I don’t agree with Trump that Obama intentionally created ISIS, but he certainly created them through a dereliction of duty.
I’m inclined to agree that using US weapon caches and vehicles, minus the logistics to support and maintain them, ultimately fucked them. Some early success, but I knew all those tanks and humvees had parts you couldn’t easily replace. Our rifles the Iraqi’s irritatingly demanded to have (we were quite content letting them keep the AK rifle heritage, don’t need to clean them, hard to break, but they insisted like idiots to have our weapons, dumbasses) break easily, need constant cleaning, and I’ve seen less and less and less photo images of guys totting them around in ISIS… some are still around, not many. Every sandstorm makes them worthless to operate till cleaned.
So yeah… we did in a sense fuck them. We seriously degraded their ability to keep functional weapons in the field.
Also doesn’t help we know our Humvee, APC, and Tank heat signatures exactly, know their tracks and their general weaknesses. When the Army and Marines train in the US, Air Force and Navy train flying overhead, looking at is move. They know damn well what we look like in those things.
ISIS in the end switched to Mad Max vehicles… crazy uparmored kamakaze vehicles designed to ram checkpoints. Think they blew up every construction vehicle in their territory for these suicide blitzkried hits, they just now slap metal on anything and charge.
Problem of course is, maneuverability is shot, steering wheel seiges up, etc. I wouldn’t even bother with antitank guns, just sink some dragonteeth down a dozen yards from a checkpoint, let them strike that. You can make them Crane portable, just keep a hole in the ground, drop the concrete slab in place.
I’m not exactly impressed with ISIS at this point.