ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By HELENE COOPER TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — Kilo Company of the Third Battalion, Second Marines was deep in a simulated firefight on a recent morning here in the high California desert. A group of Marines on the aptly named Machine Gun Hill unleashed round after round of live fire as another group of Marines tried to seize the surrounding valley from an imaginary enemy. “They’re dug in,” shouted Brian Somers, the chief warrant officer of Kilo Company, describing the “enemy” forces, supposedly supported by a real state with real resources and who were theoretically returning fire. “This is conventional warfare.” After 15 years of fighting terrorists, the United States military is learning how to fight big armies again. From the Middle East to South Asia to Africa, American forces for the past decade and a half have fought counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns — essentially smaller-scale guerrilla warfare — rather than the large land wars of the past. But Russia’s invas...

by Tarek Fatah, The Toronto Sun Western media have fawned over Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, and others seeking to shift blame for the mass murder away from radical Islamism. In the wake of the Islamic terrorist attack on a Florida gay nightclub, the media's coverage has been almost apologetic. To go by the coverage, it's as if an Islamist jihadi didn't just massacre 49 Americans, and the West bombed Mecca instead. Despite the apologetic tone of the media, the words of a spokesman for the Florida mosque attended by ISIS-inspired jihadist Omar Mateen, were inadvertently insightful. This mosque wasn't only frequented by Mateen. Another congregant blew himself up in Syria while serving ISIS. Asked by Erin Burnett on CNN what was being preached at this mosque that would motivate two young men in the congregation to become ISIS jihadi terrorists, its spokesman was succinct: "It's like any other mosque, it's simple....