I don’t believe we have the military power or the support of the American people to pursue the strategy you recommend here. Americans made the erroneous assumption that our modern wars should be short in duration. CNN showed us how mighty our military was in taking out the Iraqi Army, even the much-hyped Republican Guard, on our TV everyday during Operation Desert Shield and then the violent but brief Desert Storm. We didn’t realize what an aberration the First Gulf War was in the annals of warfare.

Gulf War II, Iraqi Freedom, relied on our superiority in military technology and a plethora of military contractors to subdue Iraq. We had a very small percentage of our population actually serving in the Armed Forces and an even smaller number actually involved in combat. This isolated the American people from dealing with the consequences of being at war that we had know during previous conflicts, i.e. Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. It was easy for most of our country to pay lip service to “supporting the troops” while they went about their daily lives with no thought or concern about our nation’s invasion of another country.

The Obama administration wanted to bring our troops home from Iraq, as promised. He was seduced by the use of drones and air strikes to do the “dirty work” we used to reserve for our boots on the ground. Now we have Air Force personnel sitting in air conditioned trailers at Nellis AFB near Vegas flying drone strikes halfway around the world. So they can rain Hellfires from Predators and never leave the CONUS. On the rare occasion, Obama would send in a SEAL team, like the bin-Laden raid or Trump with the SEAL team strike in Yemen. So now war has become a glorified video game to the American people. No need to send troops into harm’s way when you can send in the drones.

So the Hundred Years War scenario is a non-starter for the American people. One of the reasons why President Truman decided to approve the use of the atomic bomb against Japan was due to the legitimate concern over the war weariness the American people were feeling in the summer of 1945. Troops were being sent back from Germany to be reequipped and retrained for the battle against Japan in the Pacific. They bitched about it quite loudly as they felt they had done their part for God and Country in Germany. The American public was horrified by the heavy casualties we experienced capturing Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Just how much worse would it be in invading the Japanese homeland? The Japanese planned to fight until the bitter end. When the war ended (officially) on September 2, 1945, we had only been at war since December 7, 1941. We fought for just under 3 years and 9 months against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. So we have an idea of what our limits are when it comes to fully participating in a war. That was the generation that experienced the Great Depression as well as fighting in WWII, so they weren’t Snowflakes. How long would our modern, consumer driven, materialist society last if asked to make real sacrifices to fight and win a war?

I would utilize a Truman Doctrine for Islamic Extremism. It comes down to finding ways to contain your enemy without harming yourself. We need to step out of the way so the various sects of Islam can settle the differences between themselves. Christianity had to experience the Protestant Reformation to settle their schism, so must Islam. No amount of military or political force we can use will change this reality. So we do our best to contain the threat and then let them kill each other in the name of Allah. They hate each other more than they hate us.