While Centcom reports continue to maintain “progress” in the war against ISIS, new reports from elsewhere are far less rosy, with the latest report from the RAND Corporation for the Pentagon not only concluding that the war is “stalemated,” but that the US strategy of trying to kill ISIS leaders with airstrikes is useless at any rate.

The report insisted that killing senior leadership members in ISIS would never be successful because the group has such a “deep bench” of potential leaders across the caliphate that it could readily replace anyone that the US managed to kill without seriously degrading their operations.

Theirs isn’t the only report taking a negative view of the current war situation, with a new Congressional report concluding that the US has “failed” to stop ISIS from recruiting fighters from abroad, and that despite intense efforts to stop the flow of fighters new recruits continue to pour into ISIS.

The White House announced some new sanctions against certain “ISIS facilitators” today, trying to stop the flow of money and fighters to the group, though there seems to be little reason to expect this latest round to be any more successful than the past efforts.