The US is building up its presence inside Syria, sending 200 more special operations troops to continue assisting in the advance to ISIS’s self-proclaimed capital. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he requested the additional troops as part of a new phase in the fight, focused on expelling ISIS from Raqqa. The troops “play a vital role in helping to identify, build, and then enable the force that will expel ISIL from Raqqa and be a critical part of destroying ISIL here in Iraq and Syria, which we must do and which we will do,” Carter said Sunday during a briefing at Qayyarah West Airfield in Iraq. There are already about 300 troops inside Syria embedded with Syrian Democratic Forces advancing on the capital. US troops had also been embedded with Turkish forces.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week released strategies meant to focus the Pentagon’s “alphabet soup” of innovation organizations and proliferate artificial intelligence—moves that experts say could provide the structure needed to make the military’s efforts to integrate and field new technology more effective.
