The Pentagon asked Congress on Wednesday to free up about $116 million for training and equipping Syrian fighters.
But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the military will not see that money until it proves it can use it better than the first $43 million, which yielded only a handful of trained fighters.
The initial program to train and equip Syrian fighters to defeat the Islamic State involved flying vetted Syrians out of the country, training them, then returning them to Syria in small numbers to join fighting. After that program was deemed a failure, the Pentagon has used the remaining accessible money for that program to buy weapons to air drop to groups of Syrians already fighting there.
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Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he submitted a request more than a month ago to get the rest of that money to buy and transport ammunition and weapons to drop to members of the Syrian Arab Coalition.
“All four committees have failed to act on that request, and I ask you to release these holds urgently. We should not be impeding the very momentum we are trying to build,” Carter said.
But McCain said Congress would need to see a plan before the Pentagon received anymore money for the train and equip program, which he called a “failure.”
“We don’t want to approve of something like that again,” McCain said. “We have an obligation to taxpayers.”
He said specifically that he didn’t want a repeat of a previous hearing where the leader of U.S. Central Command revealed that only single digits of fighters remained after many were either captured, killed or scattered shortly after entering Syria.
