http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/we%E2%80%99re-losing-the-war-against-isis-iraq-13848


David Kilcullen

September 15, 2015

By late 2013, when ISIS fighters mounted a major push against the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Fallujah, their tactical style had settled into a pattern. A main force, often comprising dozens of trucks and troop-carrying technicals, would move in compact formation on highways and secondary roads. Ahead of it, and to the flanks, a swarm of gun trucks—technicals with anti-armor weapons, heavy machine guns, radios and a few dismounts—ranged widely across the landscape, scouting routes, securing chokepoints, and looking for targets of opportunity or soft spots. When they spotted one, they would either “bounce” and overwhelm it with their own resources, or pull the main column onto it using radio and cellphone messages. Teams of two to three technicals, each carrying six or eight fighters ready to dismount, would swarm onto a target, coordinating their fire to overwhelm it. This is classic maneuver warfare—in the business, it’s known as “recon pull”—and it looked a lot like Soviet-style mission tactics, which was unsurprising given the number of Ba’athist officers now on the ISIS payroll.

....

After a few weeks of this, however—and after suffering a few losses—ISIS leaders realized that coalition air activity was going to be relatively easy to handle. Lacking forward ground observers, and operating under highly restrictive rules of engagement, coalition aircraft could only identify and strike a very limited number of targets—on average, from September 2014 to June 2015, the coalition was only able to mount roughly 10-14 strike sorties per day across both Iraq and Syria. (For comparison, during Operation Unified Protector in Libya the daily average was 48; in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 the average number was roughly 110; and in the Kosovo campaign of 1999 it was closer to 250.)

In response, ISIS has developed a hybrid approach, which we might characterize as applying “conventional tactics with unconventional means”. The new formation of choice is the platoon plus combat group, comprising 30-40 fighters, a couple of armored vehicles and several technicals, snipers, heavy weapons teams, an artillery piece or two, and backup supplies of ammunition, fuel and water in a supply truck.