9/11 anniversary: will ISIS be defeated?

A puzzle for anyone interested in strategy. On the anniversary of 9/11, in the night to Thursday U.S. President Obama declared war on a new terrifying enemy that eclipses even Al Qaeda: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS is unlike any foe the United States has ever faced. It has state-of-the-art weapons systems, financial resources, and savvy tactics on social networks. Above all, it has largely autonomous fighters fired by a vision to rebuild the ancient caliphate and by a fanatic ideology of death for anyone who disagrees with them. Will ISIS be defeated? Will the United States and its allies be able to tackle a strategic threat unlike any they have ever seen?

The map above has been widely shared online. It purports to show the caliphate ISIS plans to have under its control within five years .

If authentic, the map  also reveals ISIS' ambition to expand not only across the Middle East, North Africa and large areas of Asia, but also into Europe.

Spain, which was Muslim-ruled until the late 15th Century, would form part of the caliphate, as would the Balkan states and eastern Europe, up to and including Austria.

Is that exaggerated? It could be. It's hard to know.

Then again, a group that has utter disregard for human life, that treats the human body with utter disrespect, that mutilates and rapes and beheads people, that preaches death to all infidels (even to Shiites or other Muslims who do not share its extreme ideology), is capable of much havoc.

Certainly the United States, in the aftermath of ISIS beheading two U.S. journalists, is aware of the threat. President Obama announced the U.S. strategy against ISIS (or ISIL, for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which sounds ominously old, like "Ottoman Empire") late Wednesday night. See this video.

U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel is clear that ISIS is not a traditional threat.

“ISIL is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen. They’re beyond just a terrorist group,” Hagel said at the Pentagon last week.

“They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well funded. Oh, this is beyond anything that we’ve seen.”

The question is, can the United States avoid being caught in old strategies that are obsolete today?

Successive United States administrations have been famous for fighting each war based on the last war. But a strategy based on the past usually fails.

It was like an evil spell: Harry Truman used military strategies he had learned in World War II when the United States went to war in Korea, thereby failing to foresee the massive attack by North Korean forces that nearly drove the outnumbered U.S. and R.O.K. defenders into the sea.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used the Korea strategy in Vietnam, but U.S. forces were ill-prepared for the highly mobile Vietcong cells that had infiltrated every village in the South. 

George Bush (both the elder and the younger) used state-of-the-art technology like stealth aircraft and infrared sensors that detected heat from tanks and made them into easy targets, as well as overwhelming air strikes the United States had learned in Vietnam. 

In fact, George W. Bush framed Iraq in terms of Vietnam; when defending his administration’s Iraq policy, he said that “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens. But both Bushes suffered from the Vietnam Syndrome in Iraq. 

And so on with Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Iraq again.

Whether in politics or business, when you graft the past onto a new situation, you may pre-program failure. (The Swiss watch industry is only one case in point. But that's another story.)

What do you say? Will ISIS be defeated? Will the United States be able to rise above its past strategies? I look forward to reading you on my blog:http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is a strategy & performance expert and coach for leaders of Global 1000 companies. His book Strategy-In-Action: Marrying Planning, People and Performance (with co-author Ed Borey) offers a practical how-to methodology for building strategy from the future, as a co-creation by all stakeholders.