"In 2003 President Bush launched a large-scale combat operation in Iraq.
"It is highly unlikely that the UK would be engaged in large-scale combat operations without the US," he said.
This is the first large-scale combat operation involving multiple objectives in Kandahar Province, where a military offensive was originally expected to begin in June.
Mr. Obama, his aides say, has long tried to balance a willingness to intervene in cases of mass atrocities with a reluctance to be drawn into large-scale combat.
The new approach is to fight four entirely different kinds of war at the same time: traditional large-scale combat; counter-insurgency; defending the US against attack (involving weapons of mass destruction); and "disruptive" warfare.
Chiarelli gave Gates an advance copy of an article he wrote for the journal Military Review called "Learning From Our Modern Wars," which called for a shift in Army doctrine away from large-scale combat against enemies of comparable strength toward "asymmetric warfare," especially counterinsurgency operations.
Yet the military is still mounting large-scale combat operations in the pursuit of armed groups of rebels in mountain hideouts, and turning villages upside down in a search for suspects and weapons that is making the foreign presence ever more unpopular with Afghans.
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, said last week that it was "highly unlikely that the United Kingdom would be engaged in large-scale combat operations without the United States, a judgment born of past experience, shared interest and our assessment of strategic trends".
While often avoiding large-scale combat with NATO forces, the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network have effectively undermined peace talks with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and sought to pave the way for a gradual return to power as the American-led forces begin scaling back military operations in the country.
We get to see the war in the future, complete with energy weapons and large-scale combat between the human army and the machines, which fans have long wished for.
