President Barack Obama’s former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency believes the United States is “losing the war” on and off the battlefield against the Islamic State.
“The enemy has more than doubled in capacity and capability and geographical footprint around the world,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We’ve lost the strategic initiative in this war. And the enemy has the strategic initiative.”
Flynn told TheDCNF that ISIS, which has slaughtered thousands of Iraqi and Syrian Christians, Yazidis and Shia Muslims, now has momentum as it deploys 30,000 troops in Iraq and Syria.
“They have a strategic depth right now to their battlefield. We don’t have that. And that’s something we have to regain,” he said.
Flynn is an active adviser on defense and national security issues to presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
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His new book, co-authored with historian Michael Ledeen, was released this week and is titled, “The Field of Flight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.”
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Flynn and Ledeen call for the destruction of the “jihadi armies,” a digital and mass media campaign to discredit the radical ideology and mounting “a direct challenge to the regimes that support our enemies,” including North Korea, Iran, Russia and Cuba.
They condemn Obama’s heavy reliance on drone strikes and tactical successes on the battlefield, saying it “makes us feel good.”
But such successes are illusory because, Flynn told TheDCNF, “we think attacking in Fallujah and routing them again — for the third or fourth time now — that makes us feel good. Or we kill some guy in Yemen with a drone and we feel good about that.”
The ISIS plan encompasses the world stage, not just parts of Iraq and Syria. When it has battlefield setbacks, “they counterattack in Orlando, San Bernadino, Brussels, Istanbul, Paris and in Brussels,” [sic] he said.
Flynn has been an outspoken critic of Obama’s refusal to use the term “radical Islam” in describing ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups that target Americans and the country’s national interests around the globe. Defining the enemy is the essential first step in devising a strategy, Flynn said.
“The President says, ‘what difference does it make what you call the enemy.’ Are you kidding me? As an intelligence officer, I would never get away with that. I could never say, ‘well you know boss, I don’t label this enemy that we’re facing.’” Flynn was an intelligence officer for 33 years.
Full article: Former Obama Intel Chief: ‘We Are Losing’ Against ISIS: ‘We’re In A War’ (The Daily Caller)
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