President Trump greets National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford to discuss current operations. D. Myles Cullen/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Donald Trump's election campaign made much of his predecessor Barack Obama’s failure to control and defeat ISIS, contrasting this with his own determination to destroy the movement if and when he became the United States president.
Around the time of his inauguration in January, he ordered the Pentagon to produce a plan for immediate and radical action. Since then, not much has happened. So in this interim period, how does Washington's outlook relate to the fluid events on the ground?
The Pentagon’s response to Trump's request was, according to informed sources, simply to advocate more of the existing strategy. That means more air-power; a bit more arming of opposition groups, especially the Kurds; somewhat closer involvement in the fight against ISIS in Mosul; and deploying some additional American troops to the region, primarily in Syria.
