Within the administration, there was said to have been no serious talk of sending forward air controllers to the front with Iraqi or Kurdish forces, or of dramatically expanding the American military presence.
Republican lawmakers have blasted Obama over his approach to the conflict, with some hawks demanding a more aggressive stance that would include spotters on the ground to direct bombing raids and a larger-scale air war.
But even the broader training mission may pose its own difficulties.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government has struggled to provide enough recruits for courses and ensuring units show up properly equipped, officials said.
“We’d like to see… more Sunnis come into the pipeline and be trained,” Warren said. “This is what we have urged Abadi to help solve.”
After meeting Abadi on Monday in Germany, Obama said the Iraqi side needed to show it could make use of extra help being offered by the United States and other members of the anti-Islamic State coalition.
“All the countries in the international coalition are prepared to do more to train Iraq security forces if they feel that additional work is being taken advantage of,” Obama said on the sidelines of the G7 summit.
“And one of the things we’re still seeing in Iraq is places where we have more training capacity than we have recruits.”
Obama said he was waiting for final plans to be presented by the Pentagon.
US concerns about the Iraqi army’s ability to absorb the training were highlighted by the absence of trainees at al-Asad air base in Anbar province, where several hundred American troops are stationed to help with combat instruction.
The Pentagon said Baghdad had pulled out the trainees and redeployed them to help provide security for a religious pilgrimage.
The US-led coalition has trained 8,920 Iraqi troops so far in basic combat skills and 2,601 are going through courses now.
The US-trained troops have deployed to Samarra, north of Baghdad, to a front line in the north with Kurdish peshmerga forces, and in al-Karmah in Anbar province, Warren said.
Other units that completed the training are at the ready for an eventual counterattack to retake the western city of Ramadi, which fell to IS jihadists on May 17.
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