Posted on 09/24/2014 4:43:11 AM PDT by markomalley
It's great that President Obama "put together this miniature coalition of Sunni Arab States" to fight terrorists in Syria, but the analysts are missing something important: The measure of success should be "acres and acres of dead terrorists," not "knocking out windows," Retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters told Fox News's Sean Hannity Tuesday night:
"These strikes (Monday) night were designed to limit terrorist casualties. These were not serious, meaningful strikes!
"And I'll give you the evidence. Why did we go in at night? There was no air defense threat...If you wanted to kill terrorists, you would have hit those headquarters and compounds and logistics sites at 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, when they were crowded with leaders, staff officers, flunkies, et cetera.
"Instead, we hit empty buildings at night! We knocked down antennas, we blew out windows!
"That is not the way to defeat terrorists who behead Americans! We should have gone in in the morning, gone in heavy, and killed -- let me give you the measure of success in air strikes against ISIS. It is not knocking out windows. It is acres and acres of dead terrorists! That is tactical success!"
A Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby said the U.S. is still assessing the effects of Monday night's air strikes, but "we know we hit what we were aiming at." Kirby said the goal was to hit "hard targets" that affect the terrorists' capabilities "to command and control, to sustain themselves, to train themselves, to recruit."
Peters told Hannity he's always glad when President Obama does anything to stop terrorism.
"But he wants to wage war by measuring it out in teaspoons. And the cardinal advantage of a superpower, for God's sakes, is super power! If you're going to go to war, you go to war to win! Small war, big war, doesn't matter.
"But all this, you know, modulated responses and graduated buildups -- no! If the United States goes to war, we should fight to win! And I'm sick of hearing pundits in Washington who never served in uniform saying, Oh, victory is impossible in the 21st century.
"Victory is always possible if you're willing to pay the price, if you're willing to be ruthless and ferocious and do what's right for our security and win!
Peters, now a military analyst for Fox News, said the United States faces "truly evil opponents" and will have to fight them "for a long time." He also said civilian casualties cannot be avoided if the job is going to be done right:
"And by the way, another thing we got to get over, this nonsense about there can't be any civilian casualties! War is ugly, sloppy and messy, and sometimes there are civilian casualties, especially when your enemy uses human shields. If you're going to go after ISIS, you got to suck it up and do what's right. And by the way, civilian casualties -- look what ISIS is doing, and it's actually gaining them recruits as they slaughter civilians."
Thank You, Lt. Col. It needed saying. Kudos to Susan Jones for printing.
Winning is losing in his book
Unfortunately its quickly becoming clear that Obama doesn’t want to kill terrorists anyway.
Uh, yeah. The idea is to scare savages into thinking they’re going to be blown to bits, not make them ponder filing an insurance claim to fix their broken TV antenna...
Absolutely!
He’s absolutely right. Military motto: kill people and break things - they forgot to do the first part.
Ralph Peters makes a good point. We wasted our element of surprise to hit antennas on the roofs of empty buildings. Now the terrorist leaders will never bunch up again. We wasted the strike.
Oh man, I'm salivating!
And his pet goat (wife!) too!
No, I think is that “winning” is actually winning, not the illusion of victory. Unfortunately, in the West, we’ve allowed ourselves to be confined to a set of rules that make victory impossible. We want bloodless, push-button victories with cruise missiles, drones and no collateral damage. What we really do is inflict pinprick damage on a foe who is able to quickly adapt and recover. That is not a formula for an MSM soundbite, but not real victory.
sorry, my comment was unclear.
Winning is losing in obama’s lexicon.
Just like he thinks he can lead from behind.
obama prefers losing
We’re putting lives at risk for a few antennas.
“We wasted our element of surprise.”
What element of surprise? When there are 5 other regional nations involved in the operation there will not be an element of surprise.
The same was true with GWI and GWII.
The first day’s strikes are more intended to destroy resources and facilities. Drones, ELINT and ISR will re-acquire the personnel in coming weeks for the aircraft and drones to strike.
Those pulling Obama’s strings are demonstrably on the side of the terrorists.
To diminish the command and control capacity, one must eliminate those in command and control - as in kill. The military term is (ironically on this case) decapitation. We’ve been doing this in the past with drones and Hellfires, so why not do the same with Mk 82 500# and CBU’s?
“The measure of success should be “acres and acres of dead terrorists,” not “knocking out windows,” Retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters”.......
Lt. Col. Peters gets it, too bad the odumbo group doesn’t have the same feeling.
“Winning is losing in his book”..........
Sounds better this way, “Losing is winning in his book”
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