Top Army leader: Russian Federation “most dangerous” threat

In one of the most negative assessments yet of America’s war against ISIS, Gen. Ray Odierno said the U.S. should commit ground troops to bolster local forces in order to break the “stalemate” against the terror group.

“If we find in the next several months that we aren’t making progress, we should absolutely consider embedding some soldiers [in Iraq]”, he said, including that it is an “option we should present to the President”.

“It might be the only solution but I’m not ready to say that yet”.

“My assessment would be it will be hard to have a Syria that looks like it did before”, he said.

The news conference included a question about Trump, the billionaire realtor and TV celebrity who said recently that, as president, he “would go in and take the oil” to solve the problem of Islamic militants in Iraq and then put troops in place to protect the wells. From December 2006 to February 2008, on his second deployment to Iraq, the Army General served as the commander of all Coalition Forces in the country.

Odierno, who retires Friday, also spoke of the escalating difficulty of reaching reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, supposing that ultimately partitioning the country “might be the only solution”.

General Odierno commanded the Army’s 4th Infantry Division from 2001 to 2004 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“Listen, we all understand why we do this and the risks associated”, Odierno said of military service.

“They love just staying connected to the Army, to the units that their children or sons or daughters or husbands were in, and for me, that’s incredibly important that we do that”, the general said.

Trump kicked off the back-and-forth by saying in a television interview Tuesday that without a money source, ISIS “would start to wither, and they would collapse”, The Washington Post reports.

“We have gained back some territory, mostly by the great work of the Kurds, some work by the Iraqi security forces”, he added, noting the Kurds were continuing to make some progress. He said violence was down, the economy was growing and the political situation was stable. “It’s important for us to support that by training and trying to develop capability and capacity”. “But they are still able to recruit, and get people to come in and fight – and that’s what’s concerning to me”.