“Could we do it better ourselves? Could we do it different ourselves? We’ve done it ourselves, and everybody knows where the results are now,” Colonel J.R. Treharne, commander of the Joint Coalition Coordination Center at the Erbil airport in northern Iraq, said in September.

Treharne knows Iraq. He did two tours here in the last war, including training Iraqi security forces who took control of detainees. In his new job, he was persuading Iraqi and Kurdish fighters to look beyond their historic mistrust, just a few weeks before coalition forces started the battle to retake Mosul. It was worth doing, he argued, and it was working.

“And we’re doing things differently now, in that we are enabling the Iraqis and Kurds to fight and defeat Daesh,” he said, using another name for ISIS. “And we’re doing it with many less soldiers than what we did in the past. We are much safer than what we were in the past. Our losses have been much less, the cost to our government, and loss of life, and on and on, is much less than what it was in the past,” he said. “And in the end, I truly think that Daesh will be defeated, and they will be defeated by the Iraqis and Kurds, which probably will put this region in a better state than if we came in and did it ourselves.”

As he spoke, reports poured in, of civilian families trapped in Mosul being executed or picked off by ISIS snipers, and in Syria, of Aleppo spiraling into calamity. Call it cold, call it wisdom, call it patience, call it an overcorrection—call it what you will. But this is how senior leaders, officer and enlisted alike, said they felt.

“If we just sent our guys, we’re going to get the same results as what we got before. And 10 years later, 15 years later, we’ll be back here again, doing the exact same thing, over and over again,” said Sergeant Major Carl Pregle, from the 101st Airborne, Treharne’s senior enlisted man at the command center.

Treharne expressed frustration with the chatter back home.

“I feel we could do it faster, quicker,” he said, “but again, it would cost a lot more. A lot more lives. A lot more resources … and in the end would the result be any different?”

At the time, critics back in Washington were loudly wondering why the Pentagon kept delaying the push to liberate Mosul, and why the Iraqi government waited so long to devise a post-Mosul political plan. Candidate Trump was gaining traction at rallies in which he proclaimed that he would defeat ISIS faster than Obama or his rival Hillary Clinton. Asked about the campaign and the complaints, coalition commanders shook their heads, chuckled or grimaced, and got angry.

“Ask yourself the question,” said one British commander at Erbil, why ISIS was able to march into Iraq in the first place? It was because of Iraqi political divisions, he argued. “Would the political scene in Iraq look better if it had been a U.S. ground force that came in and militarily defeated Daesh, or do you think it would look worse? I’d suggest it would look a lot worse. And actually, by the [Iraqi] military defeating Daesh and having done a number of years to get Kurds and Iraqis, and for that matter some other local actors, involved in cooperating to achieve that military objective, you are better placed to win.”