Originally Posted by
CrowBat
Indeed: this is the most astonishing aspect of the entire 'Daesh-War' - whether in Iraq or in Syria:
- Daesh carefully reccons its objective;
- then launches a quick, foremost 'surprise' attack;
- opposition collapses (usually alone out of panic of the sort, 'Daesh ante portas, Daesh ante portas'...) - regardless how strong, equipped, and well-entrenched;
- opposition (no matter if ISF, IRGC, FSYA/AAS or else) then makes the mistake of returning to 'classic' tactics of, 'we have to properly prepare our counter-attack', which is only
- buying time for the Daesh to heavily mine their newly-reached objective: Daesh then mines the area then 'guards' it with only few weak gangs, which have little problems to impose (often massive) attrition for weeks without an end...
And yet: nobody fighting them - apparently: not even the well-funded ISF - comes to the idea to change anything about their behaviour about the Daesh. They all remain overreliant on 'light infantry' for fighting the Daesh, instead of taking care to develop properly equipped units of combat engineers, supported by large-calibre automatic weapons (just for example, and because it seems that overpowering the Daesh with high-rate of firepower - even by such 'obsolete' weapons like S-60 flak calibre 57mm - is the only really effective method of fighting them, at least on the ground).
Add to this the micromanagement of the war by the White House - which more often than not is resulting in reluctant deployment of air power - and I would say one has got an excellent explanation for why it's so hard to beat what the Pentagon says are hardly more than 25,000-30,000 Daesh out there (in Iraq and Syria combined).
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Another absurdity of this war is the Russian misuse of air power for little else but PRBS purposes.
They stacked Hmemmem AB up to the roofs of local hangars with obsolete fighter-bombers; then launched these into hundreds of air strikes every day, armed with 2-4 bombs only (whereas the same aicraft could load up to 10 such bombs each); then they claimed each of fighter-bombers is striking 2 (sometimes more) targets per mission, while actually 99% of weapons they've deployed were dumb bombs 'sprayed then prayed' in direction of whatever 'targets' they deemed...hm... 'useful to target'...? ...or something else... heaven only knows about their targeting processes, then no matter how much I studied these, they simply make no sense.
Anyway, all of this unleashed against about everybody possible in Syria.
Just not the Daesh.
Even less so against al-Qaida's affiliate JAN - and this because, at least in theory, both are 'mortal enemies' of Russia? And the JAN should be a CIA/al-Qaida-conspiracy?
Bottom line: hand-on-heart... OK, that intervention was aiming to stabilize Assad's position. Buy him some time to recover his military. But then: 9,000 combat sorties flown, about 25,000 bombs spent for achieving absolutely nothing else but to be able to say they have flown 9,000 combat sorties and dropped 25,000 bombs.
Then, barely a month after its 'air show' has ended, the very parties that were supposedly 'bombed back into stone age' and 'severely defeated' by Russians have not only 'recovered', but are so well on the way of defeating the regime again, that this now must be saved by a 'surge' in deployment of Iranian Army (not only the IRGC)...