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No matter who President Obama nominates to replace Chuck Hagel as the next Defense Secretary, the United States faces immense challenges throughout the Middle East.

Reports have circulated that former Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter will be nominated as the next Secretary of Defense, but if reports prove accurate, Carter will face an array of daunting problems throughout the Middle East.

The past few months the U.S. has been focused on dealing with ISIS, but missing is a strategy for dealing with the transition out of Afghanistan.  Military Analyst Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, commented in a report that the administration has ceased to provide any meaningful unclassified data on either the progress of the fighting, or of Afghan forces.

Cordesman continued to report that the president has already had to admit that his previous plan to cap the U.S. training and assistance mission at 9,800 will not work, that at least 12,000 to 15,000 more troops must be deployed, and U.S. combat airpower may be needed in the future. In practice, he may well have to go much further.

A long term strategy will have to be devised not only for Afghanistan, but for Pakistan as well. The Taliban has sanctuary inside the border regions of Pakistan and any strategy which deals with Afghanistan will have to include Pakistan. The question that needs to be asked what is the long term strategy of the U.S. for this volatile region?

As Afghanistan is under the radar, dealing with ISIS has been at the forefront for national security and military strategist for some time now, but senior level military strategists have commented it will take at least three years to remove ISIS from Iraq.

The U.S. will only be able to degrade ISIS but not destroy the Islamic State, and this does not include the militant group’s sanctuary inside Syria.

The Pentagon recently deployed additional forces to the ‘train and assist’ mission and has expanded strike aircraft to include A-10’s, but is running precariously short of drone aircraft and other military assets needed.

Since military operations began inside Iraq in August, and then eventually expanded inside Syria, the U.S. has faced a daunting challenge of training the moderate Syrian forces and has never fully articulated how it will train these forces, or how they will be employed.

The air campaign has inadvertently strengthened the Assad regime, allowing them to attack rebel forces, but in the process have also aided Iran and Hezbollah, who are strong supporters of the Assad government.

At the same time a massive humanitarian crisis inside Syria and along the countries which border Syria has continued unabated, as close to 200,000 have been killed, with 3.2 million refuges outside of the country, and more than 6 million displaced persons, with over half of them being children.

Many have flooded Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, which if left unchecked will eventually overwhelm the resources of these countries.

As the air campaign continues inside Syria and Iraq, the U.S. thus far has been unable to leverage the Sunni tribes in the same manner as the “Arab Awaking” did during the surge of 2007-08, which helped stabilize Iraq.

The difficulties for the U.S. are that the Sunni tribes have been alienated and marginalized by the Shiite government in Baghdad, and will be hard pressed to fight against ISIS. Sunni’s view ISIS as the only force cable to stand up to the Shiite dominated government.

As the situation continues inside Iraq and Syria, other regional powers, to include Russia and Iran, have now become embroiled in the conflict. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Iranian military forces have attacked extremist targets inside Iraq instead of using its various proxy forces.

In Syria, Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Shiite militant movement, and the Iranian paramilitary Al Quds force, have kept President Bashar al-Assad in power, and in Iraq, Iran is cooperating at arm’s length with the United States as the two rivals focus on fighting the Islamic State.

The New York Times continued to report Iran has offered weapons to the Lebanese army and supported the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen that have taken over the capital of Sanna, where on Wednesday a car bomb struck the Iranian ambassador’s residence.

With all the focus on Syria, together with Iraq lost in the strategic policy debate, is the deteriorating situation along the Arabian Peninsula, where Shiite rebels from the north have captured the Yemeni capital and have overrun the government which has been backed and aided by the US.

Yemen is statically located, being situated along a key commercial choke point of Bab el-Mandeb between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, any disruption of oil supplies through this area would have global implications on oil prices.

Finally the continued negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program and the aggressive action by Iran in many of the regional problems listed already will add to the problems the new Secretary of Defense will have to address.

Currently the U.S. lacks a coherent strategy for dealing with Iran and the broader Middle East, whoever the president nominates will face daunting challenges the next two years.