Inside the Five-Sided Box by Ash Carter

Author:Ash Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

From “Lines of Effort” to Concrete Steps

It would take months to properly address these shortcomings. But we didn’t have months to make progress against ISIS. Every day, ISIS was brutalizing civilians in Iraq and Syria, spreading its influence via affiliates in Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and plotting attacks in Europe and North America.

Over spring and early summer 2015, ISIS continued seizing territory—Palmyra, At Tanf, Ramadi, even Sirte, Libya. The U.S.-led air campaign continued, but we were far from having the effects on ISIS operations that we wanted and needed. In May, when ISIS seized Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s al-Anbar province, I caused a stir when I told CNN’s Barbara Starr that Iraqi forces defending the city had “just showed no will to fight. . . . They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight. . . . That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIS and defend themselves.” That needed to be said to the Iraqis and acknowledged to our own troops, who appreciated that someone had finally spoken the truth. General Marty Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs put it even more pithily: “The ISF was not driven out of Ramadi. They drove out of Ramadi.”

Fielding Iraqi forces who were not just well trained and equipped, but who also fought with will and determination, would be a months-long process.

We gradually began to identify and take advantage of opportunities to speed up our progress. In mid-May we launched a raid targeting Abu Sayyaf, the head of ISIS’s lucrative oil and gas operations. We hoped to capture him, but he was killed in the raid. His death complicated ISIS’s effort to support its operations with petroleum revenue. More important, we got valuable intelligence about ISIS leadership from others captured in the raid, including Abu Sayyaf’s wife and a slave who was freed in the operation, as well as from documents and electronics that we seized.

Helped in part by that intelligence, over the course of the summer and fall, special operators undertook several raids or air strikes targeting senior ISIS figures. Each raid required approval from me, President Obama, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and Kurdish President Masoud Barzani, since such operations could pose political risks for each of these leaders. Thankfully, President Obama never wavered in his support. Whenever Marty Dempsey and I saw an opportunity to do more, Obama never declined a single request for additional resources or authority.

A key turning point came on July 6, when President Obama visited the Pentagon for a National Security Council meeting in which he encouraged DOD to present him with broader and more creative options for accelerating the fight. This was just what we’d been hoping to hear. Over the next several months, we recommended and received approval for additional forces and authorities to intensify the fight. The pacing items we’d use to trigger

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