my persistent point on this is that it requires ground forces to eventually clear each pocket
the reason for the west in taking out the major revenue centres of gravity is that there were clear signs coming out associating capture of oil generation facilities etc with follow on major military events in nearby areas - hitting those physical centres of gravity was never the sole military option - its always been a cycle in the options bag - the difficulty for the west has been a reluctance to boot boots on the ground for classical military action such as force on force,. clearing house activity etc.....
in the last few weeks there has been a growing shift towards other nations ramping up on broader air strikes and a greater discussion around the use of ground focrces
Daesh is heavily focussed on generating revenue for fighting the war - eg a lot of people see them blowing up regional holy sites, but don't see the other side of the coin where they are selling off relics for revenue - that has increased since concentric targeting has shown to be effective - so quite a few INT and analysts can see that the Daesh moral compass about a pure interpretation of faith takes second place to the need to get money to pay for the warfighting effort.
in real terms I believe that the russians have accelerated the timeline by engaging as they have... how effective that is remains to be seen - and at some point I would expect to start seeing effects happening on their homeland as their own muslim separatists see this as an opportunity to re-engage. Bear in mind that its the Saudis and GCC who have been bankrolling Daesh in the early stages - and the Saudis won't be too keen to have the Russians re-enabling the Syrians and providing political oxygen to the Iranians
That raises the question: What exactly is the financial 'center of gravity' for ISIS?
It isn't oil.
It isn't relics.
There is no one source of financing that ISIS relies on. There is taxation from the local population, donations that move through the underground support networks, and all manner of smuggling activity (not the least of which is the re-founding of the slave trade). There are ways to put pressure on ISIS, to make things more difficult, but a financial focus is not going to topple ISIS. The borders are too porous, the networks of transnational smuggling too entrenched.
We made the same mistake with the Taliban, believing that their fundng from opium could be cut (it couldn't - not in that corrupt environment) and it would dent the group's effectiveness. That is clearly not the case. Several studies about the financies of the Taliban made this focus disreputable at best, pointing out the larger financial back bone of the group.
I fear there is an element of doing 'something' for teh sake of doing something in this case. Yet the intelligence brew up from CENTCOM is precisely over whether we are having any effect on ISIS whatsoever with this focus.
Will it take ground forces to defeat ISIS? Yes.
The question is whose?
Who will we put in charge?
What system will we put in place to balance the concerns of the various parties?
What do we want Syria to look like when all is said and done?
And those are the questions we have no answers to. We are using military force simply because we don't want ISIS. That does not make a country or solve the dispute that lead to ISIS in the first place.
That is precisely why I advocate partition. Assad and his tribal connections retain a rump Syria. We work with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to get the Nursa front in charge of the Suna sections, and the Kurds retain an autonomous portion of the region.
