“If you’re killing 1,000 a month in strikes and they’re replacing them at 2,000 a month, that’s not good math,” Army Brig. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the deputy director of special operations and counter-terrorism on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center in October.

“There are inherently conflicting considerations here,” said Paul Pillar, who retired in 2005 as the top U.S. government intelligence analyst for the Near East and South Asia and is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. “Some form of military actions plays right into ISIL’s hands. That has to be balanced with whatever positive happens from military force.”

Those concerns aren’t quelling the tough talk in Congress and on the campaign trail following last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which appear to have been coordinated by ISIL, as well as the California shootings, which investigators have blamed on a Muslim couple who the FBI says became “radicalized” by the Islamic State’s message.