Originally Posted by jcustis
Interesting comment as the above comment concerning Desert Storm was in fact true---two on the desk and no databases to speak of thus the four month delay in targeting which was used to position the troops. All additional analysts had to be first found and then assigned thus no existing databases to speak of even existed.
When I read the same comment 24 years later and I know the depth of the current IC to include the defense contracting side-then the comment is correct regardless of anything else--yes everyone is doing their bit all in the so called targeting cycle --then if in fact the constraints are the political side then it needs to be said--there is an old statement---truth to power which the IC and military leadership tends to forget except for this interview by the JCoS which is blunt and to the point.
The JCoS comments from 21.8.2014 are in fact far more correct than the general public is being led to believe about the IS and I am not sure the public is ready again for an open ended war in Iraq and or Syria for another ten years because that is what it will take since we blew it the first time.
I go back to what I have said a number of times here since Iraq---we never understood what we were seeing and what did we the IC miss with al Baghdadi at Abu G and Bucca? Believe me we missed something and it was there if we had looked hard enough--but then again Abu G and Bucca were driven by numbers--number of detainees talked to per shift down to number of reports per shift per week.
We had young Army/AF/Navy trained interrogators that knew virtually nothing about insurgencies, insurgent tactics down to the use of one time pads and or understood the inherent AQI/IAI, 1920 and ASA organizational structures, or even anything about the Sunni Shia clash--- who struggled using quality interpreters, and simply were going through the motions with little or no support from national in order to get through their year or in the case of the AF/Navy their six months.
Virtually no support came from national--I let the leader of the IAI walk out of Abu G simply because five RFIs went unanswered regardless of follow ups and no biometric support which was asked for --never got responded to. With no evidence no charge, with no charge then parked for 4-12 months and then released out. He was out in three months.
We completely missed a phase two guerrilla war being fought by the Salafists and that included AQI from the mid 90s onward inside Iraq and we the IC never knew that fine point. So I am sorry if I take the IC to task--they blew it.
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey at a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, August 21, 2014.
“This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated,” General Martin E. Dempsey, U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, America's top military officer, told a press briefing this week that the mere existence of ISIS is clearly a problem that had to be addressed.
The question now is how.
Demspey noted that destroying ISIS will require " the application of all of the tools of [U.S.] national power — diplomatic, economic, information, military."
In fact, as counterterrorism expert Brian Fishman explained, truly defeating ISIS would require full-scale war that would involve fighting in both Iraq and Syria.
"Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no," Dempsey told reporters at the Pentagon.
That is where the real challenge lies for the Obama administration, which decided years ago that the U.S. was not going to “get in the middle of somebody else’s civil war.” ISIS has effectively blurred the border between Iraq and Syria, using the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa as a de facto capital while extending the terror group's reach in Iraq.
"The notion that the Iraq war can be separated from the Syrian civil war is pure fantasy," Shadi Hamid, an expert on Islamist groups at the Brookings Institution, told McClatchy. "This is what’s so worrying about the Obama administration’s approach. There is no plan. There is no vision on that front. There is no effort to talk about Syria in a different way."
A senior U.S. defense official also told McClatchy that there "is no policy" to confront ISIS in Syria.
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