Admin official shoots down Trump, Cruz plans to bomb Islamic State's oil fields

By Jacqueline Klimas, Jacqueline Klimas

Published December 20, 2015

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The administration on Tuesday pushed back against suggestions that it needs to be more aggressive bombing the Islamic State's oil fields, saying that strategic strikes are a better way to disable their network.

"There's been a lot of suggestions by experts on the outside to simply bomb it. The problem is it's not that easy, it doesn't work that way. You can't simply bomb a well," a senior U.S. official said. "It'll probably cost us more to take that facility out than it'll be to rebuild it."

The U.S. has been hitting the terrorist group's oil infrastructure over the past several weeks in an operation called Tidal Wave II, named after the first Tidal Wave to take out Nazi oil assets during World War II.