Fight against ISIL needs more trainees, Carter says

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter defended the Pentagon's effort to confront Islamic State militants on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services committee but acknowledged that it had been slowed by a lack of Iraqi and Syrian recruits.

Carter spoke a day after President Obama visited the Pentagon for an update on progress against the Islamic State, also known as ISIL. The U.S. military has led a coalition of Western and Arab states in an air war against ISIL militants who have seized chunks of Iraq and Syria. The cornerstone of the strategy, Obama and Carter have maintained, is training local ground forces to take back and hold territory seized by ISIL.

But the Pentagon has found a lack of recruits in both countries to train for the fight against ISIL.

"As of June 30, we've only received enough trainees to be able to train about 8,800 Iraqi Army soldiers and Peshmerga forces, in addition to some 2,000 CTS personnel," Carter said. Another 4,000 soldiers and 600 counter-terrorism personnel are being trained.

In Syria, where the Pentagon had planned to train thousands of fighters to battle ISIL this year, just 60 are currently being trained, Carter said. The need to vet them has slowed training, he said, noting that 7,000 fighters are being screened.

"This number is much smaller than we hoped for at this point, partly because of the vetting standards," Carter said.

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee, challenged Carter, blasting the Pentagon strategy as flawed and lacking the commitment to provide U.S. troops who can call in airstrikes and advise local forces in battle.

"It is not that we are doing nothing," McCain said. "It is that there is no compelling reason to believe that anything we are currently doing will be sufficient to achieve the president's stated goal of degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL — either in the short-term or the long-term. Our means and our current level of effort are not aligned with our ends. That suggests we are not winning, and when you are not winning in war, you are losing."

McCain appeared impatient with Carter, dismissing the 60 trained fighters in Syria as "not a very impressive number." McCain also seemed dissatisfied with Carter's response about that the Pentagon had yet to decide how it would respond if those fighters came under attack from the Assad regime.

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the panel, said that ISIL will not be defeated until governments in the region act inclusively. In Iraq, that means the Shiite-led government must reach out to Sunni Muslims who have felt disenfranchised.

"Absent a moderate opposition that is willing to and capable of taking territory from ISIL and holding it, any change in the status quo is unlikely," Reed said