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In Conversation with Colonel Dillon, Operation Inherent Resolve

by Colonel Ryan Dillon

April 2, 2018

This interview with Colonel Ryan Dillon, the official Spokesman of Operation Inherent Resolve, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place December 15, 2017. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Colonel Dillon.

[Colonel Dillon] Hello!

[frank] Hi how are you?

I’m doing well, and yourself?

Good, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me I really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

Well, I can just jump right in. You guys have had a lot of news in the last week or so.

Yeah. It’s been pretty sporty out here. You know when I first came into this, it was very busy, and things have been, at least in military operations, have slowed down a little bit. At least as far as air strikes in Iraq go. Less in Syria. There’s still plenty of fighting in Syria that is happening right now.

Before we go into what's happening right now, I want to take a step back. Could you explain the mission of Inherent Resolve as it started.

Okay, so we’ll go back. It's pretty well documented, and I don't know if you've been to our site Inherent Resolve, but you know, it was about three years ago when the Islamic State really came onto the scene as an organized army if you will. Meaning that they were largely in small groups that were able to conduct spectacular attacks in cities and on roads, sow fear amongst the citizenry. And then they started to take territory. And it was as they started showing up with vehicles, and armored vehicles, after every place that they were able to take, where there's any kind of military presence, the military then dissolved. Iraqis aren’t very proud of that, but they acknowledge that in many cases they just dissolved and just ran away. And so every place that that had happen, all the weapons — they started to grab them, the vehicles. And so their army if you will, just continued to grow, and grow, and grow.

And it wasn’t really until they were about 20 kilometers north of Baghdad that the Coalition stepped in. Quickly thereafter many nations started to jump on it, and recognize that the Islamic State was very much a global threat. The coalition continued to grow, and grow, and grow until it’s where it is right now. 70 nations. 4 partner organizations. To defeat Daesh. Not all of those nations are military contributing members, but many of them play roles in other facets of the campaign, overall to the United States. That's counter propaganda, working in centers throughout the world, or going after their finances, or formed terrorist networks.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, recently declared that Iraq is now free from ISIS control. Control over territory is one thing, but what about their ideology and intellectual presence? What’s the strategy moving forward?

The Prime Minister did say all areas have been liberated. However, he did make it very clear that we must still pursue ISIS relics and any other terrorist organizations, or any kind of terrorism that exists in Iraq. Any that does is counter to the way that we want to live in a won Iraq. So we must unify and continue our pursuit of any of these elements. We, as a coalition, assess in Iraq and Syria, that there are less than 3,000 fighters that remain in Iraq and Syria. So spread out in small areas in Syria. They still have territory. There’s still territory that we have not cleared, our partners at the SDF, have not cleared.

Back to Iraq, the Iraqi security forces know full well that ISIS still exists, both their ideology, and in small groups, and in cells that are throughout the country. And we know that for a fact because every single day the Iraqi security forces, all elements of it, the federal police, the Iraqi army, the counterterrorism service — they conduct patrols and are continuing to find these small cells. They continue to have engagements, small, but continue to fight ISIS elements. To include fighting and detaining foreign fighters that are trying to move throughout the area, trying to escape and get out of the country. So we know that there are pockets of ISIS.

There's also just you know, tons of explosives, and IEDs, mortars, and other materials that can be used for future attacks. And that's another thing the Iraqi security forces are doing. They’re going out and identifying all these caches, finding these tunnels that are, in some places, very intricate, and finding these hiding places where where they still exist.

Does a reduced number of ISIS fighters change your day to day drastically?

It does. So the way that we have conducted this campaign from the very beginning is through a strategy called By, With, and Through. And that is both in Iraq and in Syria. So in Iraq, By, With and Through means through our Iraqi Security Force partners. They are the ones that are doing the planning and the operations. They're the ones that are really fighting. They're the ones on the front lines.

We have provided support to the Iraqis really through five different ways. One is through intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Those are our drones and other intelligence collecting means and ways to identify ISIS fighters. Number two is by providing advisors, and our advisors were largely on the ground with the battalion and brigade elements while they were conducting these operations. These operations are when we talk about Mosul, when we talk about Tel Afar, Hawija, Akashat. So these are major combat operations. The fact that there are now very few combat operations that are underway, at the same scale that we have done over the last three years, those advisers are shrinking. Meaning that they are less required. So that's number two.

Number three is training and equipping. We have trained more than 125,000 Iraqi security forces across all facets of their military. That includes, the majority are Iraqi army, 44,000 Iraqi army. I think it’s about 25,000 Iraqi police — that includes local police, the Federal Police, Counterterrorism service, Border Guard Force, and tribal mobilization forces, and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters in Northern Iraq. So training. And then precision strikes, both ground artillery and air strikes.

So the strikes, you know, after all these major combat operations have gone down significantly. In September our totals were about 1,500. Then October was about 700. November down to just under 300.

I believe November 26 there were zero.

Correct. That was the first time in the three years of our campaign that we have not had a strike in either Iraq or Syria. And then it was about three weeks ago, almost a month now, that we announced that there were going be about 400 Marines in Syria that were going to redeploy, back to United States, and they would not be getting replaced. So the number of strikes continue to tailer off quite a bit. We still are very much into the training aspects, a lot of that training has shifted and adjusted accordingly now that the these major combat operations are finished. We're now transitioning to wide area security and the threat is less so of an army, if you will, the conventional type of threat, and more of an insurgent terrorist type threat. So they have adjusted accordingly in training. We will say that it is very much our intent to continue to encourage, and to provide trainers to do conventional type fighting.

If you rewind to 2014 that was really the issue. The problem was you had a lot of these Iraqi security forces that were in static positions and as soon as this conventional threat arrived, they just dissolved. So we see very much a necessity in training them on some of the conventional and combined arms type fighting that we’ve done for the last three years.

What’s your current assessment then on ISIS’s ability to project power from Iraq or Syria?

Very little. Number one, they are on the run. It makes it awfully difficult to manage and direct a global network when you are in pursuit at the rate that we are going after ISIS right now. There's no question that their twin capitals of Mosul and Raqqa were very much hubs for them both. They were, you name it, for many of the variety of different things that ISIS was doing, and they were organized, they were very adaptable. They're savvy. So we very much recognize that, and we don't want to see things like their research develop, their external operations, these branding efforts to conduct attacks in, you know, anywhere outside of Iraq and Syria. As we all know, all of these attacks that we've seen over the course the last three years, many of them emanated from planning in Raqqa and in Mosul. They were planned there. They were resourced there. They were launched from these locations. We don't want them to hold any territory or have any sanctuary. Because the other thing is, and I’ve read some really good articles recently that really dig into it, is their ability to manufacture and build weapons at an industrial level. And you can tell how nefarious — their intent. You’re talking about the type of weapons they’re trying to put together. They’re trying to mix chemicals. Thankfully they have not been very successful at that. But we don't want to give them time and space and resources to be able to get there.

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Is there a laid out timeline for U.S. presence?

In Syria there’s still plenty of work to be done. We're training these local Internal Security Forces.

And Secretary Mattis has said that we will be there until the U.N. backed peace talks gain traction. And so as far as any kind of timeline, we're there to support our partners at least until that time.

In Iraq, what gives you confidence that the areas that were so difficult to regain over the last three years, as you mentioned, won’t revert once you withdraw?

We've already seen the Iraqi Security Forces, in a couple different instances, show that they are very much capable of fending off attacks. About three months ago, there was an attack in Ramadi. There were about three simultaneous explosions happening at the same time, with several different ISIS fighters. Three years ago, the Iraqi Security Forces would have just said, uh oh, and ran away. In this case they very much stopped the attacks and nearly ran to the seams. And then, not only did they stop the attack, and kill those that were that were immediately there, but they went and put guys on helicopters, pursued them, and went after them as well. That's just one small indicator to show that they are very much in a better place than they were three years ago. I think the other thing is most people who have lived under Daesh do not want to live that that way again.

Do you consider Iraq a success right now? Should Americans?

It should be positive. You know, we’re talking very much about a military success. But that success does not equal full success. There's more that is required by the civilian efforts. I mean Mosul, east Mosul is great. People that were once displaced are all back here. University is back, it's open. Students are in there full time. It’s west Mosul that was just devastated by the amount of damage that happened from face-to-face fighting. So there are stabilization efforts that are required. In many cases immediately following a lot of these battles. You have to get the security taken care of. Because as we've seen, as we still see Mosul, in Ramadi, in Fallujah, and in Raqqa, the sheer level of explosives that ISIS has implanted and left in each location is mind boggling. I mean in Raqqa, the estimate right now is more than 8000 IEDs and booby traps left behind. Strictly and solely for the case of damaging, and hurting, and killing civilians who are going to come back. If you put these mines and booby traps in ovens, in dresser drawers, in kids toys, that goes beyond military necessity.

A Note From the Editors

by franknews

October 1, 2021

A note from the editors,

Two years ago, we spent a month looking at our grid system – we came away realizing that while we are deeply dependent on quick, readily accessible energy, very few people had an encompassing understanding of the system, the grid, that provided our energy.

That sense of disconnect is the same with much of the infrastructure that shapes our modern world. We take the ease that roads, damns, and powerlines provide for granted until they are strained or broken.

It’s painfully obvious that climate change is here, that society, as we know it, has changed, and that the infrastructure that maintains our society must change in response.

September looks at the intersection of climate and infrastructure.

-frank

EDITORSLETTER

We Normalized the Abnormal

by Peter Norton

September 22, 2021

This interview with Peter Norton, professor in the department of engineering and society at the University of Virginia, was conducted and condensed by franknews.

Peter | I study the social side of engineering, including its history and its future. I am specifically interested in mobility in cities, sustainability, and inclusivity in mobility.

You write about something called a “treadmill of car dependency”. Would you tell us a little bit about what that is and what that means?

When you start to accommodate automobiles, you inadvertently start to require them. For example, when you build a society where there are lots of good roads for cars, pretty soon, all the destinations become located far apart, such that now you have to drive. Another way in which this effect kicks in is that if you are used to taking the bus or walking or riding your bike, and you have policies that accommodate drivers, pretty soon, it gets harder to take the bus, or harder to bike, or harder to walk so that, although it may seem like the policies are just giving people the choice to drive, inevitably, they tend to give people the obligation to drive.

When they accommodate car dependency, they're perpetuating car dependency.

Why did we start to accommodate car dependency? If we could go back to between 1915 and 1930, what was our thinking? And what were the interests involved in that decision?

Good question. The usual answer to that question is that this was a market decision, this was a democratic decision. America preferred cars, and in a free society, you have to go along with what most people want to do. However, the more I looked into this, the less the story stood up.

What I found instead was that actually, when automobiles started to appear in large numbers on city streets, around 1915, they were treated as intruders who had to be on their best behavior as the newcomers. The way of looking at who belongs in the streets and who's responsible for safety was hostile to car domination. But by the early twenties, people who wanted to sell cars organized to change those norms. And none of this was a market outcome, and it was certainly not an outcome determined by a majority either. A relatively small, relatively wealthy minority of people was all it took to win car domination in city streets. Interest groups organized to make that happen. They changed engineering standards to favor cars. They changed notions about safety: suddenly fast driving was okay and expected and normal.

Crazy what small tweaks to policy can do to society.

Yeah, it was profound. Maybe even more surprising is that a lot of the experts, a lot of the insiders, actually fought these trends. One of the reasons why we don't remember that is that the automobile interest groups were very smart about giving a megaphone to the engineers who were saying, “yes, we have to rebuild cities for cars.” Those engineers got a huge audience. Again, it was very much of a deliberate effort by the people who wanted to sell us cars.

There's an analogy with the people who wanted to sell their cigarettes. It's not a perfect one, but, if you want to make money from cigarettes, it's a good thing that cigarettes are addictive. Your customer will keep buying. Cars were kind of like that. Once they rebuilt society to accommodate cars, they could count on that treadmill effect.

In terms of equity, what are the ramifications of this transformation?

This has huge ramifications. I'll try to keep them simplified, but they're fairly complex. In the mid 20th century, especially the forties, fifties, and sixties, when car dependency was really proliferating and suburbanization was taking off as well, most of the suburbs were explicitly whites-only through segregation and racial covenants, It was still legal until 1968 to write in your real estate covenant that this house cannot be sold to anybody except somebody of European ancestry. So white people could leave the city and people of color stayed in the city. At this point, the highways are coming along so they clear real estate to put the highways in to serve the suburbs.

So these highways went through majority black and brown neighborhoods with almost no compensation.

They were being expelled to make room for drivers who didn't even live there, to drive through where the local residents had lived before. And the destruction is breathtaking. It's shocking to see. I mean, I think people are acquainted with this now better than they used to be, but it's still just jaw-dropping to see what was done to these cities. I think it's an extremely close analogy with colonialism. In other words, you have the colonial power, in this case, the suburbs, exploiting places under the claim that this is progress, this is what we have to do to have a transportation system that works. Which of course is absurd because what we got instead was a transportation system that actually doesn't even work very well, leaving aside all of these matters of equity. Even many of the motorists are themselves, drivers, by compulsion rather than by choice. People pay a huge part of their paycheck to car payments, insurance, fuel, vehicle maintenance, and so on. In effect, even many of the drivers are part of this system of inequality, but not to their advantage.

So the idea was that this is how the transportation system, as you said, needs to be so that it can work. And it turns out that it didn't work. What are the metrics involved in working on the idea of efficiency? Would you say that we don't have efficiency in the system now?

It's a great question because what you use to measure this has obviously profound effects on your analysis.

For example, if you measure how many people are served, you get a very different answer than if you ask how many vehicles are served per hour. And yet the metric many agencies use is cars. Ultimately we care about the people getting where they're going. So that's a strange measure right there.

Another perverse measure is a delay. “Delay” is what traffic engineers say when they mean that you can't go the speed limit. Delay becomes almost like a magic justification for spending public money to reduce delay on the vehicle. The formula they use is they say, well, your time as a person is worth something, like whatever you get paid per hour, and therefore the delay is costing you this amount of money. And therefore we should spend at least that amount of money to remove the delay. That is absurd in a lot of respects. One of the absurdities is that the person causing the delay is the person driving – the drivers cause each other delay. Another thing is if you want to eliminate delay for vehicles instead of delay for people, then you basically have to pave over most of the city. In fact, a lot of American cities are mostly paved over.

In line with what you're saying, but the solutions to overcrowding and traffic seem to be, build more, add more lanes. I mean the freeways in LA are monsters. Would you suggest a different way to think about the current challenges that we're living with?

Well, we need a total transformation. There are some indications that big change is already underway, but not yet 1% of what has to change. We have to have cities so that you do not have to drive. I'm a historian and to me, it's a little surprising how much resistance that idea gets. As a historian, I'm used to looking at cities that are from an era when no one drove and it actually worked quite well. It was certainly not perfect, not even close to perfection, but there were a lot of things going for it that make it attractive.

A lot of Americans who can afford to take a vacation in other countries will go to countries where a city is a city where you have a hotel room and you can walk to the grocery, you can walk to a restaurant, you could walk to your job if you have one there. In an American city, that's usually illegal. By that, I mean maybe about half of Americans live in areas that are zoned for single-family residences only. And if you live in such an area, no one can open up a grocery store that you can walk to because that would violate the zoning ordinance.

And so – strangely in a time when we have to be doing everything we can to make our transportation less energy-intensive – some of our biggest obstacles aren't that we don't have the technology or the money, it's that we actually made it illegal to do it better.

And that's really crazy. We need to change that.

There are so many other things we need to do. We need to just reverse the priorities. We've reversed them before. One hundred years ago, pedestrians were priority number one. We need to put them back to priority number one. Given what we know is sustainable, inclusive, healthful, affordable, equitable, then it's very clear that number one should be pedestrians. Number two should be cyclists. Number three should be other kinds of micro-mobility, like electric bikes and scooters. Number four should be mass transit — buses, electric streetcars, passenger rail, commuter, rail. Automobiles should be last. If we can reverse those priorities, the amazing thing is not only is that more sustainable, it's also cheaper.

What is holding us back from making that transition?

We have normalized the abnormal. So it's abnormal to think that if you want to go somewhere, even to get a cup of coffee or to get a pain reliever, that you have to get in your car to do it. We've gotten so used to it that we think it's normal. If you look at it from a historical perspective, it's really, really weird. It's really weird that if you want a sandwich, that probably means going through a drive-through.

We have to renormalize what we made abnormal.

And that's not easy, but I think there's some good news: we did it before. We can do it again.

It does seem however that so much of what drove the shift were business incentives. Do you think it's possible to invite change not through business and through communities?

That is one of the biggest obstacles. When there's money to be made, there's going to be groups that are very powerful, making sure they make that money. This is a big problem because right now people are telling us, well, we can have carbon-neutral mobility, but it's going to take amazingly high-tech stuff. You're going to need incredible tech. You're going to need all this lithium, all this nickel, all this cobalt. You're going to need all these sensors. You're going to need all these integrated circuits and processors.

All of those things may be wonderfully helpful, but the problem is that they are only telling us about the things they can make some money on. And they're not telling us about all the things we can do that won't make anybody rich. I'm talking about just making environments where you can bike to work, or you can walk to work.

It's going to be very hard to overcome that business interest model to prioritize what's good for the planet and the people who live on it. But there are some good examples of how even against those kinds of odds, we can do some impressive things. One of my personal sources of inspiration is Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962. At that time, chemical companies were making lots of money selling herbicides, insecticides, and so on. And they still are, but there were some practices that were going on that were profoundly destructive and they had been normalized.

She wrote a very eloquent book explaining exactly why this had to change. And amazingly, within eight years of the publication of her book, the number one pesticide that she was pointing at was abolished in the US — and that was a very profitable pesticide. How did she do that? She took millions of isolated people and united them in a common cause. We can unite millions of people as well.

The people who sold us car dependency were very smart about it. They learned that you have to give people a beautiful vision of an attractive future. Even if that attractive future isn't even achievable, if you make it credible, people will sacrifice to get to it. We can make beautiful visions of livable cities.

You touched on electric vehicles but how do you think it fits into the picture?

We do need electric vehicles. Electrification is essential. There's no question about it. The fact that I'm critical of electric vehicles doesn't change that fact.

What I'm critical of isn't electric vehicles. What I'm critical of is the notion that car dependency will work if we just electrify the vehicles.

There's a very big difference. We need a world where you have an option of affordable housing from which you can walk to work or take transit or ride a bike. In that world, electric vehicles might be useful. In this world, electric vehicles solve nothing.

The quantity of metals necessary for the batteries is incredibly problematic in its human and environmental costs. And then it's not even clear we could ever get all the metals necessary to do it. The resulting vehicle is inevitably quite expensive – more expensive even than a combustion-engine vehicle. We simply can't afford that kind of resource-intensive transportation system, not to mention the fact that even right now about three-quarters of our grid is powered by unsustainable fossil fuels. We need to get that up toward a hundred percent, but it won't get there if we have a huge new electric demand. The more new demand we put on the grid, the harder it is to get a grid that's from renewable fuels or sustainable energy sources. Electric vehicles are necessary, but they are not the solution.

Are you hopeful?

The new infrastructure bill does not excite me because it's still primarily based on the assumption that driving everywhere is normal. That can't be normal. I am heartened by some elements in it, including some money for freeway removal, which is unprecedented in federal policy. That's huge and encouraging, but, in general, policy does not make me optimistic. The people who are demanding the policy change give me some optimism. I don't think change is going to come from policymakers of their own accord. It is going to come when people unite and demand change.

E. F. Schumacher was the author of a book called Small is Beautiful back in 1973. One thing he said that stuck with me is when we talk about being optimistic or pessimistic, the trouble with saying you're optimistic is that it leads you to be complacent, and the trouble with saying you're pessimistic means it leads you toward resignation and not trying. We just need to do the best we can.

I can't say I'm optimistic, but I don't dare be pessimistic either.

I'd like us to just go about doing what we need to do to make transportation and energy sustainable.

I think that’s probably right and the only way really to think about our climate crisis without getting either overwhelmed or dejected. It is also trite to say but my favorite thing about New York is the sort of interaction that creates community. When I go back to LA, I'm like, this is lonely...

Yeah. Have you noticed that the sustainable path is often framed as we have to sacrifice? I think a lot of the sustainable way forward is actually very attractive for reasons you just articulated. If we can frame it that way, that may help us overcome some of the resistance to it as well.

We're not just trying to survive. There's also a better world that can be built with the decisions we make now.

Back to the smoking analogy. When the experts were saying “you've got to stop smoking,” the tobacco companies framed that as an unbearable sacrifice. And they said, "Well, you don't have to quit if you use this amazing filter on your cigarette." And what people gradually figured out actually is that quitting is hard, but once you've quit, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anymore. It feels like liberation. And I think there's something very much like that in store for us. If we can get this right and get it right in time, in not being so prodigious in our energy use and in our driving, it can actually be very liberating.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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