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General Noble will be posted as the deputy commander of the mighty US Army Pacific in Hawaii. Picture: Zak Simmonds
ISLAMIC State fighters remained a “highly lethal adversary†with their knack of turning fridges, drones and phones into bombs but the growing pile of beard shavings showed they were losing the war and fleeing for their lives.
That’s the summary of Australian Major General Roger Noble who has been leading the fight against ISIS in Iraq but in a significant strategic promotion, is to be redeployed closer to home with South East Asia as the emerging new front for the Islamic jihadists.
From March 1, General Noble will be posted as the deputy commander of the mighty US Army Pacific in Hawaii, which commands 80,000 soldiers or more than double that of the Australian Army, with a sphere of influence extending from Alaska to Korea.
The move to have an Aussie in one of the highest military postings of its kind will reinforce the alliance between the two nations amid rising regional tensions both with the emergence of a Pacific ISIS jihadist army but also diplomatic spats with nations including Indonesia and China.
General Noble will be posted as the deputy commander of the mighty US Army Pacific in Hawaii. Picture: Zak SimmondsSource:News Corp Australia
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It is also recognition of the growing likelihood the next war would be an air-sea battle with the mutual reliance of the US-Australian forces, with Australia having the airfields and ports and the Americans the planes and ships to fill them.
It also comes with Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne to meet her US counterpart James Mattis this week, the first face-to-face meeting between an Australian minister with a counterpart from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Speaking on the eve of his new posting, General Noble told News Corp Australia he was still in the process of learning about the Asia Pacific fight on extremist militants.
But he said one could extrapolate the ruthless methods he saw of the group in Iraq as “maybe relevant†to this region.
There are fears of the emergence of a Pacific ISIS jihadist army. Picture: Balkis Press/Sipa USASource:Supplied
He earlier detailed what he saw in Iraq from improvised explosive devices including packing taped-up fridges with bombs and floating them downstream toward bridges held by Coalition forces and turning other everyday technologies into weapons including off-the-shelf unmanned aerial drones, mobile phones as geo-locators, commercial software for communications and targeting, small-scale mobile chemical weapons production, suicide bombers on foot and in trucks and effective global propaganda.
But the general, who was second in command of all coalition forces in Iraq, said ISIS were masters of creating the narrative to attract support but like the military battle, that too was weakening.
“They’d do an attack on an Iraqi army post, they would film the orders and conduct the attack, they will film the attack and take the post if they are lucky and kill everyone there, film and post it, it’s often how we got our post operational information by looking what the enemy put up,†he said.
“That’s just a simple example. They’ve then got the black flag, the utes, so on an operational level that strikes what wars are about — confidence and belief.â€
Major General Roger Noble was second in command of all coalition forces in Iraq. Picture: Evan MorganSource:News Corp Australia
He added however: “Generally people don’t fight to the death, they do in Hollywood and we saw with Daesh (ISIS) one of the indicators of their morale was a pile of shaved beards often we would find the shavings, ‘I’m taking this off so I can do a runner’.
“Having said that there are elements who do fight to the death so it’s a human organisation. So tactically we thought the solution was hit them on all points, the message was the end is inevitable.
“This is the Iraqi way, (tell them) the end is inevitable ‘if you are going to do this, if you fight you will die’. It is a pretty compelling message and you keep on playing that back which the Iraqis got better and better at doing. So war is a contest of wills and you will find like in all armies some units will fight very hard, some fight well … it would be fair to say as you close in on Mosul and Raqqa their options are increasingly reduced. Stay and fight or go somewhere else.â€
ISIS claim they want to establish a caliphate in South East Asia. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied