The U.S. war against the Islamic State (ISIS) has been ineffective and remains in disarray, says former U.S. Navy SEAL Carl Higbie.
"They're just letting this progress further and further by lack of action, and the problem . . . is they've yet to define any type of plan of action," Higbie said Monday on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"This is a region where we come back every decade to fix some problem that they've created because they're not accountable or intelligent enough to understand Western democracy or any type of modern rule for a civilized society," the former SEAL said.
Higbie said that in his experience, airstrikes cannot be as effective as ground troops, which the United States has shied from.
"While I was a SEAL deployed in Iraq, I called in a lot of airstrikes, and the fact of the matter is, these things are not as effective without boots on the ground," he said.
"I was against boots on the ground until this started really snowballing into what it is now, but now I'm for it," Higbie said.
"At what point do we say, 'OK, we haven't completed any goals with this in this time frame, now let's move to boots on the ground' . . . at what point do we just say, 'Enough is enough'?"
Higbie, author of
"Battle on the Home Front: A Patriot's Mission to Save the American Dream," published by Amazon Digital Services, said that when the U.S. defeated Saddam Hussein, many of his high-ranking generals and fighters fled and assimilated into the population.
"We're not fighting a uniformed population as we know it or as a uniform force as we know it, we're fighting an ideology, so we need to be prepared to do things that are not in conventional warfare," Higbie said.
"What did we do in Berlin? We went there and cleaned house, and after we cleaned house, we sent in ground troops to make sure it was clean, and unfortunately that's the only way we're going to win this war."
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