CHENOWETH: Boots on the ground? Here's how to do it and win

Now shaken up by the ISIS terrorists in Paris and possibly more coming our way, the puffing and palaver by the so-called military experts on TV, including Army generals, fiction writers, professors, et al., is accompanied by scowls and wringing hands that it can't be done.

Not a one has a clue.

SITUATION

Added to the Shiite Muslim Iran-sponsored Hezbollah terrorist threat, presently some 50,000 radical Sunni ISIS Muslims now occupy a major part of Shiite Syria and northern Iraq. The U.S. Air Force and Navy are conducting billion-dollar ineffective air strikes against them with token support by the French and a couple of undependable Arab countries.

The "Head of the evil serpent" is what must be destroyed so the disintegrating body remnants can be further eradicated. Intelligence sources know where the head's headquarters are located.

Here's how it can be done: (pundits please note).

The Russians have beat us to it, first by countering U.S. support to anti-Assad rebels, and adding minor aerial attacks on ISIS merely to camouflage their intention to keep leader Bashar al-Assad in power. Their presence, however, has immobilized U.S-NATO thinking.

Russian aircraft and support troops (4,000-plus) and a small warship contingent in the Mediterranean, plus naval forces farther north in the Baltic and Caspian seas, have further paralyzed the West.

Thus, Russia has totally gained the upper hand in a botched-up U.S.-created debacle by our inept commander in chief.

SOLUTION

The U.S has a mostly unrecognized weapon, the tip of its defense spear: a combined Navy-Marine "ESG" (Expeditionary Strike Group). Its nucleus is composed of a Navy nuclear aircraft carrier, screened by its sub, surface and air cover, that shepherds a flotilla of assault landing ships transporting a MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Force) of either Expeditionary Force (MEF 90,000), Brigade (MEB 10,000), or Unit size (MEU 2,000) all with their own coordinated fast helo transport and gunship close-air and fighter-bomber fixed-wing air support.

If the new, far more qualified chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, can sway the inept secretary of defense and get this kind of plan underway, boots will reach the ground accordingly, victoriously, and with fewer casualties.

UNIQUE ATTACK

After advising Russia of new no-fly zones from the Mediterranean over northern Syria, followed immediately by USAF high-altitude bombing and offshore naval gunfire over the targeted area, dozens of Marine OM-Osprey tiltrotor fast transports accompanied by helicopter gunships and close-air Harrier jets launch a lightning strike and vertically insert a MEB right in the heart of ISIS. Quickly they crush ISIS, then form a 360-degree tactical area of responsibility (TAOR, as in Vietnam) and send out combat patrols in all directions, wiping out surrounding startled ISIS targets.

Aerial resupply is continuous from the parent assault landing ships standing offshore.

The Russians would be outmaneuvered and any accidental shooting down of either a Russian or U.S. plane would be handled diplomatically, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, to a standoff.

MEANWHILE

Another, smaller Navy-Marine ESG in the Indian Ocean inserts a reinforced battalion-sized Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU of 2,000) do virtually the same thing on a smaller scale in the Kurdish area of Iraq to secure the oil fields. Another MEU could be landed at the top of the Persian Gulf to capture the Iraqi oil fields around Basra.

As the world is stunned and nations go on alert, the U.S. will have already gone DEFCON-1 with missile silos alerted, the submarine fleet with its nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at battle stations, and surveilling unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites, all targeted at Russia, Iran and North Korea.

This would allow for the slow-moving U.S. Army to get its act together and much, much later, plod through Turkey and Iraq to occupy the land swept clean of ISIS by the Marines. (Can you believe on TV recently an Army general advocated C-17s dropping paratroopers at low level, à la World War II? That would be incredibly stupid suicide in today's asymmetric warfare, especially with shoulder-launched rockets)

Or, wonder of wonders, the U.S. could partner with nefarious Russia, as it did during WW II, to eradicate ISIS and forget about expelling Assad. Neither the Army nor the Air Force could do this kind of long-range insertion — only the Navy-Marine teams.

Will someone please pass this on to the Department of Defense? Or, as I keep telling my wife and the TV screen: "Just put me in charge for 30 days."

Retired Col. Avery Chenoweth Sr., USMCR, is a resident of Perry.

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 9:58 PM with the headline "CHENOWETH: Boots on the ground? Here's how to do it and win ."