Send 'em in, get it done, and bring 'em back out

Retired Marine Corps Colonel Gary Anderson says that the choice is not between ineffectual air strikes or yet another decade-long nation-building slog. We could just overwhelm IS and then leave:

In an invasion, you come to permanently occupy the terrain. In a raid, you destroy the enemy and leave.

We tend to think of raids as small, short operations like the one that killed bin Laden, but history has ample examples of much larger ones.

Before he began to seriously build a permanent empire, Genghis Khan made his living by 10,000-20,000-man raids on his enemies’ cities — mostly for loot, but also to eliminate potential military threats.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of the Central Command, estimates that the equivalent of two Marine Expeditionary Brigades would be needed to systematically destroy the ISIS standing army; I agree.

That’s about 20,000 soldiers, with one brigade attacking east out of Syria and the second attacking west through Iraq. They’d meet at the old Iraqi-Syrian border in a classic squeeze play.

This would be a war the American people can understand. The number of cities and towns cleared of ISIS’ conventional combat power is quantifiable, and there is a recognizable military end state.

It would not be without cost. In retaking the Iraqi city of Fallujah alone in 2004, we lost 94 Marines and sailors killed while killing 10 times that many Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters.

This campaign of large-scale raids would likely be more costly and take months, but it’s preferable to armed nation-building, where body bags stream back for years.

It would require hard decisions, but Anderson thinks it would work.

Beats dithering and pinpricks.