Five ISIS Weapons of War America Should Fear

Five ISIS Weapons of War America Should Fear

09/25/14

Robert Farley

Counterinsurgency, Terrorism, Defense, Iraq, Syria, United States

ISIS’ path to prominence—from amassing large amounts of territory and taking on all challengers—lies in its choice of arms and tactics. 

Editor’s Note: Please also see Five American Weapons of War ISIS Should Fear as well as Five Israeli Weapons of War ISIS Should Fear.

Over the past year, ISIS has scored a series of remarkable victories over Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian forces. It has succeeded despite a lack of access to the heavy weaponry that its opponents regularly field. Indeed, the heavy weaponry that ISIS has acquired has come mostly from “battlefield appropriation,” picking up the leftover weapons of its defeated foes.

ISIS has won by exploiting the vulnerabilities of its enemies, which take the form of Western military organizations, while lacking their fighting and communications discipline. This allows ISIS to identify, in both tactical and operational terms, weak points that can cause an entire enemy position to cave in upon itself. In essence, ISIS has an operational form that allows decentralized commanders to use their experienced fighters against the weakest points of its foes. At the same time, the center retains enough operational control to conduct medium-to-long term planning on how to allocate forces, logistics, and reinforcements.

ISIS hasn’t been discriminating in its use of weapons; the group fights with whatever it can find. However, several systems have become common to ISIS fighting units. Typically, these are mobile, easy to use and easy to service. This article concentrates on five categories of weapons that have enabled ISIS’ path to prominence.

Technicals:

The rise of the technical gives lie to one of the enduring myths of maneuver warfare. In brief, this myth concentrates on the rise of the tank and the armored personnel carrier as innovations that restored maneuver to the battlefield after World War I. The myth leads to an over-emphasis on the characteristics of particular systems (tanks surely vary in quality, but generally not in war-winning ways), and a de-emphasis on the tactical and operational innovations, which make modern maneuver warfare possible.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/five-isis-weapons-war-america-should-fear-11346