The Obama administration’s war on the Islamic State is quickly approaching its first birthday, and things don’t seem to be going especially well. The strategy President Obama laid out back in September had two key components for taking on ISIS militarily: The U.S. would provide air power and conduct “a systematic campaign of airstrikes,” and the Iraqi military (with “training” and “support” from U.S. military personnel) would “go on offense” against the terrorist state’s forces.

We’ve made good on our part of the plan: We’ve dropped a lot of bombs and flown a lot of drone missions. But the Iraqi army has remained stubbornly ineffective, even with hundreds of U.S. troops training and arming them. Last month they were driven out of Ramadi by a numerically inferior Islamic State force without putting up too much resistance. After the city fell, Defense Secretary Ash Carter remarked that “what apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight.”

So things don’t seem to be going according to plan. But the White House apparently isn’t quite ready to acknowledge that perhaps a strategic reassessment might be in order. Yesterday the administration announced that some 500 more American military personnel will be sent to Iraq to assist with training and support of the Iraqi army. They’re going to supplement the 3,000 or so military personnel already on the ground there. According to the White House’s official statement: “These new advisors will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead, and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the Prime Minister.”

That’s all well and good, but wasn’t that the goal of the original contingent of “advisers” we deployed to Iraq? According to the New York Times, the focus for this new group of trainers will be on “training Sunni fighters within the Iraqi Army,” and there will be an effort made to “advise and assist Iraqi security forces and to engage and reach out to Sunni tribes in Anbar.” But as the Guardian points out, the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough Americans on the ground to train the Sunnis – it’s that there just aren’t enough Sunnis willing to join the largely Shiite Iraqi army, something Obama himself has acknowledged:

It was additionally unclear how increasing the number of US soldiers available to train Iraqi fighters would overcome a central problem to the training effort most recently spelled out on Monday by Obama: a lack of recruits to train.

“We’ve got more training capacity than we’ve got recruits,” Obama said at the close of a G7 summit in Germany. “It’s not happening as fast as it needs to.”

Hashimi said that only 1,100 Sunnis had taken part in the US training programme, and none of them have graduated from it. In total, about 9,500 fighters have completed the training.