President Obama is scheduled to meet with congressional leadership on Sept. 9 to discuss the Administration’s plan for using airstrikes to take down the terrorist organization ISIS as part of an international coalition of nations. “The strategy both for Iraq and for Syria is that we will hunt down ISIL members and assets wherever they are,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sept. 7. His meetings with lawmakers will take place on the eve of him addressing the nation on this issue. “What I want people to understand … is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we’re going to defeat ’em,” he said. This will mean the United States will “start going on some offense,” he said. However, he explained, “This is not going to be an announcement about US ground troops” going back into Iraq in large numbers. Such an approach, “would be a profound mistake, and I want to be very clear and very explicit about that,” said Obama. Instead, the United States will support Iraqi and Kurdish troops so that they can roll back ISIS, he said. (Meet the Press transcript)
Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii is trialing novel energy technology to provide electrical power and hydrogen fuel in the kind of isolated and austere outposts the Air Force will need in the Pacific theater for its new Agile Combat Employment way of warfare.