Nearly two years into the American-led air war against the Islamic State, military officials say they have corrected the poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets that initially plagued the campaign, and are now hitting targets like oil rigs and secret cash coffers that finance the terrorist group’s war machine.
The destruction in recent months of these targets, deep behind enemy lines — which commanders previously avoided for fear of causing civilian casualties — has seriously damaged the Islamic State’s ability to pay its fighters, govern and attract new recruits, military officials say.
“We’re hitting them where it hurts a lot more than we were in the past,” Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the air war commander, said in one of two recent telephone interviews from his headquarters in Qatar. “Every bomb now has a greater impact.”
To speed up the approval of targets, the Pentagon shifted the authority for most strikes that posed a risk to civilians to commanders in the field from the military’s Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees operations in the Middle East.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/us-strikes-isis-targets.html
