and I'm not totally sure that they're in much disagreement. Scheuer, in particular, has seen the specific threat up close and realizes that the probability of dissipating that threat to an acceptable degree is going to take more than law enforcement, more than covert action and that there will be some military involvement. I don't see him as rejecting an indirect appraoch, merely as -- hyperbolically, to be sure -- saying that it isn't going to be cheap or easy.

Granite State says:
Massive U.S./coalition ground campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been tremendously expensive, politically contentious, and are still years if not decades from achieving success. Given how much it costs us, economically and, maybe more importantly, in the state of our military, I don't see how this kind of model is sustainable.
There's some truth in that on several levels but I think the reasons we are where we are should be considered. Mostly with an goal of avoiding the three major mistakes we made.

Essentially there are two major factors. The first is that a lack of knowledge of the Middle East and the ME way of war deluded four successive Presidents into attempting to be nice guys when confronted with challenges from the area. Carter, Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton all erred in that way and the Fly-in at the WTC and the Pentagon resulted. So, one factor and reason for our present situation is that we've hopefully learned that appeasement or whatever one wishes to call it -- in any event a sensible western reaction to a non-western insensible series of actions in western terms -- wil not work with some of those folks. Scheuer has pointed out elsewhere that sweetness and light allied with a hopo of moderate Islam reining in the bad guys is doomed to fail. I strongly agree with that.

The second factor is that in an ideal world or nation, the civilian leadership would select the best people to run their Armed Forces and would then provide control for their employment. The Armed forces (and, here, I'll also include the Non-defense Intelligence Community) are or should be proficient in the precise as possible management of violence to achieve national aims. As Wilf says:
"...but I think military force has to be applied in an unambiguous way that most effectively achieves the desired aim."
Thus, the civilian leadership, if it determines violence is required should tell those Forces and the IC what the desired end state is and let them do the job in their own way. Regrettably, the tendency is for the civilian master to tell the Forces and the IC what to do instead of what is desired as an end state. Obviously in the current situation, we can look at Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith as examples of just that failure. Congress also has a very bad problem with telling people how to suck eggs without knowing much about the things whereof they speak.

Lest I be accused of picking on the current crew; I've been around through 12 Presidents and the concomitant number of Congresses -- all have erred in the same way (all also "lied to the American people," generally about national security matters as well; but that's another thread) to one degree or another. Not likely to change, either.

Thus the system has built in inefficiencies. Add to that the third failure, the Army's intransigence in ignoring COIN work against all indications of the probability and we had a problem waiting to happen. It happened. I think Scheuer is -- again hyperbolically -- trying to get people to wake up, no more. I do not see him advocating the Roman method; merely pointing out that it's going to take a national commitment to turn around what we invited by being unprepared and not responding properly to a number of indications...

And by trying to play nice. In a world that just is not nice, no matter how much we want it to be...