President Obama may be developing a strategy to confront the apocalyptic horrors of the Islamic State, but he already has a method, a gift of sorts from soldiers who have been fighting similar enemies for more than a decade.
To understand, consider history: George S. Patton's method of war, the one that defeated the Wehrmacht in the European theater in World War II, consisted of a mechanized war doctrine stolen from the Germans, plus a uniquely American skill for applying air- and land-delivered firepower in support of tanks on the move. Patton's method would be perfected during future U.S. and Israeli conflicts, culminating in the "Great Wheel" envelopment of Saddam Hussein's army in Desert Storm in 1991 and the march to Baghdad in 2003.
Over time, however, enemies learn and adapt. Eventually, Patton's method was successfully challenged in Lebanon by Hezbollah's anti-tank missiles and in Iraq by Al-Qaida's improvised explosive devices.
Enter a new prophet, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Over the past 20 years, McChrystal and his teams have developed another uniquely American method of war by substituting skill, information and precision for mass, maneuver and weight of shell. We first watched the McChrystal method at work in Afghanistan following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when small Special Forces units and the Afghan Northern Alliance teamed to destroy the Taliban using precision strikes delivered from aircraft high overhead.
But the secret of this new method is in people, not technology. McChrystal's success proves that small units of superbly selected, trained, educated, led and bonded soldiers can kill much larger aggregations of enemy while holding the deaths of friendly forces and innocent civilians to a minimum.
Make no mistake, the McChrystal method is about killing, but it is killing of a different sort. The president has lamented the "Whac-A-Mole" nature of battling insurgents and militants. But Whac-A-Mole tactics work when the moles are enemies who occupy critical positions within terrorist networks, when they are essentially a middle-management layer of leaders, communicators, transporters, financiers, technicians and enforcers.
The day will inevitably come when the McChrystal method is employed against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. But crushing the group will require a scaling up of the method, never attempted before.
Obstacles to this are many. The Special Operations Command could be the most intractable enemy of replicating the approach. It argues that such elite forces can be made only in small batches. Truth is, there are more than enough men to fully expand the McChrystal method if some Army and Marine close-combat forces were repurposed. Of course, such a transformation would take time. Building a conventional "elite" force would require a ruthless culling of the ranks to allow only the best and brightest to be selected, trained and bonded together in a manner proven by decades of success in the special operations community.
