Adam Kredo:
U.S. military pilots who have returned from the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq are confirming that they were blocked from dropping 75 percent of their ordnance on terror targets because they could not get clearance to launch a strike, according to a leading member of Congress.
Strikes against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) targets are often blocked due to an Obama administration policy to prevent civilian deaths and collateral damage, according to Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The policy is being blamed for allowing Islamic State militants to gain strength across Iraq and continue waging terrorist strikes throughout the region and beyond, according to Royce and former military leaders who spoke Wednesday about flaws in the U.S. campaign to combat the Islamic State.
“You went 12 full months while ISIS was on the march without the U.S. using that air power and now as the pilots come back to talk to us they say three-quarters of our ordnance we can’t drop, we can’t get clearance even when we have a clear target in front of us,” Royce said. “I don’t understand this strategy at all because this is what has allowed ISIS the advantage and ability to recruit.”
When asked to address Royce’s statement, a Pentagon official defended the Obama administration’s policy and said that the military is furiously working to prevent civilian casualties.
“The bottom line is that we will not stoop to the level of our enemy and put civilians more in harm’s way than absolutely necessary,” the official told the Washington Free Beacon, explaining that the military often conducts flights “and don’t strike anything.”
“The fact that aircraft go on missions and don’t strike anything is not out of the norm,” the official said. “Despite U.S. strikes being the most precise in the history of warfare, conducting strike operations in the heavily populated areas where ISIL hides certainly presents challenges. We are fighting an enemy who goes out of their way to put civilians at risk. However, our pilots understand the need for the tactical patience in this environment. This fight against ISIL is not the kind of fight from previous decades.”
Jack Keane, a retired four-star U.S. general, agreed with Royce’s assessment of the administration’s policy and blamed President Barack Obama for issuing orders that severely constrain the U.S. military from combatting terror forces.
“This has been an absurdity from the beginning,” Keane said in response to questions from Royce. “The president personally made a statement that has driven air power from the inception.”
“When we agreed we were going to do airpower and the military said, this is how it would work, he [Obama] said, ‘No, I do not want any civilian casualties,’” Keane explained. “And the response was, ‘But there’s always some civilian casualties. We have the best capability in the world to protect from civilians casualties.’”
However, Obama’s response was, “No, you don’t understand. I want no civilian casualties. Zero,’” Keane continued. “So that has driven our so-called rules of engagement to a degree we have never had in any previous air campaign from desert storm to the present.”
This is likely the reason that U.S. pilots are being told to back down when Islamic State targets are in site, Keane said, citing statistics published earlier this year by U.S. Central Command showing that pilots return from sorties in Iraq with about 75 percent of their ordnance unexpended.
“Believe me,” Keane added, “the French are in there not using the restrictions we have imposed on our pilots.”
And the same goes for Russians, he said, adding, “They don’t care at all about civilians.”
The French have been selecting their own targets since beginning to launch strikes on the Islamic State earlier this week, according to a second Pentagon source who spoke to the Free Beacon earlier this week about the strikes.
Obama is only ”bombing” ISIS enough to avoid open mocking.
If he ever got serious (what am I saying?) ISIS could be destroyed as a fighting force as well as a recruiting force.
All you have to do with Muslims is show the ones still on the sidelines that allah is NOT protecting them (not on their side) and they stay on those sidelines.
Obama assiduously avoids doing this.
All he does is inconvenience ISIS a little.
In other words, the Obama administration is attempting to avoid slaughtering innocent civilians. Should you have some question about this reason for restraint, I suggest you do a Google Image Search using the phrase “Syrian children” and see what comes up.
This is how we differ from the people we are at war with.
@Greg:
Were there no “children” in Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you moron? Children die when our enemies declare war on us, either by their hands or ours. If Muslims don’t want their children to die they should not strap bombs on them or go to war with us.
But since you are such a whiz kid, why don’t you tell us how you wage a war against enemy combatants without collateral damage to civilians.
Jeeze, Greggie Goebbels, I didn’t think it possible for your brain to become more scrambled than it was. I was wrong.
@Greg:
Gee, that’s an odd position to take…. now.
Civilians claim to be “terrorized” by drones
Obama selects the drone targets
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/23/obama-i-make-the-drone-decisions.html
How the images of children killed by drones is being used
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=children+killed+by+drones&FORM=HDRSC2#a
Perhaps it just makes a difference when the responsibility leads back to him instead of using sneaky drones that he doesn’t acknowledge.
Do you know what is happening to innocent women, children and MEN while Obama orders our fighter-bombers to land back at base fully loaded with ordinance? They are being raped, beheaded, enslaved, tortured, burned and slaughtered. Obama screws around and you repeat his weak and silly excuses.
Too bad the GOP can’t seem to defund ANY of the Obama Agenda.
Don’t you find that odd?
@Bill, #4:
Everybody knows that innocent people are killed when we wage war. Do you have some problem with a reluctance to kill them when it can be avoided? That’s what’s happening when airstrikes are called back.
@Greg: I have a problem with hypocrisy when it endangers our military personnel and our citizens. I have a problem with Obama using that as an excuse when he doesn’t mind it in secret CIA operations… because he can detach himself from it.
I am not one that claims Obama to be a Muslim… but there is NO denying he puts Islamic considerations before all else.
the fool is a gay muslin terrorist.
IIRC, the Geneva Conventions allow for the summary execution of any combatant that engages in combat without wearing an identifying military uniform. The purpose behind this is to try to reduce civilian casualties by making it very dangerous to hide behind noncombatant civilians.
The inherent problem with trying to take some bogus moral high ground, as Obama is pretending to do with his insane ROE, is when faced with an enemy who by nature refuses to follow “civilized” rules of warfare, is that you tie your military up in a manner that precludes the faintest hope of defeating your enemy.
With an islamic enemy, that only respects strength, such self-defeating tactics only strengthens the enemy.
The president took an oath to protect and defend the US, with no consideration whatsoever for foreigners. Americans, and citizens of our allies, are being slaughtered by islamic scum. Never before has the US pretended to go to war against an enemy with such paralyzing, idiotic ROE. The firebombing of Dresden, and Tokyo, the atomic bombs on Japan, hell, Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia – all resulted in tremendous civilian casualties. War IS hell, and as such should never be undertaken lightly. However, once the nation commits to war, it is treasonous to waste our military lives and resources for pathetic political theater such as Obama is doing with ISIS. Is it tragic that there would be civilian casualties? Absolutely. Should that stop us from bringing hell and damnation down on our enemies during war? Absolutely NOT.
Every nation on earth should know they have no better friend than the US in times of peace, but once someone declares war on us, as ISIS has done, they need to know there is no more ferocious, tenacious and terrible enemy on earth than the wartime US. There will be no success against ISIS so long as Obama continues his limp-wristed, “look-at-me-wearing-my-big-boy-commander-in-chief-underoos” pretend air war.
@Pete, #9:
I believe reluctance to bomb a target that isn’t of unusually high importance when you know there are non-combatants in the kill zone is taking the moral high ground. I see nothing the least bit bogus about it.
With targets of unusually high significance, you must sometimes knowingly do things you would much rather not do. We have targeted and killed ISIL and al Qaeda VIPs at times, knowing full well that innocent civilians would be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This sort of terrible moral calculation is in the nature of warfare.
I think a critical difference between us and them is that they make no moral calculation at all. They’ve pushed basic human values and moral considerations totally out of the equation, to the point where the horror they produce has become a central part of the objective. They’ve gone insane, but continue to pursue their insane objectives in a rational manner. Perhaps that means they’ve become demonic.
@Greg:
If, after 6100+ air sorties by the US, there was anything left in the ISIS headquarters at Raqqa for the French to target, then the ROE is foolishly, willfully stupid. How many headchopping videos, or crucifixions, or rapes, or mass burials of machinegun slaughters, or immolation murders does ISIS need to commit before the military is unleashed to do what it is designed to do?
By your thought process (I will not dignify what you said by calling it ‘logic’) the allies were no better than the nazis and the imperial Japanese because we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention dropping atomic weapons on Japan. You present the same sort of twisted reasoning as the pro-aborts who say it is better to kill the unborn child than to let it live because it MIGHT experience poverty.
If Obama doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to engage in war, he does nothing but compound his effete weakness by pretending to fight ISIS under such self-defeating ROE, and no amount of whiny hand-wringing excuse-mongering over civilian casualties erases that fact.
Terrorist scumbags only have to succeed once. We have to succeed every time to stop chaotic, bloodthirsty, islamic murder.
@Pete, #11:
I’d be OK with seeing ISIL exterminated to the last man, but ISIL is not lined up out on a battlefield in neat little rows waiting for that to happen. They’re mixed in with terrorized civilian populations that greatly outnumber them. The governing principle of U.S. military operations is not to “kill them all, and let God sort them out.”
Republicans like to pretend that ISIL could somehow be quickly destroyed without resorting to such methods. That’s a fantasy. Republicans don’t have a clue how to eliminate ISIL. They have far more bad ideas about that than good ones. They say things that can be used to alienate those who could be our allies. Most of their thinking has to do with how to politically exploit the situation.
@Greg:
You are going to have to be OK with seeing ISIS exterminated to the last man, woman and child because radical Muslims indoctrinate them ALL to pursue terror to achieve their ends. As disgusting as that sounds, unless we do that, we will continue to face the legacy of ISIS terrorism. And, UNLESS you face that with the affirmative, you are not facing who and what the enemy is.
Bombing has NEVER won a war.
Congress has not given Obama any support against ISIS no declaration of war http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/politics/isis-aumf-white-house-congress/
This is just ONE reason why Obama polls at 300% higher than the GOP led Congress
Sorry. I don’t go there. Once we cross that line, we’re no better than they are. We would lose our souls. We would be no better than the Nazis. We would be like Col. Kurtz, babbling in his malarial delirium, waiting to be put out of his misery.
@Greg: So, if a child or woman comes at you with a machete, gun or suicide vest, to protect your soul, you would allow them to kill you?
You’re beginning to sound a bit like Retire05.
I think Drs without borders would disagree about how terribly careful they are about targeting.
Indeed, they would. We’re making mistakes, even when we’re trying not to.