Top U.S. military officials are considering deploying ground troops to Iraq ahead of a reported offensive in early 2015 designed to take back key portions of the country captured by the Islamic State group.

The recommendation would sharply contrast with President Barack Obama’s current and contested position of refusing to allow any U.S. combat forces to return to Iraq, which some military leaders believe hinders their mission.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September that he would consider recommending the deployment of ground troops if he felt the situation on the ground merited it. He confirmed to the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning that such a deployment might be necessary when the Iraqi security forces attempt in the spring to wrest the Sunni Muslim strongholds of Anbar province and Mosul – Iraq’s second-largest city – back from Islamic State group control.

Iraqi forces additionally will need to secure the border with Syria, where The Associated Press says the Islamic State group and al-Qaida-affiliated fighters reportedly have agreed to work together in a pact that also could affect the U.S. military strategy.

“We’re not predicting yet they would need to be accompanied by U.S. forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” Dempsey said during his testimony. He discussed the “modest footprint” of roughly 1,400 U.S. forces currently in Iraq and largely based around operations centers in Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Irbil. An expected total of 3,100 troops ultimately will deploy to help advise and train Iraqi forces and help the government with command and control operations.

“Any expansion of that I think would be equally modest,” Dempsey said.

Islamic State fighters continue to lay siege across Iraq and Syria while battling an emaciated, U.S.-trained Iraqi military torn apart by corruption and poor leadership since the full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.

Obama repeatedly has said he would not send U.S. ground forces into Iraq in a combat role. But he likely will face opposition on that restriction from lawmakers, even in a lame-duck Congress. Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said a force authorization bill specifying the U.S. will not deploy ground troops would be “DOA in Congress.”

“How can you successfully complete the mission you’ve been given,” the California Republican asked Thursday, “when some of your best options have been taken off the table?”

In his testimony, Dempsey described a dire picture in America’s former war zone, where cronyism during the reign of recently ousted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki degraded much of the military strength the U.S. helped install. The terrorizing effect of the Islamic State group’s summer offensive also prompted local troops to strip off their uniforms and flee.

Two years ago, there was a time when a man could “purchase command” of an Iraqi military brigade, Dempsey said.

“And a mythology built up around ISIL that it is unstoppable,” he said, using a common acronym for the Islamic State group.

The new Iraqi government under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced this week it had removed 36 top officers from their command. Their replacements have not yet been named, said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who testified alongside Dempsey.

The blame, however, does not lie solely with Iraq and the al-Maliki regime.

“We left Iraq and we left it with some things undone,” said Dempsey, referring to the 2011 withdrawal, during which the U.S. was unable to secure a status-of-forces agreement that would have allowed a residual U.S. military presence beyond the American Embassy in Baghdad. “We hadn’t fully established a logistics architecture, an intelligence architecture; they did not have close air support and the ability to integrate fires.”

“We left there with a Ministry of Defence that was largely dysfunctional in the way it would assign leadership,” Dempsey said. (Indeed, al-Maliki himself performed the role of defense minister throughout his tenure.) “They knew that. They knew we knew that, it was not a completed work.”

The U.S. military is now focused on re-establishing the Iraqi military once again, which Dempsey says will require training 80,000 troops. That mission will cost roughly $5 billion, to be approved by Congress through the Defense Department’s 2015 Overseas Contingency Operations fund. The military needs $3.4 billion for its own direct actions, which currently cost $8 million per day, and an additional $1.6 billion for the train-and-equip mission.

Hagel said the nature of the threat justifies the cost.

“We’ve never seen a threat like ISIL before,” he said. “It’s new. The threat is significantly worse than we’ve ever seen before, not just in Iraq but in the Middle East.”