The Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno has all the answers about the war against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Her advice to the new Trudeau government ran Monday in the Star. Keep our F-18s in the Mid-East she advises. She has little understanding of what that costs and the small amount of success we achieve.
In her usual 800-plus words of turgid prose, Rosie actually demonstrates how little she understands her subject. She uses Department of Defence news release statistics to further the fiction that Canada is performing above its weight class. She makes the obvious point that air power does not win wars unless you have boots on the ground.
But then she gives the air strikes the credit for the Iraqi and Kurdish gains against ISIL. Despite the propaganda from ISIL, its troops are not trained in traditional warfare. They are pick-up squads of ill-trained religious fanatics fighting a holy war that they little understand. They rarely collect in sizeable mobs to be bombed unless there is opportunity for rape and pillage or they are listening to the exhortations of their warped imans.
A troop movement for ISIL is whomever can pile on to the back of an old pickup truck and drive the fastest to where their erratic leaders think they might be needed. While you should never underestimate your enemy, you can look just as stupid if you overestimate them. When you say that ISIL has a conventional command-and-control structure, you should add from which century. Frankly the ancient Romans might have had better command-and-control structures than these braggarts from ISIL.
Despite the examples of expensive guided bombs successfully killing a few people on the ground, the entire exercise in Iraq and the Levant is overkill. The amount of ground support required just to maintain those aging F-18s cannot be justified. We would be far better off fighting ISIL with World War II aircraft that were slower and better designed for ground support. We can always bring in the modern stuff when ISIL shows up with jet fighters.
The point of this is that whether he was shooting from the hip, or not, Trudeau’s election promise to end the use of our F-18s against ISIL makes sense. He should make good on his promise.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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