In its desire to fuel the RW need to "re-engage" a more complete war in Iraq, Fox News trolls for military insubordination and more collateral damage.
Darn that over-regulated military chain of command. "Military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music" (h/t Clemenceau)
OTOH another ISIS governor of Mosul has just been killed in an airstrike. These dudes should stay off their comms since they shut down cell service in Mosul. They seem to stick out like very sore thumbs for combat air controllers. ISIL seems to be now on their 4th Mosul governor.
Fox News ------ U.S. military pilots carrying out the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are voicing growing discontent over what they say are heavy-handed rules of engagement hindering them from striking targets.
They blame a bureaucracy that does not allow for quick decision-making. One Navy F-18 pilot who has flown missions against ISIS voiced his frustration to Fox News, saying: "There were times I had groups of ISIS fighters in my sights, but couldn't get clearance to engage.”
He added, “They probably killed innocent people and spread evil because of my inability to kill them. It was frustrating."
Sources close to the air war against ISIS told Fox News that strike missions take, on average, just under an hour, from a pilot requesting permission to strike an ISIS target to a weapon leaving the wing.
A spokesman for the U.S. Air Force’s Central Command pushed back: “We refute the idea that close air support strikes take 'an hour on average'. Depending on the how complex the target environment is, a strike could take place in less than 10 minutes or it could take much longer.
"As our leaders have said, this is a long-term fight, and we will not alienate civilians, the Iraqi government or our coalition partners by striking targets indiscriminately."
Since the city of Mosul fell to ISIS, many of the group’s governors have been killed by coalition warplanes.
In early March, coalition fighter jets targeted the vehicle of Shakir al-Hamdani, the second ISIS governor of Mosul, killing him and a number of his bodyguards, Ismat Rajab, a Kurdistan Democratic Party official, told Rudaw.
Warplanes also killed Radhwan Hamoudi, aka Abu Laith, the first ISIS governor of Mosul, on November 19.
http://www.pbs.org/...
Outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey admits in a new interview that the U.S. military had done no contingency planning to prepare for the fall of Mosul when Islamic terrorists swept into Iraq’s second-largest city last June and seized control.
“Well, no, there were not,” Dempsey replies in the interview with Frontline’s Martin Smith when asked if there were any contingency plans inside the Pentagon for how to respond if Mosul were to fall to terrorists from the Islamic State (or ISIL, as the group is sometimes called.)
“So, look, there were several things that surprised us about ISIL,” Dempsey adds. “The degree to which they were able to form their own coalition, both inside of Syria — and inside of northwestern Iraq; the military capability that they exhibited — the collapse of the Iraq Security Forces. Yeah, in those initial days, there were a few surprises.”
Dempsey’s frank comments would appear to raise fresh questions about the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies in tracking the rise of IS as well the state of planning inside the Obama administration as it continues to grapple with a war against the Islamic State terrorists.