Defense Secretary nominee Ashton Carter (AP Photo)

“It doesn’t sound like a strategy to mean, but maybe we can flesh out your goals. It sounds like a series of goals to me,” McCain said at Carter's confirmation hearing Wednesday.

“The strategy connects ends and means, and our ends with respect to ISIL needs to be its lasting defeat,” Carter said when asked what he understands the strategy to be. “I say lasting, because it’s important that when they get defeated, they stay defeated, and that is why it’s important that we have those on the ground there who will ensure that they stay defeated once defeated.”

“It’s different on the two sides of the border,” he said. “It’s one enemy, but there’s two different contexts. In Iraq, the force that will keep them defeated is the Iraqi Security Forces. Our strategy is to strengthen them and to make them that force.”

Meanwhile, on the Syrian border, the U.S. is trying to build the force that will keep ISIS defeated, which will be “a combination of moderate Syrian forces and regional forces,” Carter said.

Later in an exchange with Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Carter repeated the comments he made to McCain, adding that the U.S. should avoid a repeat of the experience it had with former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who resigned in 2014 amid pressurefrom the U.S. for the Shiite leader to be more inclusive of Sunnis to avoid a civil war. He was largely blamed for ISIS’s takeover of the region.

“With respect to the strategy for ISIS, I would describe it in the following way: strategy is about connecting ends and means, and the end here is the defeat of ISIS and the sustained or lasting defeat of ISIS.”

“And to achieve that lasting defeat of ISIS, we are trying to rebuild the morale and power of the Iraqi military and the confidence of its government in a multi-sectarian approach so that we don’t revisit the Maliki experience, which led to the disintegration of the Iraqi Security Forces,” Carter added.

“So on that side of the border, the lasting defeat will be made lasting by an Iraqi Security Forces and associated security forces in Iraq that are rebuilt. One enemy, two locations,” he said.

“To get to the other location, Syria, I believe the approach there similarly needs to be to inflict a lasting defeat, and in order to do that, we need a partner. We are trying to build that partner in terms of a moderate Syrian force and local forces from the region that can – with our air power and other kinds of assistance – inflict defeat on ISIS and then make it a lasting defeat,” Carter said.

“So that’s how I’d characterize what I see. I’m obviously not in the councils of government, but that’s what I infer,” he added.