Whiny Republican Donald Trump Will Outline His Plan to Defeat ISIS Today..

More than three years after it thundered out of the Syrian-Iraqi desert on its genocidal rampage and spread its tentacles from northern Africa to central Asia, the so-called Islamic State has suffered its worst week ever. Newly emboldened Iraqi army and militia forces ejected ISIS from its second-largest urban stronghold in Mosul, while Kurdish YPG forces began seizing ground in its so-called capital of Raqqa. Russia and the US signed off on a cease-fire in southwestern Syria which will allow the US and its allies a freer hand to operate in the east against ISIS forces.

As its forces reel backward from a sustained assault, their leadership has taken even more serious blows. The latest of these took place in Afghanistan, where the US claimed success in killing ISIS-K leader Abu Sayed in a drone strike. This comes during an intense focus on shutting down the ISIS franchise, and Sayed didn’t shuffle off the mortal coil alone:

The civil war within ISIS is a predictable outcome of the body blows inflicted upon it after the world began taking its threat seriously. No doubt it will return us to the original threat of Islamist terror networks, which by the way have never gone away, so defeating ISIS isn’t the same thing as defeating radical Islamist terror. It does, however, represent a big step in that direction.

That same day, Dunford and Secretary of Defense James Mattis updated the Pentagon press corps on the counter-Islamic State campaign, which Trump has ordered them to accelerate. They gave few details of the plan presented to the president. But what they did say was revealing. They highlighted only two significant changes: delegation of more authority to field commanders, and a tactical shift from shoving the Islamic State out of safe locations to surrounding it in its strongholds. Notably, Mattis emphasized that the rules of engagement had not changed, and that U.S. forces would maintain “continued extraordinary efforts to avoid innocent civilian casualties.” So much for the Trump campaign pledge to “bomb the hell out of ISIS.” Apparently shelved, too, is National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s reported interest in significantly expanding the U.S. troop presence in Syria.

These are tactical shifts, not a fundamental change of strategy. The Obama approach of working by, with, and through partners in Iraq and Syria continues, as does the campaign of U.S. and coalition air strikes and targeted raids, along with arming, training, and advising local partners, using a relatively small number of U.S. troops on the ground. The core objectives remain: seizing the two remaining centers of the so-called caliphate — Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria — and countering the Islamic State elements in southern Syria and the Euphrates valley. To his credit, the president also recently approved the arming of the Syrian Kurds — part of a larger force that will take Raqqa — in the face of strong opposition from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The military has more freedom in deciding when and where to strike ISIS targets without much oversight under Trump’s plan, which has yet to be made public by the Pentagon. But the operation of reducing ISIS’s influence by targeting local terror leaders and influential members of the group—a strategy developed by the Obama administration over his two terms in office—reportedly remains exactly the same.

One can imagine a whole host of reasons for Trump’s procrastination. Perhaps, the administration has been distracted by the alarming developments in North Korea (and/or the special prosecutor’s office). Or maybe gaming out a plan for defeating as singular an enemy as the Islamic State simply takes a lot of time. Or, perhaps, the president just has little interest in telling the public what his military plans are, and says “that’s coming in two weeks” to literally any policy proposal he’s ever asked about.

But the Daily Beast suggests an alternative answer. The outlet notes that U.S. forces have removed 50 top ISIS leaders from the battlefield since Trump took office — down from 80, in the last six months of Obama’s tenure. Further, the militants killed on Trump’s watch have generally been lower-ranking than those targeted by the previous administration.

These facts don’t reflect the inferiority of the Trump administration’s anti-ISIS strategy so much as the sufficiency of the strategy it inherited: The military is simply running out of high-value ISIS targets to kill. Under Obama, the U.S. military was effectively wiping out ISIS’s leadership.