Clay Hanna, who served in the U.S. Army from 2003 to 2008, is currently an officer in the Tennessee National Guard.

I was once a pair of “boots on the ground,” so I know a little about what the phrase means. And I can tell you that, listening to the back-and-forth between the White House and the Pentagon over who exactly we’re sending to Iraq (and now possibly Syria), neither side is giving the American people the whole story. First of all, you know those boots on the ground everybody’s still discussing whether we should deploy? Well, they’re already there. We are already effectively engaged in combat in Iraq, in direct contradiction of what President Obama said when he announced he was taking action against the Islamic State terrorists, telling the American people in an address from the White House that the mission “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” He said pretty much the same when he told troops at MacDill Air Force Base: “The American forces do not and will not have a combat mission.”

It’s just not true. The only question is whether the American people will not be deceived for the umpteenth time as to what we are really doing. Like John F. Kennedy’s “advisers” in Vietnam, like the U.S. military secretly training Manuel Noriega (only to arrest him on drug charges later on), or the Reagan administration giving weapons to Saddam Hussein to fight the Iranians, or the CIA funding mujahedeen in the 1980s who were later to become al Qaeda, or the Bush administration using the threat of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion, this strategy to send in “advisers” to fight the Islamic State is subterfuge, and reflects conflicted leadership.


How can we stand up and call out Vladimir Putin for his deception in the Ukraine—for covertly using Russian soldiers and pretending they’re Ukrainian “separatists”—and at the same time say with a straight face that our “advisers” will not have a combat mission?

Today, many of the advisers, logistics managers and other troops we already have in Iraq— said to be some 1,700 strong, including those guarding U.S. facilities—are already taking part in this new war. So are those who are even now identifying targets for the dozens of U.S. air raids that have already occurred. The situation is less clear in Syria, where U.S. airstrikes commenced on Monday. We are clearly able to identify many military targets from satellite imagery alone. But we are going to run out of targets fast, since the enemy will just start hiding them better. If you could destroy a terrorist organization from the air alone, Israel would have long ago annihilated Hamas. The last thing we want is another Mogadishu—think Blackhawk Down—and you can bet that the Islamic State’s main objective in Syria will be to embarrass us when we overreach and shame us when we miss and kill kids.

It’s important for Americans to understand the stakes here, and perhaps they can benefit from one soldier’s point of view. I remember vividly my last deployment as if it were yesterday. My platoon of field artillerymen, by God’s grace and the wise leadership of our brigade and battalion commanders, were rigorously trained into a maneuver platoon and turned out to be highly effective in degrading insurgents led by the Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr in east Baghdad. My guys and I thrived on the complexity of our operating environment and we rigorously applied our creativity and imagination to figuring out how to get at an enemy that rarely would show up for a fight in person. Much of our success I attribute to the intelligence experts in our battalion who put their own lives on the line to provide the most accurate target intelligence possible. It became a high priority for my platoon to include an intel “adviser” on our patrols and raids. Was that guy a “combat troop”? He certainly was in danger, and he was essential to our mission. And, when things did go bad, it was the ability, at the platoon level, to communicate in real time with attack aviation to neutralize the enemy’s capability to concentrate fires on our position that brought all my men home alive.

Above all, what became clear to me during that experience is that we are best when we take the fight to the enemy. We are most successful when we go to his neighborhood and target him while he is complacent and rests assured that he can’t be found and that we don’t have the guts or the determination to bring the war to him. This cannot be done remotely or from the air alone. Nor can it be accomplished by tying the hands of our combatant commanders and dictating from the Oval Office naive tactical policy in hopes of securing a dubious political agenda.

The success of both the invasion and the surge in Iraq was predicated on our ability to creatively project and sustain the full breadth of our combat power deep into enemy-controlled territory—and with unparalleled accuracy, to target him and eliminate him from the fight. Ironically, the very same militias, still sworn enemies of the United States—the very men who tried to ambush and kill my men—will now be propped up by our training, weapons and leadership to heroically save their nation from an enemy they created. All in the interest of avoiding placing American “boots on the ground.”

So the public dispute between President Obama and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey is just a pseudo-debate—a military version of trying to tabulate how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin. Dempsey set off a firestorm last week when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it was possible that U.S. “advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets.” His comments appeared to contradict President Obama’s promise that the campaign would not include American boots on the ground. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest later explained that “the president does not believe that it would be in the best interest of our national security to deploy American ground troops in a combat role in Iraq and Syria. That policy has not changed.”

Dempsey indicated that he was talking about moving U.S. troops into a “close combat adviser” role. But that distinction too is a fiction—and a dangerous one. Who are we kidding here? The president’s political strategy patronizes and deceives the American people and our military strategy is an unimaginative regurgitation of past failures. Ultimately, the pretense that we’re putting down no ground troops will be exposed as the lie that it is, and American troops will pay the price.

We already know how this story ends, don’t we? A handful of advisers/soldiers grows into thousands; weapons and support for militia groups and governments that do not share our values turn on us in the end; massive, unaccountable government agencies telling the American people to look the other way while they protect us overstep their mandate; an undeclared war takes on a life of its own, demanding more blood and more treasure. Already Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno is telling reporters that the Army plans to send a division headquarters to Iraq to handle the additional American manpower there.

So for the sake of our national honor and out of respect for those who may give their life or be obligated to take life, let’s be honest now, at the beginning, about the circumstances under which those 1,700 troops are operating, even as the pseudo-debate rages in Washington. Let’s be honest about the risks being undertaken even now by our special operators, CIA paramilitary teams and the pilots that are, and undoubtedly will be, executing President Obama’s strategy as “advisers.” They are the very definition of combat troops. Their lives will be at risk and they will be in the thick of the action, giving orders or even pulling the trigger on military targets—and will certainly be targets for the enemy.

If President Obama believes that waging war on the Islamic State, on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, on the perpetrators of horrific acts of terror and violence is the moral imperative of the United States; if the wise and experienced conclude that our national security is at risk; if Congress authorizes this declaration, I will support this war and if called on, fight in it. If Congress declares war, and the full force and might of the U.S. military and her allies is deployed, I have no doubt that we will fatally strike the Islamic State.

But without this clarity, without “boots on the ground” and above all an acknowledgement of what these really are, the president’s strategy amounts to nothing more than amorphous rhetoric and disingenuous platitudes. It is at the core a cynical plan to incite war and fund violence, backed by a vague hope that not only will we remain unaffected but somehow we will achieve peace. Don’t deceive yourself or us any longer, Mr. President: There is no good war and no participant gets to walk away with clean hands. Not even you.