“We are at war with ISIS as we are with al-Qaeda,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke before Congress with Joint Chiefs Chairman Army General Martin Dempsey. Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior administration officials have come under fire since Obama’s speech for not declaratively stating whether the U.S. fight against ISIS constituted a war.
“This won’t look like a ‘shock and awe’ campaign, because that’s not how the Islamic State is organized,” said Dempsey, referring to the ferocious tactics of overwhelming force the U.S. unleashed against Iraq during the first Gulf War, and during the initial invasions into Iraq and Afghanistan.
The chief tenets of the new plan include training Syrian opposition, which Dempsey had cautioned against last year. He said Tuesday the regional fighting has now made it easier to identify the so-called “moderate opposition,” as extremist forces operating among them now have “made their move.” The two military leaders indicated on Tuesday this new training effort, which will take place in Saudi Arabia, is designed to turn 5,000 rebels this year into a more conventional fighting force following more than three years of civil war.
“We will be able to train and equip theses forces by our ability to provide them tactical, to give them strategic guidance through our leadership,” Hagel told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The rebels will be trained to move not as a group of people but as “legitimate forces.”
“We’ll be training them as units, so they can operate as units,” said Dempsey. The training will include linking them to political leadership, which the U.S. will deal with in the future.
There are, however, limits to their capabilities. Hagel admitted 5,000 trained forces “won’t turn the tide” against the Islamic State, which by some estimates numbers 30,000 strong or more. “There will always be risk in a program like this, but we believe that risk is justified,” Hagel said.
Dempsey indicated the ultimate plan also calls for restoring original borders in the region, despite concerns from some experts that the Islamic State threat may tear apart what some consider to be arbitrary lines in the sand.
As for the highly touted line regarding “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria, Dempsey added he might recommend that the president deploy combat forces back to Iraq if the threat posed by the Islamic State extends to the U.S. homeland. He also offered a blunt response to James Inhofe, ranking member of the committee.
Source: US News
