Over the last six months, the U.S. had increased its support for the mission, but it still didn’t make a marked difference on the ground, Kabango thought. “U.S. support has intensified, but the problem is if you ask me where Kony is, I don’t know. So the fight has intensified, but against what?” he said. Playing the game of “Where’s Joseph Kony?” was like playing Where’s Waldo? while wearing a blindfold. “If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said with a laugh. “Kony exploits this north-south divide where the Sahara meets equatorial Africa.”

This is the same geographic band that Boko Haram uses as a haven. Since most intelligence is human, each group takes advantage of sparsely populated areas to hide. Kabango continued: “There’s always been a polarization here along religious lines, and the weather is too hostile” — the rivers are drying up, and with them access to food — “so that no one can live here permanently. It’s a movement corridor where no one’s in charge.” To survive, people compete for dwindling resources — gold, ivory, coltan. “Our biggest problem is poverty. It’s poverty that leads to disease, to joblessness and everything else.”

The American presence was essential, but not in the form of foot soldiers. “We need the logistics and better technology,” Kabango said. “It’s not fair to the American people to put American boots on the ground, and they actually slow us down.” Every three or four days, the Ugandans had to wait for the Americans to resupply water. “Working with the Americans is a bit like being a small horse in front of a large cart,” he said. “You have to be careful, or the cart might run over you.” There was one American approach that Kabango did like: fastening loudspeakers to airplanes and flying them over the jungle playing messages telling the guys to come home. Recently, six men defected after one such outing.

“Quite simply, it’s marketing,” Linder said later. “You’re essentially teaching psy-ops marketing. The message is: ‘You don’t have to be L.R.A. War is over. Life doesn’t have to suck.’ It’s about removing combatants from the battlefield. That’s what we did in the Philippines.”

Col. Kevin Leahy, a dry-witted Irish American from northern New Jersey, commands the mission against the L.R.A. and every other Central African crisis that comes across his desk, including the effort to rescue the more than 200 schoolgirls who remain in captivity after 57 managed to escape. One night at his base in Entebbe, Uganda, he spoke about the L.R.A.: “We’ll take every opportunity to engage them without killing anybody, because every time you engage the L.R.A. directly, children get killed.” As for Kabango’s critiques, Leahy said: “These guys can drink out of puddles in the bush and not get sick, and that’s pretty impressive. But what we bring to the table when we’re out there with them is the ability to manage intelligence assets, communications, and to know instantly where people are.” The L.R.A.’s small numbers were part of the challenge. “When it gets down to this 250, 200, 150, and they’re in these smaller groups, they get really hard to find.”

For Leahy, the most important operations fall under what in today’s special warfare are called influence operations. His team was dropping harmless grenade simulators to herd the L.R.A. and create the kind of chaos that allowed defectors the chance to escape and got the others thinking. “I’ll try anything,” he said. With the help of the State Department, he recently commissioned a “Come Home” song by a Ugandan pop star named Jose Chameleone. He reached out to Chuck Norris to create a “come home” message. The group’s members, it turned out, were big fans of ’80s action movies. In more than one raided camp, there were DVDs of Chuck Norris films. “We’ve gotten some feedback from his agent,” Leahy said.

In keeping with Africom’s mandate, Leahy stressed that this was an African-led mission. “We give a lot of advice, but at the end of the day, it’s their commanders who call the shots.” He went on, “We can’t bring the entire Death Star in and set it up.” Besides, as always, there was the question of Where’s Joseph Kony? “He could be dead,” Leahy said. Most of the defectors coming out of the bush hadn’t seen him or even heard him giving commands by radio in a long time. So either Kony was gone or he was in the disputed area of Kafia Kingi or farther north in Sudan, where his old sponsors in the Sudanese government continue to grant him haven. “Without the support of Sudan over the last 20 years, there would be no L.R.A.,” Leahy said.