Trump poised to seek new military options for defeating IS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is expected to ask the Pentagon for ways to accelerate the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, and officials said the options probably would include steps the Obama administration considered but never acted on, from adding significantly more U.S. troops to boosting military aid to Kurdish fighters

Trump's visit Friday to the Defense Department's headquarters will start the conversation over how to fulfill his inauguration address pledge to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism "completely from the face of the Earth."

Among the possible options are sending in more Apache helicopters and giving the U.S. military broader authority to make routine combat decisions, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing discussions.

The officials weren't authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

As a candidate and now president, Trump has never articulated a detailed plan for defeating IS, and his thoughts on a strategy are murky.

He has railed against the trillions of dollars that America's post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost. But he suggested at one point that he would have "no choice" but to exponentially expand the Obama administration's limited footprint of American forces fighting the militants.