Warfront with Jihadistan: Air Force surge

The Patriot Post made a good observation and it's worth posting and sharing here:

Military leaders and historians will be studying the success of the surge in Iraq for decades to come, but it is already becoming clear that the United States Air Force played a crucial role that has gone almost unnoticed. On the rare occasion that the Leftmedia has actually reported on the surge, credit for progress has almost always been given to the “Anbar Awakening,” or the 20-percent increase in boots on the ground. While these are certainly important factors, the Air Force deserves some credit too.

New research by the Pentagon shows that during the period after the surge began, air strikes against insurgents increased by 400 percent, and the amount of munitions released increased by more than 1,000 percent. The Air Force also began targeting groups as small as three insurgents with precision munitions, and in most cases air strikes were putting overwhelming force on targets anywhere in Iraq within seven minutes. Of course, air support doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it was the increased human intelligence (HUMINT) that Army and Marine surge units were able to provide that allowed the Air Force to devastate the insurgency. The Air Force’s role in the surge shows that it is overly simplistic to explain U.S. success in Iraq as merely the result of increased troop levels. All of the military branches had a large part to play.

More important, however, the Air Force’s success proves the importance of overwhelming force when fighting a deadly insurgency. By constantly pummeling al-Qa’ida in Iraq with devastating firepower wherever their forces were found, the U.S. military denied terrorists the opportunity to plan or regroup. It’s a lesson we hope the military and the American people will remember as their focus increasingly shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan, where another surge might be needed.