A senior Obama administration official says the battle to destroy the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq could take at least three to five years.

State Department spokesman John Kirby, a retired Navy admiral, appeared on a talk show Tuesday to clarify President Barack Obama’s comments at the G7 summit the day before, in which he admitted his administration lacked a “complete strategy” against ISIL.

“We do have a strategy, the president was referring to a specific plan to improve training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces,” Kirby said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Kirby, however, acknowledged that the current strategy needed to be “changed a little bit."

From a military perspective, the retired general said, even if the US and its allies went “all in” against ISIL, the campaign would “take three to five years. It's not going to happen overnight."

Recent setbacks in Iraq and Syria have raised serious doubts about Obama’s strategy, months after he announced an open-ended military air campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the ISIL forces by enlisting the support of scores of allies.

“The ends are very clear, we’ve said this all along, the goal is to degrade and defeat ISIL, to remove them as a threat in the region and frankly, around the world,” Kirby said.

Obama’s characterization of his war strategy sparked strong criticism from a number of lawmakers and officials who framed his leadership as ineffective.

“When is this administration going to figure out that if you want to destroy the enemy, you’ve got to be able to identify the enemy and that requires air controllers on the ground, and that means US troops,” Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services committee, said Monday.

Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden also said that Obama’s comments suggested that the president is using "rhetoric in place of action.”

"To say we're still in search of a strategy… nine months into combat operations, that is a little bit scary," Hayden said in an interview with Newsmax on Monday.

HRJ/HRJ