WND.com:
President Obama has given U.S. military pilots an impossible task: Wage a successful air war against an enemy hiding among civilians – without killing a single civilian.
Pilots who have returned from deployments say Obama refuses to permit airstrikes 75 percent of the time against the Islamic State group.
“You went 12 full months while ISIS was on the march without the U.S. using that air power and now as the pilots come back to talk to us they say three-quarters of our ordnance we can’t drop, we can’t get clearance even when we have a clear target in front of us,” Rep. Ed Royce, R-California, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday. “I don’t understand this strategy at all because this is what has allowed ISIS the advantage and ability to recruit.”
Obama has resisted sending in U.S. ground troops to battle ISIS, which has allowed the Sunni terror group to better defend against coalition airstrikes.RELATED: Obama calls ISIS 'killers with good social media'
Jack Keane, a retired four-star U.S. general, said Obama demanded Air Force officials vet targets based on goal of zero civilian casualties.
“This has been an absurdity from the beginning,” Keane said Wednesday, the Free Beacon reported. The president personally made a statement that has driven air power from the inception. “When we agreed we were going to do air power and the military said, this is how it would work, he [Obama] said, ‘No, I do not want any civilian casualties.’ And the response was, ‘But there’s always some civilian casualties. We have the best capability in the world to protect from civilians casualties.’”
Obama’s reply was, “No, you don’t understand. I want no civilian casualties. Zero,” Keane told the website. “So that has driven our so-called rules of engagement to a degree we have never had in any previous air campaign from desert storm to the present.”
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