I once found myself in the middle of a discussion about modern day warfare. Although the details have long been forgotten, I took away with the statement “We no longer fight war in fields.”

No longer is it up to people to actually go into a warzone and fight for their life, it’s way easier to just sit behind a computer in a high-security complex and merely pretend you’re playing a video game.

Jumping on the political bandwagon and using his potential status as the president of the most powerful military in the world, Trump’s new campaign sees him lay out his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. Using the line “Bomb the hell out of ISIS” his supporters have increased in numbers. But it isn’t really the solution. Mashable’s Chris Miller lays down four reasons why Trump’s approach just won’t work:

Civilians Are People, Too

There are thousands of innocent civilians who just don’t deserve to be killed. Like the people in France, these people have lived innocent lives and are just in the middle of this horrible war.

ISIS is an elusive target and, while Raqqa is de facto capital of its so-called caliphate, the extremists have other strongholds in and outside Syria including Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city — home to about 2.5 million people in northern Iraq.

Civilian casualties could be “astronomically high” if the U.S. simply “bombed [ISIS] to hell,” said Will McCants, head of the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations With the Islamic World. “We would risk committing war crimes as a consequence.”

The U.S. is party to the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war which prohibit the targeting of civilians and more extensive bombings.

Ideology Is Another Kind Of Fight

If the west continues to attack ISIS, it will turn them into martyrs in the “eyes of their brethern” and probably prompt more and more to pop up. Like whack-a-mole.

“Targeting an ideology is complex, and the answer cannot be bounded by a conventional military response,” Michael Kay, a British foreign affairs reporter, argued.

Bombing Syria Only Helps Assad

Whose side are you even on here? Assad is the brutal dictator of Syria who is responsible for about 200 000 deaths of his own people. The Syrian war began when he decided to run for an unconstitutional third term of presidency and since then the country has turned for worst. He has indirectly killed waaaay more people than ISIS and taking the focus off the him will only assist him in the end.

A war then began in an attempt to remove Assad from power has now turned into a de facto coalition between three forces who were once divided in opinion: Russia, the U.S. and France.

Destruction Of Key Cities

There are more than enough people relentlessly attempting to leave the war-stricken lands of Syria and Iraq, but if the West had to carpet bomb the areas, there would be absolutely no reason for anyone to return. This would only further destabilise things on the ground and create so much mess.

So what’s the solution?

While the current US strategy is part military, part political and part humanitarian, they have created a bit of f**k up and they can’t just pull out. They should just never have got involved in the first place. Their attempt to utilize allies in the region has only encouraged more opposition – namely ISIS – but the efforts have seen some results: fighting on the ground, Kurdish peshmerga fighters pushed ISIS out of the city

Yet analysts suggest that instead of using bullets and bombs, someone needs to clamp ISIS’s finances. The group makes millions of dollars through kidnappings and ransoms, illicit oil trades and plundering (like pirates, haha). Diverse and deep, it is most likely the best-funded terrorist organisation yet.

But there is hope – or dreams:

States like ISIS use terror attacks when they feel their regime is threatened. It’s a sign of weakness. They change their strategy in order to punish their enemies for punishing them.

[source: mashable]