Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Thursday that the Pentagon is prepared to relax the rules of engagement in the fight against the Islamic State, which lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been been calling too restrictive for months.
When asked if the rules of engagement were being loosened a bit, Carter said that the Defense Department is “prepared to do that.”
“We review them all the time,” Carter said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “If you look at the data, the thing that most enhances the impact of the air campaign is better and better intelligence. We’re prepared to change the rules of engagement.”
The Pentagon had previously defended the current rules of engagement as necessarily strict to keep civilian casualties to nearly zero.
Members of Congress and some pilots have long been complaining that the rules of engagement are too tight and prohibit U.S. power from striking the Islamic State when troops see them.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told the Washington Examiner that the restrictive rules of engagement are one of the first things troops ask about when he visits them abroad.
“They want to know in most countries if we’re committed to victory,” he said. “In Iraq against the Islamic State, in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda and now the Islamic State as well, and had some real reservations about the constraints put on their freedom of action in fighting the bad guys.”
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates also said this summer that the president should expand the rules of engagement to give U.S. forces more latitude to defeat the Islamic State fighters.
“If the mission he has set for the military is to degrade and destroy [the Islamic State], the rules of engagement that he has imposed on them prevent them from achieving that mission,” Gates said during a June interview with Yahoo News.
The Pentagon has defended, and largely refused to get into details about, the current rules of engagement, saying that tight rules are needed to prevent civilian casualties when Islamic State fighters are known for hiding in public places where striking would cause collateral damage and the deaths of civilians.
Asked on Monday if he would widen the rules of engagement in the wake of the Paris attacks so U.S. forces could be more aggressive against the Islamic State, President Obama spoke about the need to defeat the Islamic State and the challenges in doing so, but did not specifically address restrictions on U.S. forces.
