You are missing my point. What's new with ISIS is their unique combination of strategy and tactics.
My position is that ISIS has no new strategies or tactics. If you want to argue otherwise, you need to actually name the new strategy or the tactic. I will then reply by giving examples of humans doing this over and over.
You could say the exact same thing at the start of World War II about the Germans, "every weapon Germany is using was used in WWI." However, the Germans put together the combined arms: aircraft, tanks, mobile infantry and artillery in what was called blitzkrieg warfare and it overwhelmed the Poles, French in British within weeks.
This is a whole new can of worms you're opening. Weapons changed substantially between WW1 and WW2. For example, WW1 was fought with bolt action rifles, WW2 saw the introduction of semi-autos and the assault rifle. But since we're talking about ISIS, try comparing the industrial power of Germany in 1938 with the (lack of) industrial power of ISIS in 2015. Or the lack of military technology among the ISIS region. ISIS is pitiful compared to Germany. And Germany didn't succeed. Betting on ISIS success = bad idea.
BTW, notice from this Robb article, how the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq resembles the infamous World War 1 Maginot Line. Talk about old school defense.
The Germans hit the Maginot line in WW2 (not WW1) with an army of 3.3 million. The CIA says ISIS has about 67,000 soldiers only a fraction of which are available for sending to Saudi Arabia. That's a size difference of about a factor of > 50 maybe 100. And the Germans had arguably better (ground) weapons than the French and British while for ISIS and Saudi Arabia, the quality factor is vastly in favor of Saudi Arabia.
Second, if you want to talk about ISIS efforts at causing terror in Saudi Arabia, then please name for me any state which has ever been conquered by terror. No. States fall due to civil war and military actions and ISIS doesn't seem to be doing very well at either of these.
To use threat of violence to get humans to change their state you must apply the violence at an extremely high level. ISIS has never done this to any external state. The only examples I can think of ISIS successes recently were so tiny that the victims were named in the newspaper. That's not enough. You need to kill so many people that everyone personally knows a victim.
The allies got the Germans to quit Nazism by bombing them for years. The number of civilians killed was in the millions. Nuclear weapons were used against Japan and firebombings were used against both. Sorry, but as far as changing hearts and minds, drones and attached explosives just isn't going to do it. All that does is piss off the civilians. They're more willing to fight until it becomes obvious that they're losing and that they might be next.
Again, if you have an example of a state that fell due to outside application of terror, please name it. The world has a couple hundred states and there are hundreds of years of history for those states. Terror has been around for thousands of years. So name the state that fell due to terror alone.
The closest I can come to this is that there have been leaders killed by assassins but I doubt that killing a couple of Saudi monarchs will change their system. Instead they'll do the same thing that Egypt and Jordan did recently; they'll begin using modern military force against ISIS. And that, taken to its extreme, *will* kill enough civilians that the survivors will reject ISIS. There are plenty of examples of this in history and no examples of terror working. Now I can think of examples of terror that caused a foreign country to withdraw its troops from another (generally distant) foreign country, but that's not what you're talking about with Saudi Arabia. What you're claiming is the destruction of a state by terror, not the influence of state actions by terror.
1) Recruiting over the internet with videos etc.
2) Using the internet to encourage sympathizers to strike in Western countries if they can't come to Syria
3) Using the internet to train sympathizers in terrorist acts
4) Offering rewards to kill specific Jordanian pilots, who are attacking them. And providing the names and home addresses of those pilots.
5) Just plain easier organizing and communicating, using encryption on the internet
6) Mass distribution of propaganda (beheadings, etc.) on the internet.
And despite all the above, ISIS still hasn't knocked over a single government.
Really? That is not true. Who won the Vietnam war? We officially were in the Iraq war for (8 years, 8 months, 4 weeks and 1 day). Who won in Iraq? Afghanistan (13 years, 2 months and 3 weeks)? We just gave up in both and went home. Are you serious?
North Vietnam won the Vietnam war. South Vietnam lost it. At the end of the war, the army of North Vietnam marched through the South Vietnamese capital. This is how you can tell a country has won a war. US aims were not achieved but the US did not "lose". The army of North Vietnam did not march through Washington DC. The US government was not brought down. US civilians were not raped by invading armies. US homes were not set on fire. The US did not lose that war, our ally did. There were no significant US interests at stake and pulling support for South Vietnam caused no significant problems for US foreign policy. It was a stupid war and a stupid example to show that modern countries do not win wars quickly. The idiots who planned it were apparently fighting to show the world that the US liked to fight. I suggest that this is not in our significant national interests. Iraq and Afghanistan are similar. No US interests.
To find a counterexample to the concept that modern countries win (real) wars quickly (especially in the context of a primitive ISIS attacking a relatively advanced Saudi Arabia), you need to find a war where a modern military country is destroyed by a primitive country. Sorry, but no such example exists. The modern countries repeatedly beat the living daylights out of primitive countries and they often do it even when there are no real national interests involved. There are few examples of primitive countries attacking the more advanced ones because humans are not stupid and the leaders of primitive countries understand what will happen to them. ISIS might make the mistake of starting a real war with Saudi Arabia but they've done absolutely nothing so far in it. It's just a propaganda war.
The only recent examples of relatively primitive military countries attacking a more advanced military are the Arab state attacks against Israel. And the difference in technology between those countries is small compared to the present differences between Saudi Arabia and ISIS.
So, you can dismiss ISIS, which it seems like what your points are trying to do. But, if you could make money by buying crude just before they do serious damage to Saudi Arabia would you?
Real wars take a lot of preparation. Your hypothetical is years or more likely never away. ISIS generates the worst propaganda of any new state since the French cut the heads off their previous rulers. (And France was beaten despite, unlike ISIS, being a continental power with the world's most modern military ground forces.) If there's any bet I'd put now, it would be that ISIS doesn't last another 2 years. What's going on is that ISIS is doing small terror attacks against neighbors and then the neighbors beat the crap out of ISIS. No neighbor of ISIS has acted like they're going to fall.
I think the Saudis (with US assistance) drove oil prices low in order to punish Russia and Iran. But for this to work, they can't drive prices so low that fracking and ocean drilling companies are permanently injured. So I would expect them to arrange prices so that Russia and Iran are unable to maintain their spending but high enough that the drillers mostly keep drilling. That would be oil prices staying about where they are.
I'm looking forward to the return of the oil price / supply / storage discussion over at the Contango thread. If I were listening to them a few weeks ago, I'd be short oil now and would be hurting.
