King, a member of the Senate’s intelligence and armed services committee, echoed intelligence assessments that “lone wolf” terrorists are the “toughest” threat to counter, but disagreed with his Republican colleagues, most notably Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who argue that the U.S. needs to ramp up its military effort against ISIS and other terrorist organizations.
“We’ve been in the stamping out business for the last 12 or 13 years and it hasn’t worked all that well,” King said Thursday on CNN’s “New Day.” “Part of the problem is the more we, the U.S. and the West, are active — particularly with troops on the ground — the more it becomes a recruiting tool for the extremists.”
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“We are not going to be able to take them out by killing them one at a time. It’s not going to work,” King said. “We’ve got to go deeper than just police, FBI, CIA and military. We’ve got to talk about how do we stop this movement toward radicalization because otherwise this is going to be a 100-year war.”
Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron made it clear in an opinion piece published Thursday that they are closely watching the threat of lone wolfs, vowing not to be “cowed by extremists,” whether they come in the shape of terrorist groups or “lone fanatics.”
