Tinark
Active member
In Wednesday night’s debate, Donald J. Trump excoriated the American-backed Iraqi military offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State, saying it had forfeited “the element of surprise” and allowed militant leaders to slip away.
“Douglas MacArthur, George Patton spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country,” Mr. Trump added, invoking two of the greatest American commanders from World War II.
Actually, probably not, according to some military historians and senior officers, who said on Thursday that Mr. Trump’s armchair generalship revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of Iraqi politics, military warfare — and even some of the most famous campaigns commanded by MacArthur and Patton.
Unlike the top-secret raid by American commandos to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, there are many good reasons to foreshadow an impending ground offensive, like Mosul, mainly to reduce civilian casualties, isolate the enemy and instill fear within its ranks, military scholars and retired commanders said.
“What this shows is Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy,” said Jeff McCausland, a retired Army colonel and former dean at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.
Ever since Iraq’s second-largest city fell to Islamic State fighters in June 2014, American and Iraqi officials have made no secret of their larger goal to recapture Mosul. It has been a political imperative for Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to rally public support for an Iraqi-led military campaign to reclaim cities such as Tikrit, Ramadi, Falluja and, the major prize now, Mosul.
Moreover, it would be impossible to hide a force of about 30,000 Iraqi and Kurdish troops that have been massing for weeks on the outskirts of Mosul, gradually encircling the city while conducting artillery fire and airstrikes to soften up enemy defenses in advance of the main ground offensive.
“There are over a million innocents in the city so you want to give them an opportunity to take cover or to leave,” said General Scales. “If you kill too many civilians, the political outcome is a disaster.”
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“Strategic surprise is rarely accomplished, but tactical surprise — the how and where of low-level attacks — is kept secret,” said Mark Kimmitt, a retired one-star Army general and former senior Pentagon official. “Mr. Trump does not seem to understand this critical distinction between strategy and tactics.”
In the debate on Wednesday and on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump has all but accused the military of aiding and abetting the escape of the Islamic State’s top leaders from Mosul. “By the time we attack them, all the guys that we want are going to be gone,” Mr. Trump told supporters in Charlotte, N.C. last week. “They’re very smart. How stupid are the people that run our country?”
Actually, the secretive Joint Special Operations commandos who are hunting Islamic State figures, such as the top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would like nothing better than for him and his lieutenants to make a run for it across open desert in a pickup truck that could be incinerated with a Hellfire missile launched from a Reaper drone with no risk of civilian casualties.
“If you want to kill the bad guys, kill them in the open, not hunkered down in fortified positions, with booby traps strewn all around them,” said General Scales. “Everyone knows that’s stupid.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/us/politics/donald-trump-mosul-iraq.html
Trump insults our military by calling them stupid at the same time displaying his own stupidity.
This man can NOT be our president.