WASHINGTON: The Pentagon was due to present the White House on Monday with possible new battle plans to defeat the Islamic State group, after President Donald Trump demanded top brass find additional ways to destroy the militants.
One of Trump's central campaign pledges was to quicken the fight against IS, and he berated the Barack Obama adminstration for taking too long to do so.
He claimed to have a secret plan to defeat IS, repeatedly pledged to "bomb the hell" out of the group and even threatened to kill family members of suspected IS fighters.
On January 28, Trump gave the Pentagon 30 days to come up with a comprehensive review of the fight against IS, which a US-led coalition has been bombing in Iraq and Syria since late summer 2014 while using commandos to train and advise local forces.
The review includes input from across the government, including its spy agencies, State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
While broad in scope, the options outlined in the review are preliminary and will be refined in the coming weeks, Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said.
"It's a plan to attack an enemy, and I don't think we are going to want to telegraph too much of it," Davis said.
The options presented to Trump will likely include more US troops being sent to the Middle East, and would see the Pentagon taking a more aggressive stance in other key areas.
"This is not about Syria and Iraq, it's about a trans-regional threat," General Joe Dunford, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Washington audience last week.
"In this particular case we're talking about ISIS, but it's also Al-Qaeda and other groups that present a trans-regional threat."
He stressed the importance of renewed military action coming alongside diplomatic and political efforts.
"All of us who have participated in these conflicts over the last 15 years realize that anything we do on the ground has to be in the context of political objectives or it's not going to be successful," Dunford said.
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