Obstacles Limit Targets and Pace of

Strikes on ISIS
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WASHINGTON More than three months into the
American-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria,
commanders are challenged by spotty intelligence,
poor weather and an Iraqi Army that is only now
starting to go on the offensive against the Islamic
State, meaning that warplanes are mostly limited to
hitting pop-up targets of opportunity.
Weekend airstrikes hit just such targets: a convoy of
10 armed trucks of the Islamic State, also known as
ISIS or ISIL, near Mosul, as well as vehicles and two
of the groups checkpoints near the border with Syria.
News reports from Iraq said the Islamic States leader,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been wounded in one of
the raids, but American officials said Sunday that they
were still assessing his status.
In Iraq, the air war is tethered to the slow pace of
operations by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces.
With relatively few Iraqi offensives to flush out
militants, many Islamic State fighters have dug in to
shield themselves from attack.
The vast majority of bombing runs, including the
weekend strike near Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city,
are now searching for targets of opportunity, such as
checkpoints, artillery pieces and combat vehicles in
the open. But only one of every four strike missions
some 800 of 3,200 dropped its weapons, according

to the militarys Central Command.

In Syria, the United States has a very limited ability to
gather intelligence to help generate targets. Many
Islamic State training compounds, headquarters,
storage facilities and other fixed sites were struck in
the early days of the bombing, but the militarys
deliberate process for approving other targets has
frustrated several commanders.
In neither country are American commandos
conducting raids on militant camps or safe houses,
operations that in Afghanistan and in the Iraq war
generated a continuous trove of information for
additional missions.
Airstrikes have also been constrained by a serious
concern about civilian casualties, particularly in
western Iraq. Commanders fear such casualties could
alienate Sunni tribesmen, whose support is critical to
ousting the militants, as well as Sunni Arab countries
that are part of the American-led coalition. Another
challenge is weather, as sandstorms have thwarted
many surveillance missions needed to identify targets.
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President Obamas decision last week to double the
number of American trainers and advisers in Iraq, to
about 3,000, and request more than $5 billion from
Congress for military operations against the Islamic
State was viewed as clear acknowledgment of the
challenges in fighting a limited war. They are
especially acute when Washingtons allies on the
ground in Iraq and Syria need far more training to
battle a formidable adversary that offers little in the

way of clear targeting.

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Mr. Obama said he
had made his decision, announced Friday, in order to
accelerate the mission by taking a set of fresh, if
incremental, steps toward greater involvement.
Continue reading the main story
What it signals is a new phase, the president said on
CBSs Face the Nation.
What we knew was that phase one was getting an
Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible, and
we now have done that, he said. And so now what
weve done is rather than just try to halt ISILs
momentum, were now in a position to start going on
some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective
in degrading ISILs capabilities and slowing the
advance that they were making. Now what we need is
ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start
pushing them back.
Critics of the air campaign describe an often
cumbersome process to approve targets of
opportunity, and say there are too few warplanes
carrying out too few missions under too many
restrictions. To some veterans of past air wars, the
campaign fails to apply the unrelenting pressure
needed to help fulfill Mr. Obamas objective to
degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist
organization.
Continue reading the main story
Graphic

Areas Under ISIS Control

A visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria.

OPEN Graphic

Air power needs to be applied like a thunderstorm,

and so far weve only witnessed a drizzle, said David
A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who
planned the American air campaigns in 2001 in
Afghanistan and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The campaign has averaged fewer than five airstrikes
a day in both Iraq and in Syria. In contrast, the NATO
air war against Libya in 2011 carried out about 50
strikes a day in its first two months. The air
campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 averaged 85 daily
airstrikes, and the Iraq war in 2003 about 800 strikes
a day, according to the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments. American officials say
targeting is more precise than in past campaigns, so
not as many flights are needed.
To be sure, this air campaign has achieved several
successes. It has blunted the advance of ISIS fighters
in most areas by forcing them to disperse and conceal
themselves. Allied warplanes have attacked oil

refineries, weapons depots, command bunkers and

communications centers in Syria as part of a plan to
hamper the Islamic States ability to sustain its
operations in Iraq, and for its senior leaders to
communicate with one another.
Through mid-October, the overall operation against
the Islamic State was costing the Defense Department
more than $8 million a day, or $580 million since
airstrikes began in Iraq on Aug. 8. But senior
American officers acknowledge the limitations of air
power, and say the campaign is more about providing
breathing room to build up Iraqi and Syrian ground
forces than an all-out effort to destroy ISIS from the
skies.
The airstrikes are buying us time. They arent going
to solve the problem by themselves, said Gen. Ray
Odierno, the Army chief of staff and a former top
commander in Iraq. Its going to take people on the
ground, ground forces.
General Odierno said the priority was developing
indigenous forces to retake territory from ISIS.
Over time, if thats not working, then were going to
have to reassess, and well have to decide whether we
think its worth putting other forces in there, to
include U.S. forces, he said.
Continue reading the main story
The effort to rebuild Iraqs fighting capability,
however, risks allowing the Islamic State to use the
months to entrench in western and northern Iraq and
carry out more killings.
The allied air campaign is being run out of the allied

command center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, led by

Lt. Gen. John W. Hesterman III of the Air Force.
Continue reading the main story
Interactive Graphic

A Rogue State Along Two Rivers

The victories gained by the militant group calling itself the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of maneuvering along
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

OPEN Interactive Graphic

In addition to the United States, countries that have

conducted airstrikes in Iraq are Australia, Belgium,
Britain, Canada, Denmark, France and the
Netherlands. Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the

United Arab Emirates have joined the United States in

carrying out attacks in Syria.
Other countries are also providing surveillance,
transport and refueling planes. Non-American
members of the coalition are flying 15 percent to 20
percent of all strike and support missions, a figure
that military officials said was likely to creep up as
more allies joined the fight.
The airstrikes are mostly carried out from bases in
Persian Gulf countries or a Navy aircraft carrier in the
gulf, and include a range of aircraft including fighter
jets, B-1B bombers and lumbering AC-130 gunships.
Armed drones have accounted for about 15 percent of
the airstrikes, according to Central Command.
No allied strike missions are flown from bases in Iraq
or in neighboring Turkey. Turkey has refused
American requests to do so, forcing pilots to fly longer
distances and spend less time over their potential
targets than commanders would like.
The air campaign has focused almost solely on Islamic
State targets. In one important exception, the United
States carried out strikes on Thursday against a
shadowy group of Qaeda operatives in northwestern
Syria called the Khorasan Group. The United States
fired 47 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Khorasan
leaders on Sept. 23, the first night of the air war in
Syria.
The main American focus of these strikes is Muhsin
al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who was close to
Osama bin Laden, but his fate remained unclear.
American officials are cautious in assessing the fate of

Mr. Fadhli and Mr. Baghdadi, since past reports of

their possible deaths in airstrikes proved false.
In Syria, more than 70 percent of the airstrikes have
been directed at ISIS fighters in and around Kobani,
an embattled Syrian town on the Turkish border that
has become symbolically important to both sides after
American officials initially said the town was
strategically irrelevant.
Senior American commanders are preaching patience
and warning against trying to replay previous air
campaigns on the shifting battlefield of Iraq.
Every air campaign is different and cant be a
reflection of a past one, said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey G.
Lofgren of the Air Force, the deputy commander of
coalition air forces in the Middle East. A lot of people
would like us to drop hundreds of bombs and make
the problem go away, but its not that kind of war.