Crucially, the US and its allies are not giving air support to the Shia militias and the Syrian army, which are the two largest ground forces opposing Isis.
The most responsible prescription for overcoming these problems is a significantly larger ground force.
Without tanks or a larger ground force, the Special Operations team and Kurdish soldiers struggled to hold ground they had seized.
But critics on the right and the left say that if the real goal is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, there may be alternatives to a large ground force in Afghanistan.
But the government has pressed ahead with its counter-offensive using not only the artillery that it still retains but what appears to be a larger ground force than previously deployed.
The president's foreign policy advisers were agonizing over Bosnia, Powell arguing as usual that only a large ground force could change the behavior of the Serbs and that it was hard to envision a political goal for which the public would support the risk of American lives.
Within ten days, a large ground force had been assembled east and west of Faya-Largeau by first ferrying men, armor, and artillery by air to Sabha, Kufra and the Aouzou airfield, and then by shorter-range transport planes to the area of conflict.
America has committed no large ground forces, suffered no extensive casualties and let its allies do the hard fighting.
As Perry shows, in 1938, Roosevelt tried to pressure Marshall, then the Army's deputy chief of staff, into consenting to a delay in the development of large ground forces until seven airplane factories could be built.
Mr Rumsfeld has responded to arguments for the deployment of large ground forces by, among other things, pleading for patience, pointing out that the United States did not begin a land campaign against the Japanese until eight months after Pearl Harbor, and that it bombed Japan itself for three and a half years before the Japanese surrender in 1945.
