American forces hammered ISIS positions across Syria with 10 strikes against more than 30 targets between Feb. 3 and 12, doubling the tempo of the previous round of operations as the U.S. military works to dismantle what remains of the terrorist network.
USCENTCOM announced the strikes Saturday, framing them as part of a broader campaign to "sustain relentless military pressure on remnants from the terrorist network."
The latest salvo represents double the volume of strikes carried out between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2, a round that targeted an ISIS communication site, a "critical logistics node," and weapons storage facilities. The acceleration is deliberate — and the results speak for themselves.
According to the Daily Caller, the intensified campaign falls under Operation Hawkeye, launched by the U.S. military in December after an ISIS ambush on Dec. 13 killed two American servicemembers and an interpreter alongside Syrian forces.
That attack was a reminder — one paid for in American blood — that ISIS, while degraded, has not been destroyed. The group still operates, still recruits, still kills. The foreign policy establishment spent years assuring the public that ISIS was a spent force, a JV team relegated to caves and encrypted group chats. Dec. 13 proved otherwise. American families received the worst possible news because the terrorist network retained the capacity to plan, coordinate, and execute a lethal ambush against U.S. and allied personnel.
Operation Hawkeye was the answer. Since its launch, U.S. forces have killed or captured more than 50 ISIS fighters and destroyed over 100 pieces of ISIS infrastructure in just two months.
Those are not abstract numbers. Each logistics node eliminated is a supply chain severed. Each weapons cache destroyed is an ambush that never happens. Each fighter removed from the battlefield is one fewer threat to American personnel operating in the region. The kind of people who plan ambushes that kill American servicemembers are being systematically located and eliminated. That's the point.
What stands out about Operation Hawkeye is the pacing. The U.S. didn't respond to the Dec. 13 ambush with a single retaliatory strike and a press conference. It launched a sustained campaign — wave after wave, escalating in scope.
The Jan. 27–Feb 2 round hit hard. The Feb. 3–12 round hit harder — double the strikes, double the targets. That's not a coincidence or a scheduling quirk. It's a deliberate escalation designed to keep ISIS off balance, deny them time to regroup, and systematically collapse whatever operational capacity they have left.
This is how you fight a terrorist insurgency. Not with nation-building seminars or interagency working groups or carefully worded communiqués designed to avoid offending anyone, but with persistent, grinding military pressure that denies the enemy rest, resources, and the ability to plan. More than 30 targets in 10 days means ISIS leadership — such as it is — spent those days running, hiding, and watching their infrastructure burn.
There is a school of thought, popular in certain Washington circles, that military operations alone can't defeat an ideology. That's true in the abstract and useless in practice. You don't need to defeat an ideology to prevent an ambush. You need to destroy the weapons cache, eliminate the logistics network, and remove the fighters who would carry it out. Philosophy can wait. The operational tempo cannot.
The people who staff think tanks and populate Sunday morning panels love to talk about "comprehensive strategies" and "whole-of-government approaches." Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work — the pilots, the intelligence analysts, the operators on the ground — are stacking targets and producing results. Fifty fighters killed or captured. A hundred pieces of infrastructure were turned to rubble. That's not a strategy memo. That's a scorecard.
The strikes come against a shifting backdrop in Syria. The Syrian Defense Ministry announced that government armed forces assumed control over the Al-Tanf base — a facility the U.S. operated for years as a counter-terrorism hub in the region. The handoff raises obvious questions about what comes next for American force posture in Syria and whether Syrian government forces can maintain the kind of pressure that kept ISIS boxed in.
History suggests skepticism is warranted. ISIS thrived precisely in the vacuum left by weak and distracted governments across the Levant. The group didn't rise because of a lack of diplomatic summits or development aid. It rose because no one was killing its fighters fast enough. When pressure lifts, these networks don't dissolve — they regenerate. They recruit. They dig new tunnels, build new caches, and plan new attacks.
The Syrian government's track record on counter-terrorism inspires exactly zero confidence. For years, the Assad regime's primary military focus was on its own survival — fighting rebel groups, barrel-bombing civilian neighborhoods, leaning on Russian and Iranian support. ISIS was often a secondary concern, useful as a bogeyman to justify continued Western tolerance of the regime. Whether the new custodians of Al-Tanf will treat the ISIS threat with the seriousness it demands remains an open question — and one that American military planners clearly aren't leaving to chance, given the tempo of ongoing strikes.
Two American servicemembers and an interpreter are dead because ISIS still had the capacity to strike. That capacity is shrinking — 50 fighters removed, 100 infrastructure sites destroyed — but it hasn't reached zero. Every day the campaign continues is a day closer to that number.
The worst thing the U.S. could do right now is declare a premature victory, reduce its presence, and watch the remnants reconstitute in whatever ungoverned space opens up. We've seen that movie. It ended with a caliphate stretching across two countries, mass executions broadcast on social media, and terror attacks radiating outward from Raqqa to Paris to San Bernardino.
The instinct to "bring everyone home" is understandable — and in many contexts, correct. But the lesson of the last two decades is painfully clear: terrorist networks that are pressured but not destroyed will come back. They always come back. The question is whether they come back while American forces are still in position to hit them, or after those forces have been withdrawn and the intelligence networks have gone dark.
Operation Hawkeye suggests the current approach favors the former. The doubling of strike volume between rounds isn't random escalation. It's the application of a simple principle that has governed successful military campaigns since long before anyone coined the term "counter-terrorism": when you have the enemy on the ropes, you don't let up. You press harder.