President Donald Trump is drawing up a directive for newly tapped Defense Secretary James Mattis to devise a more aggressive Pentagon plan to eradicate ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism, following up on a oft-repeated campaign promise, officials told The New York Times.
The directive will demand a presentation within 30 days, and could involve U.S. military ground force in Syria and "Army attack helicopters to support an assault on the group's capital, Raqqa," according to the report.
The 30-day timetable was included among the president's campaign promises, and the report comes on the day Secretary Mattis was ceremonially sworn and President Trump signed executive orders to ban 'radical Islamic terrorists' from entering the U.S.
"We don't want them here," Trump said Friday in the Pentagon's Hall of Heroes.
President Trump has now signed six executive orders and the next might include a review of the U.S.'s "nuclear posture," a "state of the art" anti-missile system, according to the Times.
The step up of forces in the fight against ISIS in Raqqa and Mosul might "include expanding the use of American Special Operations forces, raising the troop ceilings on United States forces in Iraq and Syria and having the White House delegate more authorities to the Pentagon and its commanders in the field, to speed up decision-making," the Times reported.
Funding for Secretary's Mattis' plan will have to be approved in Congress, but head of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has called to up military spending $430 billion for the next five years.
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