“Our troops have been unleashed,” Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and counterterrorism adviser, said Friday at The Heritage Foundation.
“I had a tier one operator, meaning a top of the top special operations guy on detail from the National Security Council … come up to me in maybe week five of the administration and say, ‘Sir, you have no idea, no idea how the morale amongst our forces have skyrocketed because we are no longer micromanaged … and we are allowed to do our job, and it is clear the president trusts us,” he said.
The contrast in strategy has made all the difference, Gorka said.
“We have been told by the last administration that ISIS is a generational threat … [that] our children, our grandchildren will be fighting ISIS jihadis decades from now,” Gorka said. “Well, I guess the Trump administration has defined generations to last just a few months.”
While President Barack Obama called ISIS a “J.V. team” in a January 2014 interview in The New Yorker, Gorka said Trump and his administration did what the Obama administration said would take years.
“There is no ISIS caliphate any longer,” Gorka said. “We have liberated Mosul, we have have taken back Raqqa, the operational headquarters of ISIS, and just three weeks ago, the last ISIS stronghold in Syria has fallen as well.”
Trump has been successful, Gorka said, by evaluating threats and responding to threats strategically.
Trump “looked at the threat we faced clearly as a war, not as some problem to be managed, but as a war, and not only that, he wants to win that war, and that is exactly what we have been doing as a nation,” Gorka said.
U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has also been key in Trump’s successes in defeating terrorism.
“We have gone under Secretary Mattis from a strategy of attrition, he has said this openly, a strategy of attrition to a strategy of annihilation,” Gorka said.
Trump has also made gains on winning the war on terrorism by acknowledging that there is ...
