Third westerner beheaded by Isis.........

[Anomalocaris]

Of course we are being provoked.

Why would ISIS provoke us into annihilating them with a huge "desert storm" reaction when they are already wincing from tiny strikes to protect the Kurds?

I can't see it.

I can see why the western industrial military complex would want new orders though.

Because we can't annihilate a broad based insurgency that does not rely on industrial infrastructure with a desert storm. We will try, in the process kill a lot of innocent people, remind a lot of local people the colossal chasms between the values we claim to espouse, cynical interpretations of our real motives, and the values the local people feel comfortable with.

In the end, we would have reinforced things that made the insurgence strong before we went in and broke the few remaining dishes, only to realize the thing we broke were just tools and ornaments for the insurgency, and not vital to it.

Face it. The US military has never gotten out of the WWII mind set. We are only capable of visualizing how an industrialized peer power, with apparatus of a modern state, can be brought to the point were it can no longer wage industrialized technological war with us. We have not the mind set in our civilian population in general, in our civilian leadership, and in our military, to wage a successful counterinsurgency war.

To do so we need to have a conscript army in order to occupy with enough soldiers to have broad, visible and constant presence. We need to think soldiers are really cannon fodders for long term goal of the state, and be willy to absorb a substantial monthly casualty rate for many years or decades, and not give up. We need to understand if there isn't a steady stream co casualties for much of the war, it more likely mean we aren't doing the right things rather than we have done the right things well. We need to professionally train a large body of civilian and military leaders in real, not cliff notes or fox sound bite version, of local history and ethnic anthropology. We then need to listen to them.