The Pentagon will deliver its draft plan to accelerate the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to President Trump on Monday, but don’t expect to hear any of the details anytime soon.
Pentagon officials say the plan is still in the preliminary stages and is more of a framework for further discussion, rather than a detailed strategy document.
Last month, the president ordered the Pentagon to lead the strategic review, which called for a “comprehensive strategy and plans for the defeat of ISIS” to be delivered within 30 days.
And in his Friday address to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, Trump renewed his promise to deal a swift and certain defeat to the terrorist group.
“I have also directed the defense community to develop a plan to totally obliterate ISIS,” Trump told the cheering crowd at CPAC. “Working with our allies, we will eradicate this evil from the face of the Earth. ”
But come Monday, there will be no public announcements of, for instance, whether more U.S. troops will be sent to Syria.
“We don’t have any plan to roll out anything on Monday that addresses that level of specificity,” Davis said. “This going to be more strategic and more broad.”
Last week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford said Trump will be presented with a wide range of options, each that carry the risk of unintended consequences, and that it ultimately will be up to the president to make the tough decisions.
“What we are trying to do in outlining options for the president is to outline the options that exist for dealing with the ISIS threat, the most immediate, most virulent strain of extremism right now that we’re dealing with, but also, to clearly outline for him the consequences, the opportunity cost, the risk associated with each one of the options,” Dunford said at a Brookings Institution event Thursday in Washington.
Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, was at the Pentagon on Friday for discussions with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, as the options were being put in final form.
But in keeping with the president’s stated desire to avoid announcing future battle plans, the Pentagon is not intending to release any details.
“It’s a plan to attack an enemy, and I don’t think we’re going to want to telegraph too much of it,” Davis said.
Pentagon officials say the strategy in both Iraq and Syria has adapted over time, and that the U.S. military is not waiting for new orders to shift tactics.
“The executive order is not the beginning or the end of the dialogue that we’ve had with the president,” Dunford said. “We’ve already, since the president’s been the president, made changes in the campaign. We make them every day, it’s a dynamic environment.”
One example is that U.S. troops are now working with Iraqi troops closer to the front lines, according to the top U.S. military commander in Baghdad.
“We’re operating closer, deeper into the Iraqi formation, so we adjusted our posture during the east Mosul fight and we embedded advisers a bit further down into the formation,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend told reporters Monday.
