The Pentagon will send an expeditionary force of special operators to Iraq to assist government and Kurdish forces in conducting raids and gathering intelligence against the Islamic State, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
Carter and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford had been summoned before the panel amid concerns by lawmakers that the Obama administration’s approach to fighting the extremist group is not tough enough, especially in light of deadly terrorist attacks Nov. 13 in Paris.
“I agree with you. We do need greater effort. We’re applying greater effort,” Carter told panel Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas. “We’re looking for and finding new opportunities for actionable effort every day.”
The special operators will work with Iraqi troops to build their capacity and their raids would focus on defending Iraq’s borders, Carter said.
The troops also will be able to conduct independent raids into Syria, he said.
When asked why this action had not been taken earlier, Carter said the opportunity had not existed, noting that local forces in Iraq and Syria had not developed to the point where direct U.S. involvement would be helpful and that intelligence “has improved tremendously” since the fight against the Islamic State began last year.
Pentagon officials hope that the new special operations force would cause both the capabilities of local forces and intelligence information to snowball and further squeeze the Islamic State, which already is the target of an aerial bombing campaign by a U.S.-led international coalition.
“We’re doing it all over Syria and all over Iraq and that’s the key to getting continued momentum,” Carter said, referring to aiding local forces. He said “we’re prepared to do more” if more capable local forces can be found to leverage U.S. aid.
“The more we find them the more we’ll do,” he said.
Though Dunford noted that “we have not contained ISIL,” neither official would criticize the administration’s strategy when pressed.
“I think we have the right elements of the strategy in place today,” Dunford said.
President Obama has insisted that countries in the region must lead the fight, and has been willing to approve deployments of U.S. forces only in support of those efforts. But congressional Republicans have been pushing almost from the start for a greater U.S. role, saying the threat posed by the Islamic State is too great to delay its defeat, and have complained that the White House is micromanaging it.
“If we’re going to be serious about ISIS, the president needs to assign the military a clear mission and then allow the military to carry it out,” Thornberry said.
Before the hearing even began, panel Republicans trolled the Pentagon leaders in a statement highlighting recent quotes from all three former Obama administration defense secretaries arguing for a more robust strategy against the group.
Many lawmakers were not impressed with the latest tweak.
“Today’s announcement is yet another reactive and incremental step, specifically responding to the Paris attacks, in a policy that has allowed the ISIL threat to metastasize to Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere across the globe,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said.
“A comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIL is totally absent, urgently needed, and long overdue.”
