Thinking out loud with you. We're not fighting a state and we're not waging war on Islam. We are waging war on extremists who happen to be Muslims. Our critical alliances in this fight are the 90% of Muslims who don't support the extremists, so how would we conduct counter value targeting without alienating our allues?

We need to kill terrorists on a larger scale, but in a way that doesn't make the situation worse, which means getting the narrative right first and then attack hard, versus attacking and then developing a narrative to explain it. We are closer to doing that in the fight against IS, but unfortunately the killing part is falling way short. We have a green light from the Arab world and beyond so we should have our foot on the gas pedal and be much more aggressive to include using ground troops to rapidly degrade them. I think we are leaving too much space for IS to regain the initiative.