UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- sat before that congressional committee, took the oath, faced the cameras and delivered some hard news.</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): And the Pentagon is now defending how involved Defense Secretary Ash Carter is in overseeing the war.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is actively engaged in every aspect of this fight.</s>STARR: But Carter has deferred to Secretary of State John Kerry to lead U.S. discussions with Russia about its military involvement in Syria. Russia is now averaging two flights daily into Syria bringing in troops and weapons. The latest commercial satellite imagery capturing four Russian military helicopters on the ground, the first combat aircraft. One U.S. intelligence estimates up to 500 Russian troops already there. The Russian foreign minister has told Kerry it's all to fight</s>ISIS. JOHN KERRY, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: I'm not taking that at face value because we look at the type of airplanes or the type of munitions and so forth and it obviously raises much more serious questions about what is happening.</s>STARR: Worried that what is happening is the Russians are preparing to defend Bashar Al Assad. I will tell you, Jake, that many military officials I speak to are increasingly frustrated. One of them telling me we are fighting with two hands tied behind our back. That's a direct quote. They say that General Austin has put forward proposals to deal with some of these issues and that the White House and the Pentagon simply have not yet signed off on them -- Jake.</s>JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Barbara Starr for us at the Pentagon. Thank you so much. We heard a little bit about those frustrations in the Republican presidential debates yesterday. The next president, whoever he or she is, will inherit this fight against ISIS. In the debates last night in the first one, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, he got repeated applause from the crowd for his strategy to fight ISIS. Today, he'll talk to me about his rivals who criticized the current plan without bringing up one of their own. My conversation with the senator from South Carolina comes up next.
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