Donald Trump promised during the campaign to implement a "secret plan" to defeat ISIS, including a pledge to "bomb the hell out of" the terror group in Iraq and Syria.
Now, the Pentagon has given him a secret plan, but it turns out to be a little more than an "intensification" of the same slow and steady approach that Trump derided under the Obama administration, two senior officials who have reviewed the document told NBC News.
The plan calls for continued bombing; beefing up support and assistance to local forces to retake its Iraqi stronghold Mosul and ultimately the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria; drying up ISIS's sources of income; and stabilizing the areas retaken from ISIS, the officials say.
Two prominent military strategists told NBC News they fear the plan is insufficient, and won't fulfill Trump's pledges to "totally obliterate ISIS" and do it quickly.
"The current plan to defeat the Islamic State is just like that old saying: Plan B is just, 'Try harder at Plan A,'" said retired Admiral James Stavridis, an NBC News analyst. "We have not come up with new ways of approaching this. I would say the president might want to send that report back to his team to take another hard look."
The irony of the similarities between the Obama plan and the Trump plan is that as a candidate, Trump repeatedly called Obama's ISIS strategy a failure
"We have to be unpredictable starting now. But they're going to be gone," he said in August. "ISIS will be gone if I'm elected president. And they'll be gone quickly."
Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told NBC News that the defense department "delivered a preliminary plan to accelerate the defeat of ISIS" a plan that is "is serving as the basis for broader discussions with the White House and our interagency partners."
Davis said the preliminary plan sent to the White House is a grand strategy - which places even more emphasis on diplomacy, economics and information than it does on the military. It creates, he says, a framework for more tactical questions to be answered later.
