Is The U.S. About To Escalate It's War Against ISIS?

Is the United States About to Ramp Up Its Fight Against ISIS? -- Jacob Siegel, Daily Beast

In the wake of James Foley’s execution, Obama announced no plans to widen his air campaign against the group. Military officials hint it’s expanding—but not to a ground offensive.

Since U.S. airstrikes began targeting ISIS on August 7, the group, which had been steadily expanding its territory, has been losing ground in Iraq. Now there are signs indicating that the air campaign could be expanding. If it does, the model for what has worked in northern Iraq—U.S. airpower backing local ground forces—gives a preview of what future operations could look like if they spread to other parts of Iraq.

“What we saw at Mosul,” where U.S. airstrikes allowed Kurdish and Iraqi security forces to push ISIS back, “was essentially our proof of concept,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former Army officer and one of the architects of the “surge” in Iraq who later served on the National Security Council.

ISIS’s answer to its first direct confrontation with the United States came in the form of a video, released Tuesday as the bombs continued to drop on the group’s positions in Iraq, showing the execution of a captured American journalist, James Foley. In the video Foley’s masked killer warns that further U.S. airstrikes will lead to the execution of more American hostages held by ISIS.

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My Comment: After the brutal murder of James Foley .... there is no question in my mind that the U.S. is about to escalate it's war against ISIS. The only thing that I am not sure about is the size of this U.S. military response.