Counterinsurgency Expert: Beating ISIS Will Require US Ground Troops

ABC News/Yahoo! News(WASHINGTON) — Retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl literally helped to write the book on counterinsurgency field strategy for the Army and Marine Corps during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for all the lessons that the U.S. military has learned through the wars of the 21st Century, Nagl said President Obama’s strategy to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria without any ground forces won’t work.

“It clearly isn’t working,” Nagl told ABC News/Yahoo! News in an interview. “We do have about 1,600 American troops on the ground, but they’re staying well back from the front lines. That’s a big part of the reason why the Iraqi forces are not able to take on and really defeat the ISIS forces.”

Though Nagl said he understands Obama’s reluctance to commit combat troops at a time when the American people are war weary, he said the mission of defeating ISIS can’t be accomplished without 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. ground forces.

“ISIS is really, really bad, is a real evil, and ultimately is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and to the United States,” Nagl said. “The president has an important role in speaking to the American people and explaining to them what the threat is, what our strategy is, and critically that he is committed to success even if it takes boots on the ground — and it’s that last part where I think he’s been lacking.”

Nagl, who said he believes the current situation in Iraq could have been avoided had the U.S. not pulled out its military presence several years ago, warned that Afghanistan is at risk of a similar crisis if the U.S. withdraws all forces from that country, as currently planned, by 2017.

“I think that that is a disaster,” he said. “Afghanistan is not going to be ready to stand on its own this decade, and leaving behind a residual force, and again, 15,000 American combat advisors to embed inside Afghan units, to provide access to intelligence, provide access to logistics, without that kind of American leverage, those kind of American advisors, the Taliban is going to be at the gates of Kabul just as currently ISIS is at the gates of Baghdad.”

The insurgencies in the Middle East are just one of many predicaments that Nagl predicts the U.S. military will need to confront in the years to come.

In his new book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, Nagl lays out why he believes the future of warfare will be characterized less by traditional combat and more by long-term, ambiguous struggles, such as insurgencies, climate change and contagions.

The current fight against Ebola provides a “particularly frightening” example, he said.

“I think what we’re going to see is the Pentagon dealing with the effects of climate change, population pressures, weak governments unable to secure their populations,” he said. “And so we need a military that is broader, that still maintains its core competency in state-on-state, tank-on-tank kind of warfare. But I think that 90 percent of the time, what they’re going to be doing is messy, slow knife fights.”

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