It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:
Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.
CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”
The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.
“They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”
Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”
Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.
“A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”
Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.