Going beyond airpower to take down ISIS doesn’t have to mean a new US occupation of Middle East territory. The best answer may well be a large-scale raid.

A recent poll showed that over 70 percent of the American people believe that taking out ISIS will eventually require US combat troops. They don’t necessarily like it, but they recognize the reality of the situation.

Few military professionals think the war can be resolved by aerial bombardment alone. This point was rammed brutally home on Oct. 3 when ISIS forces overran the Iraqi city of Hit despite the best efforts of coalition airpower; the slow fall of Kobani reinforces the lesson.

This campaign of large-scale raids would likely be more costly and take months, but it’s preferable to armed nation-building, where body bags stream back for years.

We’ll eventually have to face two hard realities.

1) The only way to destroy the sanctuary ISIS has built for itself will be to send in a large number of well-trained combat troops to destroy the ISIS standing army in occupied cities and towns in Syria and Iraq.

2) It will take years to train the Iraqi Army, the Kurds and select Syrian rebels to conduct large-scale urban combat — if they will even accept such a mission.

The American people don’t like long-term, open-ended commitments, which is nonetheless what current strategy is certain to deliver. President Obama is setting himself up for failure.

But there is a solution. It revolves around how we define “boots on the ground.”

We already have 1,600 troops on the ground, with more on the way. Weasel-wording their mission by calling them advisers doesn’t change that fact.

Yet I agree with the president that the last thing we need in Iraq and Syria is a large commitment of American forces occupying places like Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa for a prolonged nation-building effort.

It’s not just that we’ve been there, done that. We’d also be falling into the trap envisioned by Osama bin Laden and Islamic terror theorist Abu Bakr Naji, who wanted Americans ensnared in long, casualty-producing occupations to a point where the Americans get tired of the region as a whole and leave entirely.

We’re already nearly at that point after the wars of the last decade.

What’s needed is a series of large-scale raids designed to destroy ISIS’ combat power in a way that would let the Iraqi Army and Western-aligned Syrian rebels reoccupy the liberated population areas.

What’s the difference? In an invasion, you come to permanently occupy the terrain. In a raid, you destroy the enemy and leave.

We tend to think of raids as small, short operations like the one that killed bin Laden, but history has ample examples of much larger ones.

Before he began to seriously build a permanent empire, Genghis Khan made his living by 10,000-20,000-man raids on his enemies’ cities — mostly for loot, but also to eliminate potential military threats.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of the Central Command, estimates that the equivalent of two Marine Expeditionary Brigades would be needed to systematically destroy the ISIS standing army; I agree.

That’s about 20,000 soldiers, with one brigade attacking east out of Syria and the second attacking west through Iraq. They’d meet at the old Iraqi-Syrian border in a classic squeeze play.

This would be a war the American people can understand. The number of cities and towns cleared of ISIS’ conventional combat power is quantifiable, and there is a recognizable military end state.

It would not be without cost. In retaking the Iraqi city of Fallujah alone in 2004, we lost 94 Marines and sailors killed while killing 10 times that many Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters.

This campaign of large-scale raids would likely be more costly and take months, but it’s preferable to armed nation-building, where body bags stream back for years.

It is likely that when driven from the occupied areas, ISIS’ people will disperse and try to consolidate elsewhere. We have to plan for that; you can destroy an army, but not an ideology. We may need to attack them again elsewhere sometime.

The political end state would be in the hands of the Syrians and Iraqis. We could do some advance good by training what passes for a moderate Syrian rebel coalition to administer and police the liberated areas of Syria after we’ve cleared them of ISIS fighters.

Similarly, we could work diplomatically with the Iraqis to rebuild the trust of the population and tribal leaders of the Sunni regions.

Yet there is no guarantee that they will succeed in governance, only that the ISIS threat will be dispersed.

We must prevent a terror sanctuary similar to that which existed in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks. President Obama is correct: We are the indispensable nation in this effort. And while we may be able to recruit a posse, a global marshal has to lead from the front.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who served as a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.