I understand what you're saying, I just highly disagree with it. When I talk about using the full force of the American military, it's not that we'd just "kill a lot of people", it's that we could literally destroy every single city and village in Iraq. Poof. Dust. Sand. With conventional arms. The war would be won because there would be no one left to fight against us.

I already mentioned this... Scorched Earth. What does this solve? Do you realize the implications behind doing this? War doesn't work this way anymore. We're not s first world nation bent on conquering the world behind death.

And I understand completely what you're saying as well. But what you're not realizing is that we can't fight wars the way you're describing. We've moved on. Mass communications has become to fast for us to do so. There's so many factors that you're not including that it's insane.

Look. There's a book called "The ISIS solution" that mirrors everything I'm saying.

Would this have huge international consequences? Of course. Would we lose any and all moral high ground going forward? Again, yes. Would the war still be won? Yes.

NO! Lol!!... Dude, I'm not trying to sound like a dick, but why can't you grasp the fact that killing everyone or poof "turning them into dust" wouldn't accomplish a thing. It wouldn't win a war, period. It would open a brand new can of worms. There would be a power vacuum in the region, it would upset neighboring countries in the region and basically force them into mounting an offensive against us. There would be waaayyy too many consequences, geopolitically.

I'm not saying it's a good way to go about it, I'm just disputing the idea that 200k troops and a small portion of our air force constitutes the full military might of the USA. That's just not true, you really can't argue that.

That's because I'm not arguing, I'm telling you. You keep hinging on a battle of attrition in terms of what dictates our success. If you want o be technical about it, 3 guys and one phone call could shut easily outweigh our whole military force. Nukes. But as I said before, you're not grasping the broader picture in terms of how war is fought.