James Mattis Promises ‘Annihilation Tactics’ to ‘Take Apart the Caliphate’ of the Islamic State

Secretary of Defense James Mattis gave his first Sunday talk show interview as a member of the Trump administration to CBS News Face the Nation.

Nearly every line was memorable as he talked about shifting the Obama administration’s long, grinding “war of attrition” strategy to using “annihilation tactics” to “take apart the caliphate” of the Islamic State.

Mattis also gave a response for the ages when CBS host John Dickerson asked what keeps him awake at night. “Nothing,” Mattis replied. “I keep other people awake at night.”

Interviewed at West Point, Mattis said the Trump administration’s strategy is to “accelerate the campaign against ISIS,” which he called “a threat to all civilized nations.”

“The bottom line is, we are going to move in an accelerated and reinforced manner, throw them on their back foot… We have already shifted from attrition tactics, where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria, to annihilation tactics where we surround them,” he said, delivering a blunt critique of the previous administration’s approach.

“Our intention is that foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We’re not going to allow them to do so. We’re going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate,” he explained.

He elaborated to Dickerson that attrition tactics allowed the enemy to fall back, regroup, and fight another day on different terrain. Under “annihilation tactics,” no retreat will be allowed, and Islamic State fighters will be wiped out every place they make a stand. He said the Islamic State’s inability to pull fighters out of losing battles and redistribute them to new positions is already being felt in their faltering defenses of several key towns and cities.

Mattis said nooses were tightening around ISIS positions across Iraq and Syria, including the Islamic State’s capitals of Mosul and Raqqa. “Once surrounded, then we’ll go in and clean them out,” he said.

He said President Trump’s willingness to delegate more authority to field commanders was a crucial element of the new accelerated tempo of battle. He explained:

When you’re in operations, the best thing you can do at the top level is get the strategy right. You have to get the big ideas right. You have to determine what is the policy, what is the level of effort you’re willing to commit to it, and then you delegate to those who have to execute that strategy to the appropriate level. What’s the appropriate level? It’s the level where people are trained and equipped to take decisions so we move swiftly against the enemy.

“There is no corporation in the world that would, in a competitive environment, try and concentrate all decisions at the corporate level,” he pointed out.

Mattis stressed that the rules of engagement against the Islamic State had not been changed in any way that would relax America’s commitment to “the protection of the innocent.”

“We do everything we can to protect the civilians. Actually, delegating the authority to the lower level allows us to this better,” he said.

Later in the interview, he remarked that “the American people and the American military will never get used to civilian casualties,” so both military commanders and civilian leaders will always insist on using every intelligence resource and tactical option to minimize collateral damage.

“People who have tried to leave that city were not allowed to by ISIS,” he said of Mosul, where a large number of civilians were reported dead after an American airstrike. “We are the good guys. We’re not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.” He also reiterated the U.S. military’s belief that ISIS munitions detonated and caused the massive civilian casualties in that particular incident.

The Secretary of Defense said that plans were already under way for the post-war period, to ensure that “we don’t just sprout a new enemy” after the defeat of ISIS.

“We know ISIS is going to go down,” he said. “We’ve had success on the battlefield. We’ve freed millions of people from being under their control. Not one inch of that ground that ISIS has lost has ISIS regained. It shows the effectiveness of what we’re doing.”

“However, there are larger currents, there are larger confrontations in this part of the world. We cannot be blind to those,” he added. “That is why they met in Washington under Secretary Tillerson’s effort to carry out President Trump’s strategy to make certain we don’t just clean out this enemy and end up with a new enemy in the same area.”

Mattis emphasized his close working relationship with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to ensure the State and Defense Departments are “tied tightly together, and we can give straightforward advice to the Commander-in-Chief.”

He said a key element of the Trump administration’s strategy was the understanding that the Islamic State is “more than just an army — it’s also a fight about ideas.”

“We have got to dry up their recruiting. We have got to dry up their fundraising,” he stressed. “The way we intend to do it is to humiliate them, to divorce them from any nation giving them protection, and humiliating their message of hatred, of violence.”

“Anyone who kills women and children is not devout,” he declared. “They cannot dress themselves up in false religious garb and say that somehow this message has dignity. We’re going to strip them of any kind of legitimacy.”

In particular, Mattis said it was essential to destroy the Islamic State’s aura of “invulnerability,” the notion they can “send people off to Istanbul, to Belgium, to Great Britain, and kill people with impunity.”

“We’re going to shatter their sense of invincibility there in the physical caliphate. That’s only one phase of this. Then we have the virtual caliphate that they use — the Internet. Obviously, we’re going to have to watch for other organizations growing up. We cannot go into some kind of complacency,” he said, comparing it to the vigilance his fellow citizens of the American West maintain against forest fires.

He refused to put a timeline on the war, cautioning that it would be a “long fight” across an “era of frequent skirmishing” from Africa to Asia.