Here’s an oddity in the world of drones: The S-100 Camcopter, manufactured by the Austrian company Schiebel, is operated by both the super-secret SEAL Team 6 and the Chinese Navy. Both the Pakistani and Indian armed forces fly it (the video above is courtesy of the Brazilian Navy). One has mysteriously crashed in Somalia (clue, it wasn’t Chinese). The drone has been secretly procured by the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD) and the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) to hunt for roadside bombs in places like Iraq.

It’s been a year since ISIS announced its “caliphate” over an area straddling Iraq and Syria, accelerating its reign of terror and persisting in expanding its reach into the so-called civilized world. The brutality of the rampagers is now a given–the extreme acts of killing, genocide, and systematic rape all featured on social media and intended to be a bullet aimed straight at western sensibilities; offensive clickbait that demands a response, any response.

When I wrote about the Jordan-based Eager Lion exercise in 2012, I pointed out that it had supplanted Bright Star, the U.S.-Egypt nobody-here-but-us-nice-guys exercise, as the largest in the Middle East. The press releases that used to describe that annual strokeathon were boilerplate: most important U.S.-ally in the Middle East (!), promoting cooperation (!), second largest recipient of U.S. arms (behind you know who) so they might as well know how to use those arms.