by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

In January, Kurdish troops launched a major offensive that broke Islamic State’s lines in northern Iraq. In response, the jihadist group sent 14 giant tanker trucks loaded with explosives and bolted-on armor to launch a counter-attack.

Kurdish fighters have faced terrifying attacks like that before — though not on this scale. Fortunately, before any of the trucks made it to the Kurdish positions, the soldiers on the ground — and U.S. and coalition warplanes — destroyed them from a distance.

It was a mad, desperate — and yes — suicidal tactic. But it’s also a revealing example of the group’s combat tactics and strategy during the past year.

The jihadist group is now on the defensive, but it’s still deadly on the battlefield and its fighters are willing to die in brief counter-attacks. The main feature — even if the group is losing the war — is to practice a “cult of the offensive” with a heavy cost in human life.

Why and how is the interesting part, and it’s the subject of a sweeping new essay by Alexendre Mello and Michael Knights in CTC Sentinel, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s newsletter.

Mello and Knights know what they’re talking about — they’ve studied the battlefield up close.

Islamic State’s emphasis on offensive operations — despite largely being on the defense — isn’t new.

Rather, the authors compare Islamic State to Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945. By then, the Allies had decimated the German army, but it was still tactically deadly and capable of driving back the Allies in short-term counter-offensives that inevitably ground to halt.

In December 1944, German armies launched a sudden surprise attack on unprepared American troops in Belgium. Known as the Battle of the Bulge, the German armies drove the Allies back 50 miles under the cover of winter weather.

The Allies stopped the Germans. Worse for the Nazis, they had too few soldiers to prevent larger breakthroughs by the Soviet, American and British armies the following year. The German air force had lost its advantage, rendering its troops vulnerable to bombardment by Allied aircraft.

Nor did the Germans have a strategy to win the war. They were tactically good — that is, fighting on the battlefield — but strategically inept in that they had no way of turning those tactical victories into something bigger.

“Commonwealth forces learned the ‘bite and hold’ tactic,” Mello and Knights wrote. “To seize ground cheaply in surprise attacks and then inflict heavy casualties on the German counter-attackers, a situation not unlike today’s Kurdish/Western tactics on their frontlines in northern Iraq.”