Remember Trump's promise to "bomb the sh*t out of ISIS" during his campaign? With the help of James "Mad Dog" Mattis, he is doing his best to live up to that promise. Mad Dog Mattis told his generals to start 'annihilating the enemy.'
Per Daily Caller:
“When Secretary Mattis looked at our anti-ISIS campaign, he concluded that in some instances we were essentially just pushing the enemy from one location to another,” Dunford explained. “He asked me and the military chain-of-command to make a conscious effort not to allow ISIS fighters to just flee from one location to another, but rather to deliberately seek to ‘annihilate’ the enemy,” he continued.
The Pentagon has yet to reveal a new strategy to defeat ISIS but Mattis has heavily emphasized his focus on “annihilation” in recent months.
“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. Our intention is that the 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,” Mattis declared in a late May interview with CBSNews.
Even while annihilating ISIS, there are still things the United States military needs to be careful about. For instance, ISIS is mixing themselves with civilians to help defend against U.S. airstrikes.
“One tactic they have adopted is to mix in with the civilian population, and that makes targeting them very difficult. We can’t just indiscriminately bomb people who are leaving these cities. Even with this annihilation battle plan, we have to be very careful about civilian casualties,” Mattis said.
It is very clear that Mattis has put the Obama administration plan for defeating ISIS in the rear-view mirror. The coming months should be very telling in the battle to get some control over this group of terrorists.
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