Ben Watson, Defense One: What Was The Largest Battle Of The Decade Say About The Future Of War
The bloody battle to wrest Mosul from ISIS was the world’s largest military operation in nearly 15 years.
Here’s how Western-backed Iraqi soldiers helped break the Islamic State’s grip on a city of more than 1 million people — and what we can learn from it.
DAY ONE
The Mosul offensive began on October 17, 2016, when a variegated body of more than 100,000 troops—local volunteers, regular soldiers, elite Iraqi and Western special forces—collapsed on the country's second-largest city. The force, believed to overmatch ISIS 10-to-1, moved under the cover of airpower provided by a half-dozen nations.
Advancing from the south, east and the north, Baghdad and its allies needed just 14 days to make it to Mosul’s doorstep. Iraqi special forces raced about 15 miles in those two weeks, and became the first to knock on that door. But such large-scale, coordinated assaults would prove much more difficult in the months to come.
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WNU Editor: I posted this before .... but it deserves to read again. The battle for Mosul is going to be studied by military planners for decades, and from it new tactics and technologies are going to be developed and implemented.
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