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.”
The U.S. supports “a stronger and more capable” European defense, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said during an Oct. 22 press conference in Brussels—but that defense should not duplicate the functions and capabilities of the NATO alliance.