Colonel Blimp on High Strategy

It's pretty hard to figure out what's happening in a war by reading dispatches, but it sure looks to me that Isis is in serious trouble. The Kurds have expanded along the Turkish border making it harder for new recruits to join the radicals. The Syrian government, backed by Russian air power, is advancing on the Caliphate's capital from the Southwest. Fallujah is under siege, and Mosul is probably next. The combatant in the middle normally has the advantage of interior lines—the ability to rapidly switch forces from one front to another in order to achieve local superiority of force—but moving around Iraq and Syria in high summer is a dubious proposition granted all the planes and drones above. The situation with Isis is rather similar to that of the Confederacy in '64. All the Caliphate can hope for now is that its enemies will have a falling out among themselves or lose their nerve and resort to the really stupid strategy of converting a local insurgency into a global religious war. Jefferson Davis could hope that Lincoln would lose his election. Al Baghdadi can hope that Trump wins his.

If I'm right about this, the terrorist manifestations of the last year are signs of the weakness of Isis, not its strength. The South also resorted to desperate moves towards the end (e.g., General Hood's death march). Shooting up nightclubs is a poor substitute for the establishment of a secure territorial base. It can only work if the opponent panics. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it can’t work.

I’m sure that it will be possible to criticize the American response to Isis in retrospect, but I find myself thinking that our current strategy is beginning to look pretty sensible. That’s a desperate thing to have to write in a blog.