What is the President's Actual Strategy To Defeat ISIS?

"...Now Obama is in the unenviable position of championing a strategy that even he admits could take years to work, and could be marked by significant setbacks and more terrorist attacks like those in Paris.
“The strategy that we are putting forward is the strategy that is ultimately going to work,” the president told reporters Monday. “But as I said from the start, it is going to take time.”
The story of how Obama landed on his approach is one of a president who campaigned for reelection on a promise to end America’s wars and came to office with other pressing priorities, such as reaching an agreement that would prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
He was deeply skeptical that U.S. military power could produce lasting political change in the Middle East and heavily influenced by the steep costs and heavy casualties that America suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan to achieve only mixed results.
In the early days of the Syrian civil war, Obama rejected proposals from his top national security advisers at the time, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and CIA Director David H. Petraeus, to arm rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
To Obama, the rebels’ chances looked bleak. They were a collection of “former doctors, farmers, [and] pharmacists,” he said, facing off against a well-equipped Syrian military that also had the support of battle-hardened Hezbollah forces.
Early proposals for a no-fly zone that would have grounded Assad’s jets and attack helicopters were also dismissed as too costly. Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that maintaining a no-fly zone would cost as much as $1 billion a year and put the U.S. military into direct conflict with Assad and his Iranian backers.
Senior White House officials have countered that the president’s critics vastly overestimate the capacity of American military power to stem chaos caused by decades of misrule and the collapse of repressive governments throughout the Middle East.
To illustrate that point, Obama on Monday described the problems of establishing a no-fly zone or a safe area for moderate rebels in northern Syria. Such a measure recently received the support of Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Who would come in and who would come out of that safe zone?” Obama asked. “Would it become a magnet for terrorist attacks, and how many personnel would be required” to safeguard it?
Most pointedly, Obama, who has tried to set hard time limits on U.S. military commitments, wondered if American forces would be required to police it indefinitely.
…
The net result is a strategy that offers little immediate satisfaction. For now, one of its biggest selling points is that it largely keeps American soldiers and Marines out of harm’s way.
“This is not an abstraction,” Obama said in defense of his approach. “When we send troops in, those troops get injured, they get killed, they’re away from their families. . . . And so, given the fact that there are enormous sacrifices involved in any military action, it’s best that we don’t shoot first and aim later.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-defends-his-strategy-against-the-islamic-state-saying-it-will-take-time/2015/11/16/bf938224-8c8d-11e5-ae1f-af46b7df8483_story.html