NOT THAT YOU ASKED

I have to admit that I'm more than a little bit hesitant to write about military strategy, since my main experience with it was in trying to avoid military service. But then, you have to remember that when I turned 18 you still had to register for the draft, and we were still in Vietnam. Then again, we have been at this "War on Terror" since 2001, and the people in charge of it haven't done too well at it, so I can't do any worse. So here goes.

We should put boots on the ground, but not thousands of troops barging into towns destroying property and killing innocent bystanders. That just makes the moderates over there, who also hate and fear ISIS, angry at us. We need to be cultivating the friendship and trust of those moderates instead.

We should send in small strike teams like the one that killed Osama Bin Laden, to attack pre-selected targets, like the homes of ISIS leaders. We should also attack those camps they have where they enjoy group activities like beheading people or burning them alive. Just go in a surprise attack and kill the heck out of everybody there.

While Congress wastes time arguing over what to call our enemy over there the President should be ordering the CIA and military intelligence to get busy finding those targets, and start planning attacks on them, and training the teams that will carry out those attacks. In short we should fight the terrorists in the same way they fight us. Don't send in thousands of troops and lots of hardware that they can see coming. Instead, attack their camps in surprise raids that they don't expect, and don't see coming. Let ISIS begin to feel the terror that we have felt since that awful September morning.

At the same time the CIA and the FBI should join forces to prevent another attack here at home. The CIA should be infiltrating radical groups in the Middle East to find out if any such attacks are being planned, and if anyone in this country is working with them. If that's the case, they should turn the names of those people over to the FBI and let it take over from there.

The President was once criticized for calling the fight against terrorism a law enforcement problem instead of a military one, but he was right. It's the job of law enforcement to prevent crimes from being committed, and blowing up buildings, hijacking planes, and kidnapping are all crimes. The military doesn't prevent these things, it reacts to them.

So there's my brilliant plan. Don't send in an Army to destroy property, kill the innocent, and turn the survivors against us. Instead target the homes of ISIS leaders and their camps. If you kill the leaders, the followers will begin to lose the will to fight. That's not an entirely original idea. During the first Gulf War the General Colin Powell compared the enemy to a snake, and said the best way to kill it was to cut off its head.