Tom Cotton explains what need to be done to defeat the enemy

Washington Examiner:

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... The president consistently puts arbitrary caps on troop levels. He consistently makes it hard for generals to make honest, even-handed requests for troops. The rules of engagement are too limiting, in my opinion.

Some of the rules that our intelligence community has to follow are too limiting. So there are multiple changes that we need to make to take the fight to the Islamic State. I have great praise for the FBI and domestic law enforcement agencies, but we can't keep our country safe, we can't stop terrorist attacks on defense.

Ultimately in a country as large as ours, terrorists are going to get through, as we've seen in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Fort Hood, at the Boston Marathon and in Chattanooga and so forth. We have to win the war on terror on offense, and that means going to places where groups like the Islamic State and al Qaeda are developing safe havens in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and so forth.

Examiner: Are there specific countries in which we should have more ground forces?

Cotton: Our generals say, sometimes publicly and sometimes off the record, that they need more troops in Iraq to help train the Iraqi forces and work with the Sunni tribes to defeat the Islamic State. Troop levels are always going to be something that depend on conditions on the ground.

Not just in places where we're fighting actively, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in places like Japan and South Korea and Italy and Germany as well. In general, I think it's a good thing that we have more interaction with foreign governments and foreign militaries.

Just sending a 12-man Green Beret team to a small country for three months to help train their special forces or to help train their security police can yield huge dividends not just for that country, but for us as well, because it gives them the capabilities they need to control their own territory, and to prevent their territories from being used by terrorist groups like the Islamic State, like al Qaeda, like al Shabaab, like Boko Haram.
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There is much more.

I think Cotton is a rising star in the Senate.  He is smart and articulate and he has a commanding presence.   We need more people like him in Congress.