TOUGH CHOICES FOR DEFEATING ISIS: No matter how many times reporters tried to get Gen. Joseph Dunford to give an idea what the Pentagon will be recommending to President Trump next week to speed the defeat of ISIS, the Joint Chiefs chairman kept stiff-arming the questions with some variation of the same response. “We are in the business of providing options to the president, and that is what we are doing,” he said yesterday in a session at the Brookings Institution. “With regard to specificity as to what we will do and what our posture will be, I’m not in position to talk about it.”

But over the course of an hour, Dunford did discuss the enormous complexity of the problem, especially in Syria, and said the president would be briefed on a “wide range of options,” along with a presentation of the upside and downside of each course of action. “This is an incredibly complex environment. Everything we do, or fail to do, will have second and third order effects,” Dunford said. “We will clearly outline for him the consequences, the opportunity costs, the risk associated with each one of the options that we present.” But he cautioned, “We don’t want to bring options to him that solve one problem, only to create a second problem.”