And Then There’s The Peculiar Mosul Invasion Plan…

…which has now been advertised to the enemy in high definition.

The Pentagon went public with the size of the force – 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops – and the time frame for the planned attack on Mosul on Thursday. We’ve gone from building a decoy army around George Patton to pin Hitler’s Panzers down at the Pas de Calais and allow the Normandy invasion to achieve operational surprise…to this.

In a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon, a U.S. Central Command official said brigades of Iraqis along with Kurdish peshmerga forces and Sunni militia will seek to take back Iraq’s second largest city from ISIS, which has held it since June.

The half-hour briefing attended by WND and other media outlets was given on condition that the official could not be identified.

The disclosure surprised many on the call who wondered why details would be released months ahead of the planned offensive.

An intelligence source who spoke to WND also on condition that his identity not be revealed called the disclosure “pure lunacy.”

The source referred to previous disclosures in advance of an attack that gave enemy forces in Iraq time to set up improvised explosive devices.

The Pentagon briefer said that all training and equipping of Iraqi forces now under way will be for taking back Mosul. He said that some six brigades of equipment now are in place in preparation for the expected Mosul offensive in April or May.

“There are still a lot of things that need to come together, and as we dialogue with our Iraqi counterparts, we want them to go in that time frame; because as you get into Ramadan and the summer and the heat, it becomes problematic if you go much later than that,” he said.

“By the same token, if they’re not ready, if the conditions are not set, if all the equipment they need isn’t physically there to the degree that will be successful, we have not closed the door on continuing to slide [the time frame] to the right,” he said.

“And, so, although we would like [the battle for Mosul] to occur in the April-May time frame, that decision will still have to be one we will have to contend with in the future.”

Thursday night Megyn Kelly had Sen. Tom Cotton, who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and Gen. Jay McInerney on to discuss this unusual development…

Perhaps this whole thing is a ruse to distract ISIS. Except if it is, one wonders what would be the point. After all, Mosul is far and away the largest prize inside Iraq’s borders ISIS has taken since its inception; at some point it will have to be retaken. There isn’t anything else ISIS would believe a feint at Mosul is a mask for – an attack on Raqqa, the ISIS de-facto capital, would be a sizable splash, but a move on Raqqa would involve an invasion into Syria and it would also involve some rather longer supply lines than the Iraqi Army could be expected to maintain.

No, this isn’t likely a ruse. This is an exercise in attempting to placate domestic criticism of the Obama administration’s inaction against ISIS, and the operational effectiveness of the plan has been compromised in the process.

Something is very, very wrong with our military strategy and command and control.

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