War Against ISIS Becoming Blurrier

Top U.S. military officials say the Islamic State group is spreading. And in a tumultuous battle against an increasingly amorphous enemy, the U.S. appears to lack a consistent and coherent strategy that ultimately will defeat the extremist fighters.

“Aside from setting broad priorities, there’s no plan, no indication of progress, no measures of effectiveness,” says Anthony Cordesman, a former State Department and Pentagon official who regularly advises leaders in both departments. The Obama administration tends to take too long to adopt serious military advice, he says.

“Events and reality certainly have to shape strategy,” says Cordesman, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But if you don’t have a strategy and clear plans, you lack the ability to shape events.”

President Barack Obama, who was elected on a pledge to bring American soldiers home from war, now faces multiple fronts abroad, including the war against the Islamic State group; a civil war in Iraq between the Shiites, Kurds and disenfranchised majority Sunnis; the ongoing war in Afghanistan; and a creeping conflict against traditional al-Qaida forces in places like Yemen.

But the president has distanced himself from directly taking ownership of this war, touting the U.S.-built and led coalition that includes five predominantly Sunni Arab countries, even though the U.S. is doing most of the work.

[READ: Who Are the Kurds, and Why Should We Help Them?]

Top U.S. military officials, meanwhile, reportedly have grown frustrated with what they believe are too many parameters for their mission against the Islamic State group – also known as ISIS and ISIL – in Iraq and Syria: They cannot deploy combat ground forces to either theater or conduct airstrikes in Syria that would entangle the U.S. in the war there between rebel forces and the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Other than these White House mandates, however, no clear plan exists beyond vague rhetoric.

“We have to keep degrading, and ultimately destroying, ISIL in Iraq and Syria,” Obama said Friday after announcing the nomination of former Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to replace Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel. Some insiders believe Hagel turned in his resignation last month in part due to White House micromanagement of a war for which it has no clear plan.

Obama's goals related to the conflict include training Iraqi security forces to fight the extremists, though that didn’t work before and there is no timeline for progress. The administration's plan also requires singling out yet-unidentified moderate elements within the Syrian opposition – without having U.S. forces on the ground to vet them – and delivering them to yet-unidentified camps in Saudi Arabia for at least a year of training. The hope is they will return to Syria and promise to fight the Islamic State group and not Assad.

The Pentagon has compensated for such fuzzy plans by leaning heavily on a new website it has created that documents each strike conducted in Syria and Iraq. A Wednesday release outlined 14 airstrikes near Kobani, Syria, that destroyed vehicles, “fighting positions” (terminology that defense officials have not yet thoroughly explained) and a staging area. In Iraq, four airstrikes in Mosul destroyed five Islamic State group bunkers, two buildings it occupies, a vehicle, fighting positions and two heavy weapons.

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Yet despite these achievements, the war continues to escalate.

Air Force Gen. Paul Selva runs U.S. Transportation Command, which oversees almost all components of the military that involve moving materials from one place to another, including supplies air-dropped to Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish peshmerga.

“In the last few months, the tempo has picked up,” he said on Thursday at a breakfast meeting with reporters. Peshmerga fighters in the north are increasingly in need of ammunition, weapons and other supplies, as are Iraqi government forces operating in the central and southern reaches of the war-torn nation. There are at least two major flights per week into Baghdad or Irbil, two centers of the coalition's war efforts.

“The necessity to resupply them and refresh their equipment has gone up,” Selva said. “It went from a trickle months ago to a pretty regular drumbeat.”

Selva declined to speak further on the kinds of supplies these forces need and where they ultimately end up. But he highlighted what has become a unique feature of this war: U.S. planes, vehicles and ships can easily transport supplies from American hubs to American facilities in war zones like Afghanistan, but that process has become much more complicated in the battle against the Islamic State group.

The U.S. is now responsible for transporting Kurdish weapons from a depot in Irbil to fighters operating in northern Syria, for example. Or, supplies must be transported from a Romanian or Albanian warehouse to Iraqi forces.

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It’s a concept U.S. troops must adopt and get used to, since the conflict only seems to be covering more territory. Army Gen. David Rodriguez casually confirmed on Wednesday that the Islamic State group is now operating in Libya, the center of a brutal civil war raging in the aftermath of the 2011 NATO incursion there.

“ISIL has begun its efforts over in the east out there to introduce some people,” Rodriguez, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said at a Pentagon briefing.

The few hundred insurgents in Libya are mostly working to establish training camps and equip regional extremists, and are not operating a more broad-reaching command and control headquarters – at least, not yet.

“The flow of foreign fighters goes throughout the entire area,” Rodriguez said. “I think it’s just militias trying to make a connection right now.”

Rodriguez said he has not yet recommended troops or air power to address the Islamic State group threat in Africa, but officials are monitoring its potential spread.

U.S. intervention in Iraq and Syria, however, has done little to weaken the extremists' vigor. And a continually murky strategy may only strengthen their foothold.