I'm not in Syria or Iraq, and I am certainly not listening in on White House conversations or the Pentagon. All I know is what I hear from the press, and for the most part, they aren't in Syria or Iraq or listening in on government conversations either. The press is reporting what governments is releasing, little more.
And I'm not sure at all that the media is accurate. Earlier this week there was this interview with someone in Bagdad who claimed that ISIS was three miles away. Then Turkey issues a statement two days later claiming that ISIS was 60 miles from Bagdad. Who the heck really knows.
We don't even have a clue as to how many ISIS fighters there are, estimates are all over the place. I'm suspecting that there are a lot fewer than the CIA's estimate range of 20,000 to 31,000. The reason I suspect that it is fewer, is because it is taking very few ISIS fighters to take over territory. When four ISIS fighters in a pickup truck can take over a village, it's not all that hard to extrapolate the total number of ISIS fighters based upon the amount of land they have captured and the population in that area.
And I wonder why we don't know how many tanks and armored vehicles they have. It's hard to hide those things in the open desert, and we should know how many they seized from Iraq and Syrian troops. You also can't really purchase a lot of tanks on the black market, so it's fairly unlikely that they have many more than what Iraq and Syria have reported they lost to ISIS. So (just guessing), maybe 50? That's not exactly formidible, it may be to a small village, but not to any real army. And of those 50, how many have we already destroyed? And how many of them did ISIS unintentionally destroy (not knowing how to properly operate them). How many have been destroyed by the Kurds? It's entirely possible that ISIS now only as a handful or less of tanks and APCs. If you had lots tanks, why ride around in a pickup truck or a toyota corrola?
Anyhow, I can think of no reason in the world that the POTUS wouldn't want a major military victory over ISIS between now and the election (or at least the election after that), thus I can't think of any reasons that we aren't already destroying every ISIS target we can find.