Yeah I don't agree with everything that he's saying, but ISIS is not a threat that we can't destroy. It's not even a threat that would require a thousand boots on the ground, if only we had the mettle to go through with it.
Honestly if we know certain roads are only used by ISIS fighters I'm 100% behind laying land mines and shit. Yeah we shouldn't blanket mines all over the place, but this is a valid tactic against military targets.
Anyway the point is that this could easily be done. A team of 20 US Special Forces could decimate hundreds of ISIS fighters in a couple of hours, then go on to play a round of golf later that afternoon. These guys are fucking amateurs who are only able to do what they are doing because they don't have any real opposition.
Estimates vary (because no nation comments on the number of special forces deployments) but there are currently 200+ US, French and UK SPECFOR within Syria and Iraq, acting as reconnaissance and forward air control. They are also there to confirm targets are where they say they are by the Mark 1 eyeball. They aren't there to engage because the number of fighters varies enormously, with some estimates for just I.S as low as 35,000 and as high as 200,000 for the amount of turf they've been able to hold. We genuinely don't know how many of the black-wearing gits there are.
The Kurds asked for months just to get a bit of air support so they could retake Sinjar. Apparently we couldn't afford to bomb more than 7 targets a day. The one time we said yes, they retook the whole city in 24 hours. They say they could do that for all of Kurdistan.
This should be a cakewalk, it's not, and it's infuriating.
Ok, time to let you into an open secret. Yeah we could. Within a month we could bring the might of NATO to bare on the I.S and crush them within weeks.
But we're not going to.
Islamic State's existence is
very convenient for the Western World for numerous reasons. Much like Al Qaeda before it, the Islamic State is acting as a rallying flag for all of the nut jobs we're stuck with inside our own borders that, like many of us, grew up with the Afghan and Iraq wars as a background but rather than seeing it as the tragic waste of blood and treasure it was, they see it as a slight against Islam itself.
They're a tiny minority (in the tens of thousands at most) but they're there and they're bloody dangerous. Islamic State has, since 2013 been sending out a siren call to these people, sending them off to an area where it's pretty much a free-for-all CoD-esque paradise.
They can be killed by any number of Western backed proxies, reduced to chunks and paste by airstrikes, other islamic groups, or even the Chinless Wonder himself, Bashar-al-Assad and his Iranian and Russian backed proxies.
In other words, they go to fight the war out there, so we don't fight it on the streets here.
Paris and Brussels attacks included, we've had a grand total of
two Islamic State attacks here in "The West" with under 200 casualties versus the quagmire of the middle east (250,000 and rising killed), where they actually need new bodies to throw at problems. Simple, cold and very hard facts.
It's also whittling down the various Caucasus Mercenary groups that sprung up after the second Chechen War and they're about as reliable as mercs have been through history (to the point we've stopped reporting so-called 'defections') as these groups (who could move on to any other future conflict zone) are slaughtered by one group or another.
The best part is? This plan is actually working.
Islamic State is now having to send out increasingly younger soldiers to the front lines, because their casualty rate is fucking terrible. Pictures of them "training the next generation" are being sold this way, but they were already resorting to 16 and 17 year olds six months ago and this process will get increasingly worse as the toll of lost territory, arms, money and food continues to bite.
The officer-corps (such as it is) remains dangerous but are being slowly closed in on by those SPECFOR soldiers acting as Forward Air Command, hence why so many of them fled to Libya (where it's believed about 50-100 western SPECFOR currently are).
Iraq and Afghanistan proved that there's no shortcuts in modern warfare, doubly so when dealing with fanatics. A lot of Western thinking (certainly of this political generation) is
heavily influenced by the works of Blair and Bush which means that an invasion, while a quicker route initially, has to be backed up by enormously expensive and much better planning for peace.
Now, the smart way, is to accept the expense and to follow the same route as previous successful peace operations when rebuilding a country, this worked for Germany post-war and worked on some levels for the collapse of Yugoslavia; The Middle Men (the people that actually ensure a country
runs) should be kept in place regardless of political affiliation and largely forgiven for any instructions they carried out, this didn't happen in Iraq (because Bush pursued a disastrous policy of De-Ba'athification and Afghanistan (because the last functional government was sometime back in the 70s).
The problem is, this approach is
really fucking expensive.
The current and "cheaper" option is to try and allow local forces to do this naturally. This started to show promise in Libya until factions of the TNC broke apart into their respective governments, Libya Dawn (who basically hold everything of worth, including the Libyan Coastguard, and the TNG, which still has western backing in spite of the fact they can barely hold Tobruk.
Basically, it will be into the next political generation to find the more level response after going too far previously and not far enough this time around.
this sucks really bad.
