And what will they do, all these fighting men and women, with their guns and their rockets, their bayonets and bombs? For a start, they'll be very, very careful. Four years ago, during a war game at the Army War College, the U.S. and its allies were unable to eradicate a terrorist group that resembled al-Qaeda. "These new terror groups are built the way the Internet is built," says an officer who took part in the exercise. "Every time you destroyed one chunk, the rest stepped in to fill the gap." Initially, air strikes against Afghan targets are likely; but Pentagon sources stress that a massive carpet-bombing exercise isn't in the cards. "There isn't that much to hit in Afghanistan," says an Air Force planner, "and we want every bomb to count." A huge bombing campaign, says another officer, "would be more for show than effect." Instead, planners hope that a sustained campaign will cripple the al-Qaeda camps and--if the forces are lucky--smoke out bin Laden so that someone can nab him.

That's why, last Monday morning, Bush entered a secure room at the Pentagon for a briefing by Major General Del Dailey, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs the military's most secretive units. The special forces--including the 800-strong Delta Force, Navy SEALS, and Army and Air Force commandos--are likely to be central to the first phase of the war. Special forces always have a hard time getting the attention of the brass leading conventional forces--they operated under very restrictive rules during the Gulf War--and they have had their setbacks. A Delta Force team was chewed up in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, when it tried to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid. And in Afghanistan, where the terrain is about as unforgiving as any on earth, and the population as warlike, they won't be able to hold territory for long.

Nonetheless, some hit-and-run operations are likely, to hold an airport, raid a terrorist camp, or snatch a top target. But military analysts are bluntly realistic about the challenges facing them. In a sense, the U.S. military is a victim of its own success. The Gulf War, says Charles Dunlap Jr., an Air Force colonel, "was an object lesson to military planners around the globe of the futility of attempting to confront the U.S. symmetrically, that is, with like forces and orthodox tactics." The attacks on the World Trade Center were classic examples of "asymmetric" warfare, using small fanatical teams to inflict maximum psychological damage on a chained Gulliver. And there isn't an army in the rich world that knows, with confidence, how to defeat such a foe. "When you're fighting someone who wants to die," says a Marine colonel, "those old-fashioned rules of war seem rather quaint."

In Bush's newfangled war, in which some successes may be secret, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. Beyond his own instincts, his closest advisers, his officers of state and his superb armed forces, Bush has had to reach out to others, who can help him win the financial and economic battle against terrorism, and win hearts and minds to his cause.

That's one reason why, last Monday, he appeared at the Islamic Center in Washington, and spoke of Islam as a "faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world." Islamic terrorists, he said before Congress, "are traitors to their own faith." The U.S. will not win Bush's war without intelligence on the names, places of refuge and financial support for terrorists--assistance that, in many cases, is available only in the Islamic world itself. Cooperation with Pakistan, at one and the same time a supporter and a victim of the Taliban, is essential if the mission is to be accomplished.

At the same time it looks for allies, the U.S. can't press too hard; this isn't a matter of building a war-fighting coalition of the kind arrayed against Saddam. With the Aqsa intifadeh still smoldering, it is intensely difficult for Arab regimes to be seen offering assistance to Washington. The Administration, says a senior White House official, recognizes that "everybody doesn't have to be involved in anything." But Washington has been worried by the response from Egypt, whose President, Hosni Mubarak, has been pleading for a U.N. conference on terrorism rather than for military strikes. American intelligence has picked up reports of a disturbing lack of support for Bush's policy.

Cooperation with Saudi Arabia, some of whose plutocrats salve a portion of their conscience by funding terror groups, is vital. Administration sources say that notwithstanding the hassle over the Riyadh air base, the overall tenor of discussions with the Saudis has been good. Iran, with whom Washington has had no official relations for 21 years, is suddenly useful; Tehran has more reason to loathe the Taliban than most. As TIME reported last week, Washington has used the British as a conduit to some moderate Iranians. Blair wrote to President Mohammad Khatami (they have since spoken) thanking him for his expression of sympathy after the attacks, and asking for his help in preventing any confrontation between religion and cultures. The British Foreign Secretary will visit Tehran this week. Iranian intelligence on Afghanistan would be useful; the right of American planes to overfly Iranian territory, though unlikely anytime soon, would mark the start of a new order in the region. Will it work? Hard-line Iranian religious leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei followed Khatami's expression of condolence with a chillier tone: "If we are supposed to condemn such deeds, which we must, we must condemn them everywhere."

There are geopolitical problems as well. Moscow has been supportive; last week Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, after meeting with Powell, said that "Russia and the U.S. have agreed to closely coordinate their actions." But the Russians remain determined that the U.S. should not use the crisis as an excuse to build permanent military bases in the region, and are making their views known in central Asia. China, with a potential Islamic insurgency of its own in Xinjiang, has no reason to stand in the way of the fight against terrorism; but Beijing is always anxious about the projection of American power close to its border. In a display of support so unprecedented it was shocking, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose nation did nothing but write a large check in support of the coalition during the Gulf War, deployed a destroyer to the Indian Ocean and promised a seven-point plan of assistance to Washington.

Depend on it; these expressions of support and any that follow come with a price tag. A top-level Saudi delegation to Washington last week stressed the need to address the grievances of the Palestinians. Russia will not expect to hear a lot of moaning from Americans about its behavior in Chechnya. Pakistan will expect some economic relief for its battered economy. (And Pakistan will get it; sources tell TIME that Japan has already offered cash and loan guarantees to Islamabad.) George Bush's war will be one of strange bedfellows.

But then, many wars are. In World War II, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill made common cause with Stalin--"Uncle Joe" for a brief while, but in the full measure of his life, a bloodstained monster--in the fight against fascism. Even heroes compromise, and Churchill has long been a hero of Bush. When he welcomed five religious leaders to the Oval Office last week, the President pointed out a bust of the British leader. Churchill, Bush once told TIME, was the political leader he most admired, and Card says that since Sept. 11, Bush has spoken of Churchill often.

At first glance, it's hard to imagine two men less alike. Bush has had his share of verbal stumbles; Churchill never uttered a sentence that didn't stiffen spines. Bush is fit; Churchill was whatever is fitness's opposite. Bush has forsworn the demon drink; when Churchill stayed with Roosevelt in the White House over Christmas 1941, he instructed Roosevelt's butler that he needed a tumbler of sherry in his room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of Scotch and soda before lunch, and French champagne and 90-year-old brandy before he went to sleep. About the only thing they have in common goes between the lips; very occasionally, Bush sneaks out on the Truman balcony of the White House and enjoys a cigar.

But one big thing Bush and Churchill may share. At the times when he was most challenged, and whether he was justified in his sense of self or not (and often he was not), Churchill never knew self-doubt. It seems to rarely stalk Bush. For a man leading the kit-bag-packing troops and a great wide world into a war the like of which it has never known before, that confidence is a useful attribute to have.

— With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Christopher Ogden, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Scott Macleod/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/London