Lt. Col. John Nagl on Our Weapons Going to ISIS: We Need More Boots on the Ground

“What we need to do, we currently have about 1,500 American advisers on the ground in Iraq. I think we need to multiply that by probably a factor of 10. We need to push those advisors closer to the fighting, put those advisers inside Iraqi units, Peshmerga, Kurdish units, and that will increase their reliability and allow us to provide intelligence to those forces about ISIS, make them more effective against ISIS, and it will also allow us to gather intelligence on them and make sure that none of them haven’t been infiltrated.

So there is really no substitute as effective as air power is, as helpful as the air power is. There is no substitute for some American boots on the ground. We got 1,500 guys on the ground, but they are not as far forward as they need to be to make a real immediate impact on the battlefield.”