The United States needs to do more to battle the extremist ideology of ISIS, said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter during his keynote speech at ASC15. “We are having strategic impact eliminating leadership, [the] ability to mobilize, organize, and so forth, but they take advantage of the information domain in a way that we don’t really have an established way of countering,” he said on Wednesday. The Defense Department is not the only entity responsible for battling ISIS, he said, and “it’s so important to keep in mind that the fight against ISIL is not only a military fight. … I know we’ll be successful but it’s not the whole battlefield,” said Carter. “That’s why we talk about the strategy of … countering finance, countering foreign fighters, [and] countering messaging.” Carter, however, remains confident in the Air Force, saying, “Our airmen … have conducted two-thirds of all air strikes against ISIL since last September” and they have enabled “partners on the ground to begin to take back the territory ISIL took in Iraq last summer.”
Since President Donald Trump first unveiled his “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative in late January, much of the focus for it has been focused on space—how the Pentagon may deploy dozens, if not hundreds, of sensors and interceptors into orbit to protect the continental U.S. from missile barrages. But the Air…