President Obama said it is time for the United States to "start going on some offense" to stop the advances of the Islamic State in the Middle East as he prepared to announce the next phase of the U.S. effort that he said would require additional resources in the region.

"There's going to be a military element to it," Obama said in an interview to air Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And what I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We're going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we're going to defeat them."

In a wide-ranging interview with moderator Chuck Todd, Obama also signaled for the first time he is likely to dispatch military resources to help deal with an serious outbreak of Ebola in several African countries. That comes in the wake of his administration's request of Congress last week of $58 million to help deal with that medical crisis, which Obama emphasized was not a threat to the United States.

Obama's remarks on the security situation in the Middle East came as the U.S. military launched a series of new airstrikes late Saturday against the Islamic State, also known by the abbreviation ISIL, which had been threatening to seize control of a second giant dam that generates electricity and irrigation for much of the country. In the "Meet the Press" interview, which was conducted Saturday at the White House, the president did not specify what stepped-up military efforts he had authorized, but he emphasized, as he has repeatedly, that it would not include commitments of large numbers of U.S. combat troops on the ground....