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Ashton Carter listens in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Dec. 5, 2014, as President Barack Obama announces he would nominate Carter as the nation's 25th defense secretary. Carter, nearing his first anniversary at the helm, was confirmed Feb. 12, 2015.

(Jacquelyn Martin, Associated Press, File, 2014)

If anyone has the moral standing to challenge U.S. defense policy, it is Andrew J. Bacevich, a scholar, author and retired Army officer whose vociferous criticisms of America's misguided adventure in Iraq did not prevent his son Andrew, an Army first lieutenant, from deploying there -- or dying there, in an improvised bomb explosion in 2007.

In the latest issue of the Nation magazine, Bacevich, an emeritus professor of history and international relations at Boston University, rips into what he describes as the go-along, get-along Pentagon stewardship of Ash Carter, the 25th U.S. secretary of defense.

The 61-year-old Carter, a Yale-educated physicist and former Harvard professor, this month marks one year at the helm of the Pentagon, but his roots at the Defense Department are deep, having first served as an assistant secretary of defense in the early 1990s under President Bill Clinton. Many consider him to be an exceptionally competent, smart manager with his hand also on the pulse of our troops in the field, a leader who pushed hard for and succeeded in the recent historic decision to open all combat roles to women.

Bacevich acknowledges Carter's technocratic skills -- but casts them more in the mode of what Vietnam War combat soldiers once derisively called REMFs, or Rear Echelon M-F-'s.

"What Carter has not done is pose first-order questions related to national-security policy and practice," Bacevich writes. "Instead he has deferred to and thereby protected existing routines and arrangements."

Bacevich is particularly galled by the Pentagon's recent decision to proceed with a new-generation strategic bomber, the Long Range Strike-Bomber, or LRS-B, awarding the contract to develop the bomber to Northrop Grumman in what could be a $55 billion defense bonanza. Bacevich challenges the wisdom of this move in an era of unmanned drones and cyber warfare, and when U.S. forces can already deliver nuclear weapons with precision from afar using existing sea and land-based systems. (Those associated with Northrop Grumman, not surprisingly, see it differently, and argue that the "anti-access/area denial" strategies of nations like Russia, China and Iran require upgrades to America's ability to project air power.)

But more particularly, Bacevich denigrates Carter's hands-on handling of the Pentagon's fluid and evolving strategies for taking on the Islamic State, arguing that "given adequate resources, a reasonably competent staff-college graduate should be able to figure out how to prevail over an adversary that lacks an air force, possesses few modern weapons, and by relying on nihilistic violence alienates the population it presumes to govern."

Those observations may be true as far as they go -- and Bacevich is spot on when he warns that post-9/11 events have shown us "manifestly" that a purely militaristic approach to countering the terrorist threat, without addressing what breeds it, will do nothing but allow the next terrorist group to step into the void, much as IS has done with al-Qaida.

But Bacevich misses in suggesting that an improvised, small-ball strategy of countering IS militarily is misguided. The history of al-Qaida and 9/11 -- and of Osama bin Laden's well-documented attempts to acquire nuclear materials -- suggests that it's not. While the Pentagon should not suggest that it's able to defeat IS in this manner, nonetheless, using key alliances, some strategically placed ground forces and advisers, precision air power and denial of resources to prevent IS' expansion, recruitment and acquisition of more lethal capabilities is better than the alternative of doing nothing militarily to stop its advance on the ground.

Elizabeth Sullivan is opinion director of cleveland.com and directs the editorial board for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Elizabeth Sullivan: esullivan@cleveland.com; (216) 999-4688