it is a lot different than it was during desert storm obviously the nature of isis. we have so many opportunities anderson from the very beginning. the rules of engagement that have been put on our pilots are so restrictive when it comes to pilot identification and collateral damage. the laws are very clear. we don t target civilians. but if we have a legitimate military target. we do everything we can to limit civilian casualties but behave engagements that are civilian sashlt casualty so high that we have pilots coming back with bombs. and terrorists continue to rain terror on tens of the thousands of the civilians. and it took us this long to start doing that and we re dropping leaflets and we re allowing the fuel to continue to finance this terror operation and the caliphate over the last
extort and tax. and that s a serious problem because this is a wealthy terror operation with a lot of people and a lot of educated people, moreover a lot of military personnel who used to work for saddam hussein s military. what will be interesting now is if the stop the policy of paying ransom when their citizens get kidnapped by them. a lot of the millions of dollars available to isis has actually come from european countries paying ransom in the case of hostages taken by them. so the whole world right now and correct me if i m wrong, mike, is on a higher state of alert right now as a result of what happened friday night in paris? oh, absolutely. and i m sure that led at least to some degree to these passport controls working in a place like honduras where they showed up with greek passports. obviously that s going to raise a level of suspicion. and a good interviewer can get to the bottom of that pretty quickly that that passport is not jiving with what that story is. i as
is some massive terror operation that was incredibly sophisticated and that it couldn t happen here. look at those characteristics. eight people, good communication, they got weapons and shot up cafes. that is not that difficult to do. so if you want to look at a security professional and say screen every immigrant so you can ensure this doesn t happen, that s one of the most unreasonable things i ve heard during this entire war. you can t do that. that sounds pessimistic. if i m listening at home, i m thinking there is nothing that can be done. no, i m not a pessimist. we have an expectation in this world that we will win every battle. we won t. and that this will be done in months. it won t. the average time span for an insurgency/counterinsurgency like this is ten or 20 years. first, the kurds and others in iraq have been doing pretty well. isis is not advancing. we ve got to keep giving them tremendous amounts of assistance and helping them spot targets on the grouped.
regular basis. they are very worried about what comes next now and the number one concern now is isis will flood. this is the richest terrorist group in history. it s got training camp rivaling those run by al qaeda and all those western recruiting coming in that it is send back and capable operational planners and increasingly getting into the international terrorism business. it s thrown a fraction of resources into international terrorism. if they start to ratchet that up, we ll be in a very, very worrying scenario. it is the richest terror group out there that captured the oil fields, mike rogers near mosul. billions of dollars potentially. they had robbed the bank. mosul is a city of 2 million people and they have all that gold. this is a very, very powerful terror operation. clearly. one of the things that worries you about an organization is do they have space to plan operations and do they have finances to plan operations? and the space to recruit.
terrorist organization can t plot an attack against new york city. you re thinking of operations in traditional military terms, the military controls, i would say we re in the new world and i call it the game of drones. this is the operations that devastate the leadership of organization even as they don t retake territory. isn t that the difference here, it s not purely a terror operation there? the unique factor with eye isis is that it has elements of being a terror organization and military organization, because they can hold territory. they re holding towns and cities in iraq, holding off a major army in iraq. but if you re an bell gens position as an intelligence professional, ensure that nobody directed by the leadership of isis reaches new york, chicago, and elsewhere. if you re charged in the pentagon, you re saying help them retake cities. the oil refinley, for example,