America Puts More Boots on the Ground to Defeat ISIS

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A U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber arrives at the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar on April 9. The U.S. is deploying B-52 bombers to Qatar to join the fight against ISIS in Iraq and... U.S. Air Force/Tech. Sgt. Terrica Y. Jones/Handout via Reuters

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

As the authorities in Western Europe face up to the increased risk of attacks from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), arrests have been made in Britain, and security operations in Belgium and France all point to intensive government action against the "new" domestic threat from the militants.

The popular media narrative is that this is a desperate move from ISIS as it retreats in Iraq and Syria. But security professionals take a very different view.

There are three elements at work here: the actual state of the war, the Pentagon's plans for a rapid increase in U.S. involvement in the war (including "boots on the ground") and the hidden nature of ISIS's plans for an expanded war overseas.

ISIS is certainly under substantial pressure in Iraq and Syria and has lost significant territory in both countries over the past year. This, though, is a very long way from defeat.

For a start, whenever the Iraqi army takes back a town or city, the process is invariably much slower than anticipated, and even when it does reclaim territory, it has serious trouble maintaining control. It took well over four months to overrun Ramadi between August and December 2015—and, four months later, ISIS paramilitaries are still harrying Iraqi units around the city.

March 2016 saw a new assault on Mosul begin, to great fanfare. But now, and with much less publicity, the Iraqi army has withdrawn in at least temporary disarray, its early advances not only stalling but going into reverse. Meanwhile, ISIS has actually recaptured a key crossing on the Syrian-Turkish border.

This leads us to the American reaction. The Pentagon regards Mosul as the principal focus of the war against ISIS in the Middle East, and it has become clear that the U.S. is going to expand its air support for the Iraqis—and that this is evolving more and more into a ground war.

Shadow War

President Barack Obama was recently reported to be considering sending an additional 250 special operations forces to operate in Syria, and there's every indication that the U.S. is developing a major "shadow war" against ISIS, similar to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operations against Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004-07.

That isn't the best of precedents. While JSOC was credited with hugely damaging AQI, it also helped spawn ISIS, which has proved to be a much more dangerous successor.

In addition to its expanded use of special operations forces, the Pentagon is increasing the number of regular combat troops fighting ISIS, regardless of the Obama administration's avowed intent to avoid deploying "boots on the ground."

The Marine Corps has for many weeks now been operating the first of what may become many forward-based artillery batteries, Firebase Bell, a unit equipped with four M777A2 howitzers. These are heavy-duty artillery pieces, each of which can fire two shells a minute with a range of up to 20 miles, covering an area of around 800 square miles.

ISIS has already started counterattacking this firebase, killing one Marine and seriously injuring several others at the end of March. But the Pentagon is undeterred and is now looking at setting up more forward artillery positions, which it deems necessary aid if the Iraqi forces are to ever retake Mosul.

As if to support this, a substantial force of Marines, the 13th Marines Expeditionary Unit, has just arrived in the Persian Gulf with three large amphibious warfare ships and supporting vessels—a force nearly twice the size of the one it replaces. Meanwhile, B-52 strategic bombers have been moved from the U.S. to the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Long Time Coming

The expansion of the conflict into what is now likely to become a major ground war comes as Pentagon sources claim that the intensive 20-month air war has killed around 28,000 ISIS supporters.

The thinking goes that this is why ISIS has taken the war to the West, first with the Bardo Museum and Sousse attacks on Western tourists in Tunisia and more recently the destruction of the Russian Metrojet airliner in Sinai and the attacks in Paris and Brussels.

But it's now clear that there is nothing recent about this change and that ISIS has been developing this strategy for at least two years. The group may now be intensifying its strategy, but in all probability it was establishing sleeper cells in Western Europe well before the Tunisia attacks of 2015.

This is not just crude retaliation. It is a considered long-term plan to maximize anti-Muslim bigotry and inter-community tensions across the West. To put it bluntly, from a Western security perspective, it might be sensible to remember how ISIS sees things. To the militants, we have killed Muslims in the tens of thousands, so ISIS is now killing hundreds of us in kind—but it wants to kill thousands.

Paul Rogers is a professor of peace studies at Britain's University of Bradford.

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Paul Rogers

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