On Fox & Friends Saturday morning, Breitbart National Security Editor and Major General Horner Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University Dr. Sebastian Gorka warned that the Islamic State is a terror group “far, far more dangerous than Al Qaeda ever was,” and that only a coalition of Arab ground troops with U.S. advisors would eradicate the threat from the Middle East permanently.
Discussing the Islamic State’s recent advances near a U.S. military base in the heart of Iraq, Dr. Gorka highlighted to hosts Tucker Carlson and Ann Kooiman two key failures of the current American strategy to defeat the terror group: limiting attacks to airstrikes and ignoring the international nature of the ideological threat that the group poses. The proximity that ISIS has developed to the Al-Asad air base, where American troops have been working to train Iraqi soldiers, was “proof positive that we really don’t have a strategy for ISIS and that the few troops we have deployed there are in danger from a threat group that is far, far more dangerous than Al Qaeda ever was.”
He noted that any strategy to defeat the Islamic State that limits itself to rebuilding Syria and Iraq, the main targets of the terrorist group so far, was setting itself up for failure. “If you listen to [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] Al-Baghdadi… he wants to reestablish an ever-broadening caliphate,” he explained. “He wants to take down King Abdullah in Jordan, he wants to capture Saudi Arabia.”
The limiting of military responses to the Islamic State to air power was also an error, Dr. Gorka warned. “In the history of modern airpower, there has never been an insurgency ever– not one– that was defeated by airpower. If we are serious about this group, if we want to secure that country in which thousands of Americans shed blood, we need to have troops in the region.”
The strategy now, on the other hand, was little more than “pin-pricks,” he argued. “It’s very difficult to destroy an enemy when you are just nibbling at the fringes.”
Ultimately, the solution to the Islamic State problem is “not about the Marines– it’s about the people in suits in DC,” Dr. Gorka concluded, referring to the politicians that have imposed restrictive rules of engagement on our units. A successful counter-terror operation, he urged, requires “embedded advisors, right down to the brigade unit if possible.”
Watch Dr. Gorka’s appearance on Fox & Friends below, and follow him on Twitter at @SebGorka:
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