More than once, the media assumed that former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy had been on Barack Obama’s short list of candidates to replace outgoing Defense Secretaries. In 2012, Eleanor Clift raised the possibility that Obama would name the first woman to the job when Leon Panetta announced his departure. Last year, when Chuck Hagel got pushed out of the Pentagon after the debacle in Iraq with ISIS became apparent, Politico reported that she and Ash Carter were the two top candidates.

Flournoy got passed up twice for the spot, and her column in the Washington Post may explain the last missed chance. She becomes the latest in a line of former advisers to President Obama to object to his foreign-policy choices, in this case specifically on handling ISIS. The current strategy will not come close to achieving Obama’s stated goal of “degrading and ultimately destroying” ISIS, Flournoy writes. The only way to accomplish that mission is to actually invest in it.

In other words, go big — or stay home and shut up:

The announcement this month that 450 additional U.S. trainers and support troops will deploy to Iraq represents a modest step forward in the fight against the Islamic State. But the move by itself will not turn the tide in a faltering effort. To succeed in the president’s ambition of ultimately destroying the Islamic State — or even to contain its gains or roll them back — a broader and more intensive effort is needed.

The fall of Ramadi in Iraq’s western Anbar province was just the latest wake-up call for a Middle East reeling from the Islamic State’s advances. The group has seized the Syrian city of Palmyra, launched attacks in Saudi Arabia, established a presence in Libya and the Sinai Peninsula, and won adherents in countries as varied as Afghanistan and Nigeria. The U.S. government now estimates that some 22,000 foreign fighters have joined the Islamic State from 100 different countries.

Iraq is the locus of the current U.S. military effort against the Islamic State, and the administration’s strategy of working with and through Iraqi forces is the right one to achieve gains that are sustainable over the long term. But the execution of this strategy has lacked the urgency and resources necessary for success.

Flournoy wants a number of changes to the ISIS battle plan, all of which highlights the fact that this administration doesn’t want to admit it is in a battle despite its “degrade and destroy” rhetoric. In the column, she calls direct arming of the Peshmerga, a step Obama won’t take for fear of alienating Baghdad — which might be useful except for the fact that Baghdad has been almost completely ineffective ever since Obama pulled out American troops in 2011.

Speaking of which, Flournoy also wants American troops to embed into forward Iraqi battalions. Thus far the small number of “advisers” have been kept far away from the actual combat. They’re needed on the front lines, Flournoy argues, mainly to keep 6,000 Iraqi soldiers from running away from 150 ISIS marauders as happened in Ramadi. “It’s hard to bolster morale, stiffen backbones or adjust a battle plan from a training base,” Flournoy drily observes.

Flournoy also wants Obama to admit that the war in Afghanistan isn’t “winding down” at all, and adjust accordingly:

The group is building momentum as it wins adherents and takes root in places such as Libya and Afghanistan. An enhanced strategy that combines military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts will be necessary to prevent it from becoming the new al-Qaeda — a terrorist organization with global reach and ambitions to attack Americans at home and abroad. The rise of the Islamic State in Afghanistan also offers one more reason to abandon the calendar-based withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country by the end of 2016. Instead, the United States should adopt a more forward-looking approach that would keep a modest force in place to advise and assist the Afghan national security forces and conduct joint counterterrorism operations to safeguard both countries.

It’s becoming clear why Ash Carter got the job, is it not?

Even Flournoy’s overdue reality check may have passed its due date. We could have stopped ISIS with this kind of backstopping with the Iraqi army we had built by 2011 — multisectarian, relatively apolitical (within the context of the region, certainly), and commanded by able leaders. Thanks to our withdrawal, the Iraqi military has degraded into a patronage dead end, with poor discipline and worse morale. Major General Robert Scales (ret) now says that the Iraqi army can’t be Westernized into fighting shape, and the US would do better to rely on tribal allegiances:

So what does all this suggest for the future? Several things. First, there is something to be said for militias or at least militia-based conventional units in the Iraqi military. The T.E. Lawrence model would mold an effective force by clustering close-combat formations around familiar and trusted leaders, taking cultures, clans, tribes and ethnicities into account. Such an approach is anathema to Americans who see strength in cultural and ethnic mixing. But recent history strongly suggests that Middle Eastern societies do not.

Second, as Saddam Hussein learned in his abortive conflict with Iran in the ’80s and asBashar Assad is learning today, Middle Eastern conventional armies don’t do attrition warfare very well. The coming Iraqi offensive against the Islamic State heartland, if it is to succeed, must be swift, methodical and accompanied by absolutely overwhelming American air power—hundreds of sorties a day. The campaign must be based not on retaking lost territory so much as breaking the will of Islamic State fighters. Only when the world sees that Islamic State is not the dominant force in the Middle East can Iraq hope to restore its sovereignty.

Can the Iraqis readjust their army to better reflect culture and clan in time for the next offensive? Can the United States commit to an air campaign to rival Desert Storm? Can we provide enough moral and technical support to make all this possible by the beginning of the next campaign season in April and May 2016? I don’t know. But I do know that history has been harsh to those who try to build alien armies in their own image. All the American firepower and “boots on the ground” will be for naught unless we allow the Iraqis to fight their war their way.

The US isn’t prepared to invest even that much in its “fight” against ISIS. The easiest step, directly arming and bolstering the Kurdish Peshmerga despite the protests in Baghdad, would have been done immediately. The Peshmerga and the Kurds in general are both retaking ground and breaking the will of ISIS fighters. Had we aligned with the Kurds immediately and forced Baghdad into coordinating attacks from the north, Mosul might already be liberated and Raqqa threatened in Syria. Instead, we’ve been dillying for more than a year with a handful of advisers to the Iraqi troops far from the front line while the only effective force in the field goes woefully under-resourced.

Flournoy didn’t get the SecDef job because she was serious about “degrading and destroying” ISIS. Maybe the next president will be as well, and Flournoy can finally get the job.