Learned analysts starting to realize airstrikes alone will not dislodge Islamic State

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/05/learned-analysts-starting-to-realize-airstrikes-alone-will-not-dislodge-islamic-state

May 27, 2015 11:07 pm By Robert Spencer 21 Comments

Mainstream analysts usually lurch from mistake to mistake, applying faulty solutions based on fantasy-based analyses, without ever being held accountable for the disasters that follow in the wake of their actions. Just look at Obama and Hillary at Benghazi. But the idea that an entity that controls an expanse of territory larger than Great Britain will be dislodged by airstrikes alone is so risible that even mainstream analysts are having to acknowledge it.

“Analysis: Growing sense that airstrikes alone will not dislodge the Islamic State group,” Associated Press, May 27, 2015:

BAGHDAD – It is the modern era’s military strategy of choice: overwhelming air power delivering precision-guided punishment backed by intelligence on the ground, with minimal exposure for soldiers of the striking side.
Seductive though it is to risk-averse governments with war-weary publics, the approach has its limits — and these are on display in Syria and Iraq, where a U.S.-led coalition has carried out over 4,100 airstrikes against Islamic State radicals yet failed to stop the extremists.
August will mark a year since the campaign was launched after tens of thousands of minority Yazidis were forced to flee an onslaught by the militants in Iraq, causing a humanitarian crisis.
It was clear from the start that a ground force was needed, and Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish fighters have had successes on the battlefield. The Iraqi military was also to play a key role: air power would soften up the extremists, weakening them or getting them to flee, and the Iraqis were to deliver the final blow or retake areas abandoned by the militants.
That has not gone according to plan.
Badly humiliated and Shiite-dominated, Iraq’s army has shown little stamina in the mostly-Sunni cities taken by the Islamic State militants. In recent days U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter assessed it lacked the “will to fight” after fleeing Ramadi, the strategic capital of Iraq’s largest Sunni province, Anbar, leaving the Islamic State group in control of nearly all its territory, which stretches to the Jordan border….