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Obama will use a speech to the nation Wednesday to make his case for launching a U.S.-led offensive against Sunni militants gaining ground in the Middle East, seeking to rally support for a broad military mission while reassuring the public he is not plunging U.S. forces into another Iraq War.

“What I want people to understand,” Obama said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that was broadcast Sunday, “is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum” of the militants. “We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities; we’re going to shrink the territory that they control; and, ultimately, we’re going to defeat them,” he added.

The military campaign Obama is preparing has no obvious precedent. Unlike U.S. counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Pakistan, it is not expected to be limited to drone strikes against militant leaders. Unlike the war in Afghanistan, it will not include the use of ground troops, which Obama has ruled out.

Unlike the Kosovo war that President Bill Clinton and NATO nations waged in 1999, it will not be compressed into an intensive 78-day tactical and strategic air campaign. And unlike the air campaign that toppled the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi, in 2011, the Obama administration is no longer “leading from behind,” but plans to play the central role in building a coalition to counter the Islamic State.

“We have the ability to destroy ISIL,” Secretary of State John Kerry said last week at the NATO summit meeting in Wales, using an alternative name for the militant group. “It may take a year, it may take two years, it may take three years. But we’re determined it has to happen.”