MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, FLA.

Weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a small team of Green Berets was quietly sent to the Philippine island of Basilan. There, one of the world's most virulent Islamic extremist groups, Abu Sayyaf, had established a haven and was seeking to extend its reach into the Philippine capital.

But rather than unleashing Hollywood-style raids, as might befit their reputation, the Green Berets proposed a time-consuming plan to help the Philippine military take on the extremist group themselves. Seven years later, Abu Sayyaf has been pushed out of Basilan and terrorist attacks have dropped dramatically.

"It's not flashy, it's not glamorous, but man, this is how we're going to win the long war," said Lt. Gen. David Fridovich, the Army officer who designed the Philippine program.

Fridovich is part of a quiet but significant transformation taking place within the most secret of the U.S. military's armed forces, the Special Operations Command, which encompasses the Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force and similar units from the Air Force and the Marines.

A new Special Operations commander, Adm. Eric Olson, is shifting emphasis from the high-profile raids that were the hallmark of the early years of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts. Instead, Olson has stressed what officers called "indirect action": training friendly militaries to fight terrorism and violent separatists within their own borders.

In his first extended interview since becoming Special Operations commander last year, Olson acknowledged that secretive "direct action" operations remained "urgent and necessary." But he added: "They are not by themselves decisive, in the long term."

Olson is renowned within the tightly knit Special Ops world as leader of a team that in 1993 led trapped Army units out of a firefight in Somalia's capital of Mogadishu, a rescue retold in the book "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War." Shortly after that, he headed SEAL Team Six, the Navy's super-secret anti-terrorism unit.

Yet he has argued that headline-making U.S.-led attacks can be counterproductive, angering locals and undermining domestic leaders.

"We pride ourselves, for good reason, on our ability to respond to the sound of guns," Olson said in the interview at his headquarters on a sprawling Air Force base on the outskirts of Tampa. "We also pride ourselves on our ability to move ahead of the sound of guns. If we can move ahead of the sound of guns, and prevent them, we're all better off."

The debate over whether U.S. strategy should focus on direct or indirect action is a central point of contention within the Bush administration and among counterterrorism experts at the Pentagon and the CIA.

The tensions are most acute in U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Advocates of more frequent unilateral U.S. action there have bumped up against those urging "strategic patience" when dealing with the new government in Islamabad.

Pentagon officials familiar with internal debates said that Olson has not shied away from direct action in Pakistan when it is backed by solid intelligence. But they said he has advocated improvements in training and other support for Pakistani forces so they can deal better with militants on their own.

"He's a realist," said one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely with Olson on Pakistan issues. "Some of these guys are not realists. They want to do something just so it appears we're doing something."

Supporters of Olson's approach point to progress in the Philippines and elsewhere. The rescue of 15 hostages by the Colombian military in July was similarly striking, because the Colombian military for years has trained under U.S. Special Forces teams to combat the leftist rebel group FARC.

To succeed, indirect action depends on strong, long-term ties to foreign militaries. But the demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it more difficult to cultivate those relationships. Nearly 80 percent of Special Operations deployments go to the Middle East or central Asia, representing a "vacuum that's sucked away some of our forces from other countries," Olson said.

Olson also must contend with the fallout from pre-Sept. 11 U.S. sanctions efforts against countries plagued by terrorism that barred the U.S. military from working with local armed forces.

"You can go ahead and figure out where those places might be, but there's opportunity we might have missed there," said Fridovich, who declined to name specific countries. U.S. officials in the past punished Indonesia for military abuses in East Timor and targeted Pakistan for unauthorized nuclear testing.

Olson's views on strategy are especially significant because with a series of directives culminating in "Conplan 7500," a classified planning document, the Special Operations Command has become the Pentagon's lead agency for the administration's war on terrorism, synchronizing planning among the military's regional commanders. Olson has put Fridovich in charge of the synchronization effort.

The role does not give SOCOM direct command of troops in war zones. But Olson and Fridovich help shape Pentagon priorities.

Even with their new power, Special Ops leaders acknowledge that others remain skeptical of the slow, persistent approach. But Olson said the climate is changing, in part because of the success of new approaches in Iraq. "I think there's much less institutional resistance now than there might have been a few years ago," Olson said.