IT WAS ABOUT 4:30 P.M. ON JUNE 18 when a Syrian warplane first attacked rebels supported by the U.S., pushing them out of a town on the road to Raqqa, the Islamic State capital. Syria is aligned with Russia, and so a U.S. officer picked up a hotline and warned the Russian officer on the other end. When, about two hours later, a Syrian jet returned and bombed the same rebels, it was shot out of the sky by an American F/A-18 Super Hornet.
It was the first air-to-air kill by a U.S. pilot in 18 years, and it happened so quickly that no President could have been brought into the decision making loop. But the striking thing about Donald Trump’s tenure as Commander in Chief is that he wants no part of it anyway. Both in Syria and Afghanistan—where thousands more U.S. troops are about to be deployed in what is already the longest war in American history—Trump says he’s leaving things up to “the generals.”
“The lieutenants, the captains, their majors, their colonels—they’re professionals,” Trump told TIME on May 11. “They love doing it. They know every inch of the territory, right? I say, Why am I telling them? So I authorized the generals to do the fighting.”
A great deal is going on in both of America’s wars. The Islamic State in June took Afghanistan’s Tora Bora from the Taliban, which nonetheless holds more territory than at any other time since the 2001 U.S. invasion.
This story is from the July 3,2017 edition of Time.
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This story is from the July 3,2017 edition of Time.
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