Armed Services panel to press military chief on Mosul offensive

The House Armed Services Committee is poised to grill the head of U.S. Central Command on why an official disclosed key details about a plan to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul, according to the panel’s chairman.

{mosads}“I suspect that the question will be asked: Why did this happen?” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said Thursday during a roundtable with reporters.

“I’m perplexed. I got to say, I don’t understand,” he added. “I don’t understand what benefit there is in saying ‘Here’s what we’re going to do and when.’ And yet they did.”

Thornberry said there has been a “continual problem of telling the enemy what we are going to do and what we’re not going to do and thereby simplified their calculations and I think that is nearly always a bad idea.”

Army Gen. Lloyd Austin and Christine Wormuth, undersecretary of Defense for policy, will appear before the panel next Tuesday to discuss President Obama’s war resolution to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Thornberry’s comments indicate lawmakers are still fuming over a background briefing that took place last week, when a senior official at Central Command told reporters a surprising amount of operational detail about a spring offensive to free Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from around 2,000 ISIS fighters.

The official said it would take about 25,000 members of Iraq’s security forces, trained by U.S. troops in as little as three to four weeks, to reclaim Mosul, and that the offensive likely would happen in April or May.

The revelations have lawmakers worried the military telegraphed its strategy for fighting ISIS.

Thornberry’s Senate counterpart, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) fired off a letter to President Obama last week to voice their concerns about the disclosures.

Earlier this week, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), an Iraq War veteran and member of the Armed Services panel, said she was “mind-boggled” by the Defense Department briefing.

Thornberry dismissed the argument that the Pentagon divulged the details in a bid to intimidate ISIS fighters and signal civilians to evacuate the area.

“I’m a little skeptical with some of these justifications that the administration is trying to come up with afterwards,” he said. “What makes you think ISIS will let civilians leave Mosul?”

“What if this doesn’t happen kind of on the time frame they indicated? What effect does that have on Iraqi military morale? On the morale of the civilians there?” he asked.

“When you start telling people what you’re going to do, giving a time frame and so forth, I just think it’s a bad idea,” Thornberry told reporters.