The ISIS Way Of War Is One We Know Well

The ISIS Way Of War Is One We Know Well

Like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Mao in Korea, the enemy is brutal, elusive and armed with good-enough weapons.

By Robert H. Scales in the Wall Street Journal
The images are frightening and the consequences dispiriting as the Islamic State rapes, tortures and murders its way across Syria and Iraq in some twisted version of black-clad blitzkrieg. President Obama was clearly caught off guard by this unexpectedly horrific enemy. Now he is trying to conduct a war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, by striking the terrorists with air power and seeking regional allies to do the dying for us.

Sadly, ISIS is the latest example of a behavior in wars against Western powers that has proven remarkably consistent regardless of region, intensity or level of conflict. From Mao in Korea to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Saddam Hussein and now Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq, all act in fundamentally the same predictable manner.

The strategic ambitions of all our enemies have been the same. They have sought to exclude the West from interfering in their regional ambitions and have aimed to confront Western militaries below the nuclear threshold.

An image grab taken from a video released by the Islamic State (IS) and identified by private terrorism monitor SITE Intelligence Group on September 13, 2014 Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Their methods are much the same as well, often killing more for the psychological effect than military advantage. Western armies go into villages to win hearts and minds. ISIS storms villages intent on killing—local leaders, teachers, captured government officials and soldiers, the unbelievers, anyone who would oppose their ideological or religious ambitions. It's a method that has been used by guerrillas the world over for decades; the ISIS terrorists just seem more fanatical and better at it. They also murder Americans and amplify the acts on social media, hoping that the sight of our dead will wear us down and diminish our willingness to fight.

ISIS and other terrorists know that Western militaries fight short wars well and long wars poorly. Thus they employ a patient method of fighting that engages only when the odds are in their favor. When it goes badly, they look to any well-meaning international body to interfere long enough to regenerate their forces and return to the fight.

Seventy years of experience has taught them the folly of fighting using Western ways. Instead, they have adapted a way of war that avoids the killing effects of Western technology and firepower. They "spot" us control of the air, sea and space. They disperse, hide, dig in and go to ground. They seek shelter among the innocents and amplify any Western transgression with cameras thrust into the dead faces of women and children.

They fight with secondhand technology that's good enough. The Chinese and North Vietnamese did most of their killing with mortars and automatic rifles. Hezbollah and Hamas, in various clashes with Israel, have knocked out Israeli tanks with simple handheld anti-tank missiles. Command and control is by cell phone and courier. Americans died by the hundreds in Iraq and Afghanistan from the crude technology of shells and explosives buried along roads and trails.

A worrisome survey of contemporary history reveals that the enemy's strategies and tactics are both consistent and effective—and getting better. It will take more than a few bloody beheadings before we see American "boots on the ground" again. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that no U.S. combat troops would be deployed to Iraq "unless, obviously, something very, very dramatic changes." ISIS has already begun to disperse and dig in to obviate the effects of airstrikes. They will continue to brutalize the region and eventually threaten the American homeland. And, as always, ultimately we will confront them.

The enemy knows that while we may have the most sophisticated military in the world, it is a military that remains ill-suited to defeat them. The truth is that missiles, ships and planes are mostly irrelevant when not used against a traditional military foe. It was true in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan.

This kind of enemy truly fears us only when we meet them on their ground, with the will and conviction to kill them in large numbers.

Some day the brutality and successes of ISIS in Iraq and Syria will demand that we meet them on the ground; no other force in the region, and none likely to be convened, will have the capacity to vanquish them, even with U.S. air support.

When we do, the responsibility for defeating this foe will rest exactly where it has in the past: On the shoulders of men and women who are willing to kill in close. We have too few of them, and they are getting scarcer by the day. If the past is prologue—and I believe it is—then a combat force consisting of less than 4% of those in uniform and costing less than 2% of the national budget will be asked to do the job again. I suspect that the outcome, again, will be problematic.


Maj. Gen. Scales retired from active duty in 2000 as commandant of the Army War College.