Rain showers with some a now-and-again wave of thin-tinted bright this afternoon — nothing out of the ordinary, just a weather system struggling across the north coast of California, with that occasional drifting-hole in the cloud cover allowing the sun to peek through for just a moment.
SOP — nothing alarming.

Same most-likely for the US and the requirement for constant, bickering war — SOP for a mission without a plan, which naturally allows shit to creep hard-fast right up on your ass.

(Illustration found here).

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey: “I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by US forces, but we’re certainly considering it.”

Despite a public-plastered White House vow of no “boots on the ground.”
Dempsey, along with DOD head honcho, Chuck Hagel, testified today before the US House armed services committee on the clusterfuck, fuck-up that’s the campaign against ISIS.
And in apparent disregard for the use of US GIs in another shit-fight in Iraq…again. Although he claimed there won’t be another 150,000-troop onslaught like once before, Dempsey doubled-down, left some creeping wiggle-room.
From the Guardian:

“I just don’t foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent,” Dempsey said.
But should the Iraqi military prove unwilling to take back “al-Anbar province and Ninewa province” — the majority of territory in Iraq seized by Isis — or should the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, exclude Sunnis from power, “I will have to adjust my recommendations,” Dempsey said.

In other words, if current levels won’t work, up the levels. Last week, President Obama authorized an additional 1,500 US troops to Iraq, mostly as advisers — 50 on Monday to Anbar province, an always shit-bed for Americans.
From MilitaryTimes:

Until now, 12 U.S. advisory teams had been operating in Iraq since August — seven in a joint operations center in Baghdad, and the remainder at a similar facility in Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
But advisers alone may not be the answer.
The U.S.-trained Iraqi military has been gutted since the crisis began.
After months of small-scale attacks around Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, it buckled almost instantly in June when militants advanced on the city.
Commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered.
In some cases, soldiers stripped off their uniforms and ran.
Iraqi officials say the country’s total military and police force stands at one million men.
However, a senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press that as of June, the Iraqi military strength stood, generously, at 125,000 men, down from 205,000 in Jan. 2014, forcing it to rely heavily on unruly Shiite militias for reinforcement.
The official spoke anonymously as he is not authorized to brief the media.

A generous 800,000-plus drop, huh?
Yesterday, the US began a 10-day international ‘war summit’ — a sign of a stink in the air.
Via Foreign Policy:

There were signs Wednesday that a shift was in the works.
Early yesterday, U.S. Central Command put out a notice about the start of a weeklong meeting at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida involving planners from the more than 30 nations that are part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State.
A get-together of this length suggests substantive discussion about how the fight might change as well as discussions on which country is willing to do what.

This is starting creep me out.