After a summer in which Islamic State militants have rampaged through Iraq and Syria, declared an Islamic caliphate, recruited extremists from abroad and claimed credit for decapitating American journalist James Foley, President Obama vowed earlier this week that “justice will be done” to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIL or simply the Islamic State—a group that Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey have called an “ imminent threat” to the United States with an “ apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision.”

But the president has long resisted getting “dragged back into another ground war in Iraq,” as he recently reiterated, and in a White House press conference on Thursday, he made clear he has not yet made up his mind about how exactly to counter the terrorist group, aside from dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to talk with other countries in the region and tasking Hagel and Dempsey to “prepare a range of options.” Asked whether he would get approval from Congress before potentially going into Syria, Obama said it would depend what kind of intervention, if any, the United States pursues: “We don’t have a strategy yet,” he admitted.


While the president deliberates, we at Politico Magazine decided to ask for some suggestions, and so went to some of the country’s top defense thinkers—hailing from the military brass to the Pentagon to Congress. Here’s what they think Obama’s strategy should look like.

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Bomb the Islamic State

By Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap

Some evils in this world can only be stopped by force. ISIL is one of them.

ISIL might be adept at sadistically brutalizing the helpless, but if President Obama orders a robust and sustained American air campaign, the militants might well find themselves on the receiving end of military force so ferocious that it could unhinge their most hardened fighters.

Some pundits like to insist that airpower can’t do much, but they need to look harder at how ISIL’s style creates liabilities for itself. ISIL arrogantly eschews the furtive, hit-and-run tactics that other Iraqi (and Afghan) militants used to escape being bludgeoned by U.S. fighters and bombers. Rather, they like to collect themselves into brazenly visible groups and use their reputation for savagery to scatter their already terrorized opponents.

All of this actually makes them vulnerable to a determined American air campaign. Among other things, ISIL isn’t going to “scatter” or intimidate American airpower. What’s more, ISIL’s penchant for operating openly—as well as for seizing, occupying and trying to administer territory instead of hiding quietly among the civilian populace—presents targeting opportunities that other terrorists assiduously avoid.

If American airpower dominates the skies, no ISIL militant can count on seeing another sunrise. Some ISIL fighters might think they can endure airstrikes having undergone some desultory bombing by Syrian or Iraqi air forces, but that experience doesn’t give them even an inkling of the hell that the United States can unleash from the air.

All human beings have a primal fear of being relentlessly hunted by a ruthless predator against which they have no defense. And that is exactly the kind of psychological effect that today’s airpower can impose on ISIL. At a minimum, a muscular American air campaign can force the group to become so preoccupied with its own survival that its dream of establishing a terror caliphate is bound to suffer.

Airpower can also be applied without putting American “boots on the ground,” as the president has promised to avoid. Of course, ground-based spotters can help in certain, very specific circumstances, but U.S. airpower can conduct precision strikes deep into enemy-held territory without such assistance. Once an air campaign forces ISIL to give up operating openly and obliges them to disperse and hide, local ground forces can direct airstrikes that are very discreet and accurate.

Will using force against ISIL invite terror attacks in the United States? Certainly not to any greater degree than is already the case. If we want to have any real hope of preventing such attacks, ISIL needs to be struck—hard, and now.

Airpower or, indeed, any kind of military force isn’t the whole solution to the ideological threat ISIL poses. But it’s a grave mistake to underestimate what it can do—immediately—to halt ISIL’s barbarism and give real hope to the forces battling them.

Charles J. Dunlap, a retired Air Force major general, is professor and executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University School of Law.

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Strike the Enemy, Arm the Rebels

Since he ran against Barack Obama in 2008 as the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain has become the president’s fiercest critic on foreign policy. This is especially true when it comes to the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization, what McCain has called “probably the greatest threat to the security of the United States since the end of the Cold War.”

McCain has been ahead of almost everyone else on Capitol Hill in calling for military assistance to the moderate rebel Free Syrian Army and, more recently, U.S. air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria. And within hours of Obama’s White House news conference Thursday—his first since returning from vacation—the Arizona senator blasted the president for appearing to hesitate yet again over how to respond to the threat from Islamic State. “I’m still recovering from watching it,” McCain said in a telephone interview with Politico Magazine, repeating one of Obama’s remarks in disbelief. “‘We don’t have a strategy yet?’ The president articulated a view of the world that is Orwellian. … There’s no recognition of what we’re facing there.” (In his news conference, Obama said he was still examining “a range of options” about what the United States could do to go after ISIL in Syria.)

McCain accused the Obama White House of inducing both Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey to “walk back” strident remarks they made about the Islamic State earlier in the week, in which they appeared to suggest that U.S. military action in Syria might be imminent. “His people, especially Dempsey and Hagel, got way out front there,” said McCain. “They painted a picture that requires action, and then within 24 hours you saw them both backtrack—what can only be described as a complete reversal.” (White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden responded: "The idea that the president, or anyone at the White House, pressured Secretary Hagel or Chairman Dempsey to walk back their comments is just plain false." The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, also said the allegation was "absolutely untrue.")

McCain believes the United States should target the Islamic State from the air in both Iraq and Syria and arm the Kurdish pesh merga, though it should not go so far as to ally with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Their main operations are still conducted out of bases in Syria, so we have to go after them there,” he said of ISIL. “I would even establish that humanitarian zone we’ve talked about and I still support equipping the Free Syrian Army to the point where they can be major players.” — Michael Hirsh

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Root Out Extremist Ideology

By Douglas Feith

The ISIL threat is pushing President Obama into military action. But the U.S. strategy should be more than force.

The most salient characteristic of the Islamic State is that it’s ideological. These aren’t people engaged in ordinary interest politics. They are religious extremists who, with extraordinary brutality, are trying to remake the world according to what they believe are the dictates of Islam. And if we’re going to stop them, to deal with them as an enemy and a “cancer,” as the president has said we have to do, we should try to understand what they believe—what ideas motivate them. To defeat them, we have to counter their ability to replenish and grow their force, to recruit and indoctrinate new members. In other words, we have to counter the appeal of their ideology.

The U.S. government is not good at understanding, much less battling against, the ideology of Islamist extremists. This was a problem even before the Obama administration, but it is certainly still a problem now. Soon after President Obama came into office, his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, and now CIA director, gave a speech in which he explained how President Obama’s approach to fighting terrorists was different from President Bush’s:

Portraying this as a “global” war risks reinforcing the very image that al Qaeda seeks to project of itself—that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate. And nothing could be further from the truth. … Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against “jihadists.” Describing terrorists in this way—using a legitimate term, “jihad,” meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal—risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.

First of all, it’s bizarre for a U.S. official to opine on the legitimacy of a religious term like “jihad”—let alone to define it as a “holy struggle for moral good.” What Brennan was really doing was bending over backwards to say that our fight with these people is not ideological. Brennan insisted that “violent extremists” (not “jihadists”) are extreme not because of their beliefs but because they suffer from certain conditions—lack of political outlets and of jobs. Those conditions may make some people more receptive to terrorist recruitment, but the essence of the problem is the ideology. Outside the world of Islam, many millions of people are unfree and unemployed, but the problem of terrorist violence is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem in Muslim communities. President Obama has come around to calling ISIL “jihadists,” but he still relies on a CIA director—the man who runs the institution responsible for informing the government about what our enemies believe—who insists on dancing around the problem.

ISIL isn’t murdering the Yazidis or brutalizing Iraqi Christians because of some policy dispute with the United States. The things they do that appall us as inhumane are things that ISIL fighters believe are religious requirements for them. Their extremism is not rooted in frustration about a lack of democratic politics. The ISIL murderer who decapitated the journalist James Foley apparently came from Britain, after all. Nor is Islamist extremism necessarily rooted in poverty; remember that the captain of the Sept. 11 hijackers was an engineer. Ignoring ISIL’s Islamist ideology is like trying to understand the Cold War without reference to communism or World War II without reference to Nazism.

How does the U.S. government counter this ideology? Part of the answer is systematically supporting people within the Muslim community who will tell ISIL, “You claim to speak for Islam, but you don’t speak for me.” The U.S. government isn’t and shouldn’t be anti-Islam, but it should oppose the Islamist ideology that ISIL promotes in the name of Islam. ISIL is setting up a caliphate that it says is universal—it claims to speak for Islam. It’s important that Muslims say that that’s not true. Some have done so, but they’re not anywhere near as vocal as the extremists. If ISIL is not challenged persistently and effectively by other Muslims, then ISIL will be credible when it says it represents Islam. Muslims who oppose the Islamism of ISIL, whether in Iraq or Indonesia or Britain, need microphones, as it were. They need platforms and resources. And they need security.

Defeating ISIL on the battlefield can help discredit its ideology, just as defeating Germany in World War II hurt the prestige of Nazi ideology. But ISIL is working hard to attract new young men and women into their ranks. So as the United States is fighting ISIL militarily, U.S. officials should be implementing a strategy to counter the Islamists ideologically—to prevent people from becoming committed extremists and dangerous enemies to begin with.

Douglas J. Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, is director of the Center for National Security Strategies at Hudson Institute.

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Get America’s Friends On Board

By Lt. Gen. David Barno

President Obama is facing perhaps the most severe foreign policy test of his presidency today in Iraq and Syria. After withdrawing all but a handful of U.S. forces and ending the war in Iraq in late 2011, he has not only authorized the use of U.S. airpower to strike ISIL forces in northern Iraq, but also reportedly sent manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft across the border into Syria. The ISIL threat now has the world’s attention.

How serious is that threat? And what can the president do to address it? U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are sounding alarm bells about the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 ISIL foreign fighters of Western origin, who pose a serious and growing threat. Some of these U.S. and European passport-holders will return to their homelands infused with a deadly combination of combat experience and ideological fervor that could be easily aimed at Western targets. This lethal mixture poses a new and particularly insidious threat that some are characterizing as the most dangerous terrorist menace since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It is increasingly clear that ISIL must be stopped. Finding a way to do so without putting thousands of American marines and soldiers on the ground is Obama’s central dilemma. ISIL’s military wing is large, combat-experienced and armed with first-rate captured U.S. and Russian equipment. In recent months, the group has easily overwhelmed Iraqi security forces and dealt serious blows to the capable Kurdish pesh merga. Only the recent application of U.S. air strikes has enabled those forces to stem ISIL advances. It remains unclear whether this approach will prove enough.

It is time for the United States to roll out an aggressive regional strategy to contain, disrupt and ultimately enable the defeat of ISIL. Such a strategy must involve not only U.S. friends in Middle Eastern states, but also European and other international allies of the United States as well. The president should increase the levels of targeted air attacks in Iraq, employ unmanned lethal drones to attack ISIL in Syria and selectively employ Special Forces and covert intelligence teams to assess and facilitate targeting of key ISIL military capabilities.

Further, the United States should muster a broad coalition of friends and allies with a stake in regional stability to help contain and facilitate the defeat of this growing international threat. These countries could contribute to air operations, provide intelligence or Special Forces or, at a minimum, provide funds and material support for anti-ISIL forces. They could also help support countries such as Jordan and Turkey, who can help form a bulwark against growing instability. The United States must also lead efforts to isolate and marginalize ISIL by cutting off its sources of international financing and acting to shut down its access to global financial networks. And given this expanded military mission, the president should go to Congress for a new authorization for the use of force, focused directly on the ISIL threat while carefully circumscribing the use of U.S. forces on the ground.

ISIL is now a clear and present danger to the world that demands action before the crisis worsens. The United States, backed by a broad coalition of friends and allies, must take on this effort before it is too late.

David Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general, is senior fellow and co-director of the Responsible Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

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Lead a Diplomatic and Economic Offensive

By Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton

The Islamic State has demonstrated that it understands the principles of war—mass, objective, offensive, surprise, economy of force, maneuver, unity of command, security and simplicity—and can apply them. It has surprised the United States and our allies and has taken the initiative. They are politically and militarily disciplined, ruthless and effective. The United States and whatever coalition we are able to assemble to fight this organization needs to be similarly focused. To date, more than two months into this fight, the results are not encouraging. We have endured a serious intelligence failure, a failure to understand the problem and a failure to take the initiative.

This threat is important to the United States, but it does not represent an existential threat—one that is vital to the national interest. It does, however, represent a vital national threat to a number of our allies. It took weeks before we acted in the form of airstrikes in response to the Yazidi humanitarian problem and a potential assault on Erbil, a key city for our Kurdish friends.

We need a comprehensive, interagency plan to contain, disrupt and defeat ISIL using coalition diplomatic, economic and military power. The ISIL foreign policy problem trumps other American interests in the world like Israel/Hamas, Ukraine or the Chinese navy. The Obama administration needs to prioritize, and to assign as its main foreign policy effort, the defeat of ISIL. The plan requires the development of the coalition, a test of our diplomatic power; the containment of ISIL, a test of the coalition’s economic and military power; and subsequent disruption and dismemberment of ISIL, leading to its ultimate defeat.

The coalition needs an operational leader working on behalf of the strategic U.S. position. I vote for Turkey to have its day in the sun, with its excellent armed forces. From a geopolitical perspective, this NATO member and U.S. ally is perfectly positioned to take lead. Prime Minister designee Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might also see a terrific opportunity to help the region and consequently the United States, with the Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council as key players. Recent discussions of neo-Ottoman political behaviors should not distract from the potential power of Turkish leadership to act as point man, diplomatically and militarily, for the defeat of ISIL. Jordan, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia all have vested interests in the return of Iraq to viable nation status. All are needed to execute the containment phase, and all are eligible to provide the forces needed for disruption and defeat. And in this case, the national interests of Syria and Iran align with our own.

Should Turkey not work out, Jordan is an excellent next choice, though geographically less well suited and without the population mass of Turkey.

With a successful effort to win the diplomatic component of the anti- ISIL operation, the coalition, with the U.S. leading, needs to contain ISIL economically, denying all means of electronic funding operations, driving them essentially to a cash-only operation. Aggressive economic attack and isolation will significantly reduce recruiting efforts and internal governmental operations. We do not need to silence ISIL electronically; we need to manage their transmissions.

At the operational level of war, the United States would do for the anti-ISIL operation essentially what we did in Libya, where we provided “combat enablers” including command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and logistics. Our Special Forces and air forces could be added to the coalition mix as desired. Command and control of allied air forces would demand set-up of a system like NATO’s to manage the air campaign and airspace management to include that of Syria and Iraq.

There is potential good to come from any crisis. At the end of this one, we could see Turkey as a new regional leader, a general reduction in hostilities with Iran, a political solution for Iraq and an off-ramp for the United States to act more globally and to truly draw down from the Middle East, leaving moderate Muslims in a greater position of authority.

Paul Eaton, a retired Army major general, is a senior adviser at the National Security Network.

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A (Nearly) All-of-the-Above Approach

By Adm. James Stavridis

To counter the Islamic State, we should first and foremost galvanize the huge global outrage through condemnations in the United Nations, Arab League, NATO and every other responsible international organization. Second, we should find coalitions of partners who are willing to pool and share intelligence and information about the group, particularly in the Arab world. Third, it would be very helpful to get NATO involved. There is strong rationale for doing so, notably the direct and clear threat posed to Turkey, a front-line border state to the Islamic State. Additionally the longer-term threat, especially given the many national citizens of NATO member states who are in the fight and have access to their home countries, is very high.

The United States should also supply significant and immediate military assistance to both the Kurdish pesh merga and the Iraqi security forces, thus opening up a two-front war for the Islamic State. I suspect their resources, when stretched, will appear and be far less formidable. We should also utilize our cyber capabilities to go after their command and control, which runs on email and social networks. Lastly, there is a clear need for U.S. airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria, and these should be increased in their frequency and lethality.

James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral, is dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University.