WASHINGTON -- The U.S. is overhauling its approach to fighting the Islamic State in Syria, abandoning a failed Pentagon effort to build a new ground force of moderate rebels and instead partnering with established rebel groups, officials said Friday.
The shift, telegraphed weeks ago by disclosures that the effort had produced only a handful of trained rebels, is meant partly to take better advantage of U.S. air power, which can play a bigger role now that Turkey is permitting U.S. fighter jets to operate from its soil.
However, officials do not expect the change to immediately give new momentum to a slow-moving -- some would say stalled -- U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State, also referred to by the acronym ISIS.
The aim is to work with established rebel units "so that over time they can make a concerted push into territory still controlled by ISIL," said Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook, using another acronym for the Islamic State. Others said the hope is to put much more pressure on the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State's declared capital.
The change also reflects growing concern in President Barack Obama's administration that Russia's airstrikes have complicated the Syrian battlefield. Russian warplanes have conducted scores of airstrikes, and Moscow has fired a barrage of cruise missiles at targets in Syria.
"We need to be flexible. We need to be adaptive," said Brett McGurk, a top adviser to Obama on the fight against the Islamic State. "Is it best to take those guys out and put them through training, or to keep them on the line fighting and give them equipment and support?"
The U.S. has had success working, for example, with Syrian Kurds and Sunni Arab rebel groups in northern Syria. The U.S. believes that a capable ground force is essential for success against Islamic State, but those troops will not be American.
"I remain convinced that a lasting defeat of ISIL in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated and capable ground forces," Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a written statement.
Administration officials said the new Pentagon approach focuses heavily on equipping and supporting Sunni Arab rebel groups that the U.S. military has been coordinating with in recent months as they, along with Syrian Kurdish rebels, take and hold ground east of the Euphrates River.
The Pentagon will provide leaders of these groups with "basic" equipment, such as ammunition and communications gear, while vetting them for links to terrorism, and then call on them to identify and pinpoint Islamic State targets for airstrikes.
Only the rebel groups' leaders will be vetted, whereas the abandoned training program included an arduous requirement that every individual fighter be screened.
"We are very careful to provide support to groups who are not involved in that type of activity," said Benjamin Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.
The idea is to begin small and then build up the level of U.S. support for these established rebel groups, based on their performance.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a frequent critic of Obama's Syria policy, said Friday that continuing to insist that rebels fight only against the Islamic State is a "fundamental flaw" of the revised U.S. approach.
"This problem, compounded by the administration's immoral refusal to protect those we train from [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's bombs, could doom this new effort to the same failure as the previous one," McCain said.
Administration officials sought to discourage the idea that the training effort was ending. Instead, they said it is "evolving."
Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon's policy chief, told reporters that the effort to train and equip a new rebel fighting force, as intended when the program began early this year, is being "paused" but might be restarted one day.
The new aim is to "work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our airstrikes," Wormuth said.
Congress approved $500 million for the program, but much of that is unspent. As of May, $41.8 million had been spent, according to the Pentagon's latest public accounting. An official familiar with the program said Friday that the total is now close to $300 million. The official was not authorized to discuss the details and so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Since 2013, the CIA has trained some 10,000 rebels to fight Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces. Those groups have made significant progress against strongholds of the Alawites, Assad's sect, but are now under Russian bombardment, officials said. The covert CIA program is the only way the U.S. is taking on Assad militarily.
Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, say he is a bulwark against all manner of terrorists, including the Islamic State. The United States has long insisted that Assad is the problem and has to go, though possibly as part of a negotiated transition.
The administration is under heavy criticism in Congress for what some say is a flawed approach in Syria, amplified by Russia's moves to launch ship-based cruise missile strikes and deploy fighter aircraft and battlefield weaponry -- actions that caught the U.S. by surprise and underscored the failure of the Pentagon's program to train and equip rebels.
"The administration has had a weak, inadequate policy in Syria and a weak, inadequate policy against ISIS," said Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "Adjusting one program, even if it were successful, will not solve the problem."
The White House is to provide classified briefings to lawmakers and their senior aides on Capitol Hill to explain the impending changes to the train-and-equip program.
Carter said Friday that the new Pentagon approach is in line with the administration's basic formula of leveraging U.S. and coalition air power by coordinating with anti-Islamic State rebels on the ground.
"I wasn't happy with the early efforts" of the program, Carter said during a news conference in London. "So we have devised a number of different approaches."
Citing the work with the Kurds along the Syrian-Turkish border, Carter said: "That's exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward."
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press and by Michael D. Shear, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.
A Section on 10/10/2015