This piece from Dr. Alf is interesting and I can see the demand for smart bombs rising during the Syrian conflict, but ISIS fighters have tunneled through stone with jackhammers and are underneath civilians in Raqua.

The ISIS commanders have already moved to Mosul, where they are mingling with the population and no doubt have arranged for tunneling to take place there. That leaves the civilian populations of both places, sitting ducks irrespective of which types of bombs are used. The new ISIS headquarters in Libya and ISIS incursions into Afghanistan may be a different story and I can see the utility of drones with smart missiles for taking out ISIS fighters when moving about in areas where there are no civilian populations.

Sadly, you either have to root them out using soldiers in a series of brutal house to house clearance operations and withstand heavy casualties or you surround the area and use thermobaric weapons to clear the area and kill the ISIS fighters in their tunnels followed by napalm strikes to cleanse whatever is left – here there will be large collateral damage.

Pussyfooting around with ISIS gives them too much time to recruit more extremists, conceal themselves and hold people hostage and it allows them to make conditions so intolerable that they leave and become economic migrants heading for Europe.

I suggest that we need to take the ‘gloves-off’. It’s perhaps time to listen to America’s military  leaders not Obama’s excuses.

John Gelmini