Indeed this is correct:
The objective for the U.S. now in both Iraq and Syria was to reduce the ISIS threat to the point that local police can handle it, Mattis said. To do that was still the job of the military backed by accurate intelligence that can pinpoint the locations of scattered groups of fighters, Mattis said.
"What we want to do is drive this down to the point that it can be handled by local authority, by police and that sort of thing," Mattis said, "but right now it's still very much a military/intelligence operation."
We're not quite there yet, but we have made great strides.
And this reflects what Mattis said we had to do to achieve victory over ISIL early last year:
You say, "What does [victory] look like" -- I mean, "What will it look like when we say that we've got success?" I think what we'll see is the local security forces, police, that sort of organization can handle it. In other words, we drive them down to a point where the locals can handle that and it's no longer a trans-regional, transnational threat.
So you -- you've got to drive them down to a point that police can handle it. Police can't handle a force that's driving tanks and using artillery, or has thousands of fighters in mobile vehicles that allow them to range far and wide. So we've got to drive them down to a point that police elements can handle it.
Atomizing an enemy so they are a police problem rather than a military problem has always been the point of waging military campaigns against jihadis.
And preventing jihadis from becoming more than a local police problem is the goal elsewhere--especially in Africa these days.
Ultimately, Islamic society must be the first line of defense by de-legitimizing Islamist thinking as an acceptable form of Islam.
It's a long war.
