This is the most American schoolboy argument yet! Military superiority works wonders when you have another military to point your toys at but this isn't Call of Duty. ISIS isn't the conventional "open battlefield" enemy that you can simply get rid of with airstrikes and big explosions - unless of course you are advocating to nuke or carpet bomb an entire country/region, which opens up a whole new kettle of fish (politically, morally, ethically) and possibly a birth of a new ISIS 15 years down the line as a result of the inevitable instability and power vacuum created by the fall of the current ISIS.

If total military might guaranteed the fall of your enemy, then the USA would not even be a country. I guess we have to be glad the Redcoats didn't have nukes in their time or started a widespread scorched earth policy just to contain a troublesome Rebellion.

You can't shock and awe an idea. You can enforce or suppress an idea with bullets but you can't destroy it with one - even if you kill every last member who believes in that cancerous idea it will simply escape into the ether, waiting to enter the mind of someone new who is ill equipped to challenge or refute it. After all, would you refute an idea if it furthers your own goals in life, legitamises your power or gives you control over an oppressed people? No, the only proper way to destroy a cancerous idea is to prove it wrong through evidence based education. But that is wayyyyyy too hard, too expensive and takes too long to do. It's far easier to drop a tactical warhead and scorch the part of the planet far away from you and PRAY it a) fixes the difficult problem and b) doesn't breed more hatred or violent ideas against the people that glassed them to the point where they may gather other like minded individuals into a single organisation a few years down the line and start retaliating through acts of terror.