FACT CHECK: Should Mosul Campaign Have Been A 'Sneak Attack,' As Trump Said?
Lauren Hodges November 1, 201611:13 AM ET .. bit..
"Trump seems not to understand rudimentary elements about the use of force," said Kori Schake, a defense policy adviser for the George W. Bush administration and senior policy adviser for John McCain during his 2008 presidential run.
"For example, the moral and operational value of separating civilians from combatants — that is the purpose of telegraphing the approach on Mosul. It's to allow civilians to flee the city, which is a humanitarian gesture underscoring the difference between coalition forces and ISIS."
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 .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo ’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.
That has not prevented Mr. Trump from repeating his criticism in the highly publicized prelude to the operation that started this week. “Why don’t we just go in quietly, right?” Mr. Trump said at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wis., on Monday. “They used to call it a sneak attack.”
Mr. Trump, who avoided military service during the Vietnam War with five medical or education deferments, boasted again on Wednesday that he had the endorsement of more than 200 retired generals and admirals.
But the endorsements, the reverence of Patton and MacArthur, and Mr. Trump’s military assessment do not impress national security historians like Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina: “I don’t think it really demonstrates any understanding of warfare.”
Robert Scales, a retired Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College, said the unfolding Mosul campaign is a course in Military Operations 101 that American and Iraqi armies have followed for years.
A large allied force approaches the objective (Mosul, in this case) from multiple directions, establishes a loose cordon around the city, and peels away the outlying towns and villages, all the while opening an escape route for refugees and people who do not want to fight, General Scales said.
Before this week’s offensive, Iraqi warplanes dropped thousands of leaflets and Mr. Abadi broadcast into the city, urging Mosul residents to hunker down, if they could, to avoid getting caught in the crossfire or adding to the sea of refugees already gathering outside the city and surrounding areas.
“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.”
Once the advancing force reaches the most hardened fighters, often concentrated in a city center, “You pound the bejesus out of them with artillery and precision-guided bombs until they surrender or die,” General Scales said. “There’s absolutely no surprise in all this.”
This cordon strategy is what General Patton used as his Army forces fought to retake German-held cities along the French-German border in late 1944, General Scales said.
And American commanders have said this will be the same approach that Syrian Arab and Kurdish militias, aided by American Special Operations Forces, will employ to attack Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in eastern Syria, in the coming weeks.
While commanders willingly surrender the notion of strategic surprise, they zealously guard the element of tactical surprise. In World War II terms, for instance, the Germans knew the allies were planning to land in France; but they did not know the critical place nor the exact timing of D-Day.
“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.
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