Iraqi troops abandoned dozens of US military vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces when they fled Islamic State fighters in Ramadi on Sunday, the Pentagon said today.
A Pentagon spokesman, Col Steve Warren, estimated that a half dozen tanks were abandoned, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armored personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees.
He said some of the vehicles were in working condition; others were not because they had not been moved for months.
This repeats a pattern in which defeated Iraq security forces have, over the past year, left behind US-supplied military equipment, prompting the US to destroy them in subsequent airstrikes against Islamic State forces.
Asked whether the Iraqis should have destroyed the vehicles before abandoning the city in order to keep them from enhancing IS's army, Warren said, "Certainly preferable if they had been destroyed; in this case they were not."
Warren also said that while the US is confident that Ramadi will be retaken by Iraq, "It will be difficult."
The fall of Ramadi has prompted some to question the viability of the Obama administration's approach in Iraq, which is a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding Baghdad to reconcile with the nation's Sunnis, and bombing Islamic State targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.
"The president's plan isn't working. It's time for him to come up with overarching strategy to defeat the ongoing terrorist threat," House Speaker John Boehner said.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama has always been open to suggestions for improving the US approach in Iraq.
"It's something that he's talking about with his national security team just about every day, including today," Earnest said.
Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who served multiple tours in Iraq, says that while the extremist group has many problems and weaknesses, it is "not losing" in the face of ineffective Sunni Arab opposition.
"They are adaptive and they remain well armed and well resourced," Harvey said of the militants. "The different lines of operation by the US coalition remain disjointed, poorly resourced and lack an effective operational framework, in my view."
One alternative for the Obama administration would be a containment strategy trying to fence in the conflict rather than push the Islamic State group out of Iraq.
