WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is expected to ask the Pentagon for ways to accelerate the fight against the ISIS terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. Officials said the options probably would include steps the Obama administration considered but never acted on, from adding significantly more U.S. troops to boosting military aid to Kurdish fighters.
Trump’s visit Friday to the Defense Department’s headquarters will start the conversation over how to fulfill his inauguration address pledge to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism “completely from the face of the Earth.”
Among the possible options are sending in more Apache helicopters and giving the U.S. military broader authority to make routine combat decisions, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing discussions.
The officials weren’t authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
As a candidate, and now as president, Trump has never revealed details of his plan for defeating ISIS, and has said that announcing plans openly for our enemies to hear is poor strategy.
He has railed against the trillions of dollars that America’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost. But he suggested at one point that he would have “no choice” but to exponentially expand the Obama administration’s limited deployment of American forces fighting the terrorists.
There are about 5,160 U.S. troops in Iraq now. There are no more than 503 in Syria.
In a Republican primary debate last March, Trump raised the prospect of needing 20,000 to 30,000 troops to “knock out” ISIS.
