Transcript: Webinar – Iran’s Two Fronts: Growing Links Between the Middle East and Ukraine Wars
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PANELISTS
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Former Commander of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe; JINSA Generals and Admirals Program Participant
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
Former Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command; JINSA Generals and Admirals Program Participant
The discussion was moderated by JINSA Associate Director of Foreign Policy Ari Cicurel.
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Ari Cicurel
I’m joined by General Philip Breedlove, the former commander of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and Lieutenant General Thomas Bergerson, former deputy commander of U.S. Central Command. Both generals participated in JINSA’s Generals and Admirals program. If you have questions for the panel, as always, please submit them through Zoom. General Breedlove, I’ll start with you.
Ukraine recently struck Iranian and Russian cargo vessels in the Caspian Sea to disrupt the supply line between the two countries. How significant was that operation and is that something Ukraine can sustain to disrupt Iranian logistics over time?
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Well, first, thanks for having me on, and it’s a pleasure to be on with my friend Tom. This started not as a part of any sort of a contra-Iran cooperation, but what you have seen in the beginning was that Ukraine essentially has now taken the Black Sea from Russia, and Russia’s fleet has had to go to the extreme eastern edge, and even there, Ukraine is hitting their ships and things that are there. Recently, you saw them hit a submarine, which is a big deal.
The next extension is this new growth in Ukraine’s ability to precisely target and to reach out and touch with indigenously built equipment as well as some equipment acquired from the Europeans.
Russia has now moved its smuggling and shipping of banned items into the Caspian Sea and the corridor that comes down out of Russia. So, now it’s a natural extension, Ukraine is reaching out and touching those military items that are traveling on those two bodies of water, and it so happened that some of those shipments were Iranian and Ukraine is not shy to hit, no matter who sends it.
So, I think that Iran is taking umbrage, and now we see that this is probably going to grow into a wider part of both the Ukraine and the U.S.-Iran conflict.
Ari Cicurel
General Bergeson, from the U.S. Central Command perspective, how is Iranian drone technology transferred to Russia and their growing weapons production cooperation looped back to threaten American forces and partners across the Middle East?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
Well, Ari, thank you for the opportunity to be on this panel with my good friend General Breedlove. Let me just do a quick background scene setter, if you will, and then we’ll get into your specific question, if that’s okay with you.
Ari Cicurel
Absolutely.
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
Iran and Russia, post-Soviet Union, have had mutual interest and alignment. In contemporary times, when I was at Central Command, I saw a lot of cooperation between those two nations, specifically in Syria, in support of the Assad regime. The Russians had interest in maintaining an airbase at a port on the Mediterranean, principally fighting in support of Assad. Taking on ISIS and other those actors there, while Iran really had the interest in maintaining an open corridor through Syria to supply Lebanese Hezbollah.
Although they did align on counter ISIS activities a little bit. We came up against Russian forces; U.S. forces did on a couple of occasions. The Wagner Group, when they tried to cross the river and kind of affect our forces operating in northeast Syria, so there was some contact there. Most of the time we agreed to kind of go along and get along. We deconflicted more than we cooperated on missions, but there was a nascent capability for the one-way attack drones that the Iranians had developed that they started to use in northeast Syria.
These drones sometimes threatened U.S. forces but mostly went after other kinds of targeting. We saw the development then and the cooperation between the Russians and the Iranians at that time. Fast forward to today, their technology has advanced quite considerably, and I would say there’s a lot of learning that’s been occurring both the Russian and Ukraine side, as far as the building of these types of one-way attack drones, their ability to survive heavy electronic jamming environments, satellite jamming environments, and still be effective for navigating and striking the targets, the distances, the altitudes they’re able to achieve now. I think they’ve come a long way, and so we can see that technology sharing has been occurring.
The Russians and the Iranians signed a Comprehensive Strategic Security Agreement in January 2025. It’s not a mutual defense treaty per se, but it did expand the scale of the sharing that was happening from a technology perspective. What we’ve seen today is clearly the Iranians and the Russians are supplying each other with various technologies that are being used on the battlefield against Ukraine. I think Ukraine is in their interest to try to interdict that to the extent they’re able to.
So, and what we’ve seen the Russians provide is the quid pro quo here is I think superb intelligence that the Iranians don’t possess on the location and disposition of U.S. forces and other forces in the region. Specifically, attacks like Prince Sultan Air Base were very precise and methodical. Maybe even more concerning the recent attack on the airbase in Jordan, which went after our air defense artillery sites, again requires a lot of knowledge of those systems’ capabilities, how to avoid them, and then hit them with a lot of accuracy.
So, that’s where we stand now, as I see it. I’ll turn it back over to you, Ari, for any follow-up questions.
Ari Cicurel
Thank you. My next follow up question was going to be on the satellite intelligence and the aid that Russia provides, which clearly seems to be something Iran would not have to be able to do on its own.
General Breedlove, Ukraine has struck Russian defense industrial facilities. The U.S. and Israel have done the same in Iran. What effect do those campaigns had on Russians and Iranians’ ability to produce weapons, and what effects will that have? Not just amid the current war and the current fight, but their abilities are going forward.
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Well, this is a wide-ranging question, and I’ll start first with Russia, and then move to Iran. Russia has a plethora of missiles, and so they are firing rather indiscriminately into target sets in Ukraine that we would describe as counter value, not counterforce. Meaning, the counter value gets after many civilian interests, civilians, and the things that support the industry and civilian support of the war. Most believe that Russia’s goal is not so much to defeat their military because they’ve run slam into a wall trying to do that, but they’re now trying to separate the Ukrainian people from the Ukrainian leadership and get them to try to rise up against their government.
What we see now is Ukraine starting a campaign that is very similar to that, with one major exception, we do not see Ukraine purposely targeting civilians, but they are targeting civilian institutions to create unrest.
For instance, this whole wild berry campaign. Wildberries, which is the Amazon of Russia, has had some impact and handled some movement of goods to support the war, but the attack on the wild berries, most of us believe, is really about taking that away from the Russian people. This gets after the Russian population without killing people, they’re taking away these goods, services and capabilities. Wildberries are a weird thing where individual investors have their goods in the system, and when those goods are destroyed, there is no recompense to the investors and so forth. These campaigns are creating a lot of problems for Putin in the rear and all of us understand that the campaign against the petrochemical industry in Russia is significantly affecting the Russian population but it is also extremely infecting Russia’s ability to push force forward and sustain that force.
I think that what we see out of Russia is a I hate to call it strategic, but a fairly wanton attack on the people of Ukraine, trying to separate them from their government and Ukraine out of a lesser number of weapons is being very tactically targeting against two chains that are having a great effect in Russia.
Now going over to Iran, I think I do not have any special insight, Tom may. I believe that we have done a pretty good job of getting after the industrial capacity to rebuild. I don’t think we have done as well on getting after the stored missiles that are in hand in Iran, and we probably are learning that we didn’t have a good count on how many they had before because we have been striking hard, precisely, and with good effect on that target set. But they still have the capability to reach out and strike, and I believe that Iran right now, specifically the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], their mantra is we don’t have to win this war; we just have to survive to perpetuate the war. The Lloyds of London and the voters will win the war for us. I think we have got to consider: Are we using our ways and means in the appropriate manner to get to the ends that we want?
Ari Cicurel
General Bergeson, I’ll turn over to you as just a follow-up on that. When you look at the lessons from Ukraine and Iran, what are your takeaways for how we should be thinking about preparations for offensive operations, and I guess the utility of how we consider whether our strikes will be successful.
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
I agree with General Breedlove in that going into the conflict with Iran, you know what you know, but you also know you don’t know everything. So, we have very good intelligence to be able to locate missile launchers, which for ballistic missiles is key. I think the Israelis did a super job of targeting those because you have far fewer launchers than you have missiles. If you can take those out, you can really get a number of effects by doing that. But these one-way attack drones, which are relatively small and storable in any number of warehouses or caves, I think we had some idea about where they were, what their numbers were.
But the war actually starts to reveal where they may be emanating from. You learn while you’re fighting. I think that during the first three weeks, we’re really focused on hitting some strategic targets, but also just gaining and maintaining a level of air superiority, so we have more unfettered access to that region. That was our principal targeting effort and going after the known storage locations and manufacturing facilities. I think we stopped a little bit soon because I think we probably have learned more and were ready to kind of continue on to the next phase of the campaign and start targeting some of the other storage sites that we weren’t aware of, and we still probably don’t know where they all are. But we are learning more everyday as we watch their operations. But they had quite an extensive capacity, as we’re seeing. I think they’re being resupplied, and also, they’re also supplying Russia, which is really if they’ve got enough to supply Russia during this fight, then they’ve got plenty built to impose the kinds of costs that they’re trying to do throughout the region. I guess it’s an age-old lesson, which is you go into war with what, but you’re going to learn and adapt because the enemy has a vote, and you have to be willing to adjust your campaign based on the realities on the ground and what you see.
Ari Cicurel
Similarly, on lessons learned, General Bergeson, Iran dispersed its missile and storage sites through dozens of underground sites that are harder to hit. Russia has tried hardening some of its plants, and Ukraine has done some redistribution. You both mentioned the hits that the U.S. faced on sites in the Gulf.
As you look at our posture and our force protection in the region, what lessons do you take from these wars and how we should be posturing ourselves in the Middle East going forward?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
When I was at CENTCOM, we had and the commanders that I served, were advocating with the U.S. government for building out a Western defense network, right? We knew that we were perfectly postured to fight Desert Storm, but we were not postured to fight Iran in any way, shape, or form.
There was a real effort to try to gain advocacy for building some air bases, ports on the Red Sea, and kind of shift things to make it less vulnerable. That didn’t happen, and it wasn’t just one administration that didn’t do it. There were multiple administrations from both parties. We recognized that it would be hard, and I think that proved to be true to some extent. Now, I think masterfully working basing in places like Israel has been very effective in creating a little bit of defense in depth there. But we went into this not postured well to fight, and it’s only a lesson if you change your behavior, otherwise it’s just an observation, as one wise general once told me. As we’re looking forward to things like the Pacific or North Korea, for example. Are we postured if we had to go fight tonight in those areas?
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Let me just jump on that because there is a tough problem to consider and learn from and move forward from here. Russia and we have long thought the idea of a wide distribution of fighting assets was going to be what we needed to protect them in a war. Especially in Russia, their military capabilities, storage sites, command and control, are widely dispersed. In this age of these ballistic missiles and long-range drones, that becomes a problem and not a solution in that now you don’t have enough air defense capability to defend them all. If your opponent understands how to figure that out, they know where the unprotected sites are and guess where the targeting is going to focus. We in the Middle East, for all the right reasons, have a wide distribution of places that we are and capabilities, and we’re learning that can be a hindrance. Russia is learning in a big way that they don’t have enough capability to defend all the sites they have. I’m not saying that the answer is to cluster, but I think we’re going to have to think a little more seriously in the future about what is our capability to defend and how do we distribute our forces and capabilities into areas that we know we can defend. As opposed to thinking that by scattering them all over, we’ve done the right thing. We’re learning that can be a problem.
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
That’s a fantastic point, and I’ll add about another lesson learned. The enemy also has been learning lessons, and I think that we haven’t mentioned North Korea, which is also a party in all this conflict, with forces actually fighting against Ukraine, and they’re developing and learning new technologies that they’ll bring back to North Korea to put more costs potentially on the South. The military training and sharing between North Korea and Iran were apparent in the dispersal and the use of tunneling. I don’t think there’s probably not a country in the world that’s better at concealment, deception, and protection than North Korea, and so I think a lot of that sort of thing that the Iranians have done, they’ve learned from the North Korean playbook.
Ari Cicurel
I wanted to recommend two reports to the audience based on these points. One on the Western basing network concept, former CENTCOM General Frank McKenzie wrote a report for JINSA, U.S. bases in the Middle East Overcoming the Tyranny of Geography, that pointed out a lot of the problems we’ve seen with the Iran war on the vulnerability of our basing and also recommending basing in Israel. The second, Base for Success, U.S. Basing Options in Israel, was co-authored by General Berguson, recommending U.S. deploy aircraft to Israel shortly before, of course, the U.S. did that for this war.
General Breedlove on the lessons learned from these wars, by all reported accounts, the U.S. has used a large number of its both offensive and defensive munitions in the Iran war, alongside sending munitions to Ukraine, and that taking up a lot of the defense industrial base, which is already overtaxed.
What are your takeaways from the rate of munition use in a fight against a country like Iran and where our current defense industrial base is to put out the level of munitions that we need?
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
I’m going to answer the second part because this is something I’m engaging in as I’m a local part-time professor at Georgia Tech. The response of the American industrial base, we have spent a period in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, where we were very much acting like a nation at peace, trying to find relationships with former enemies or oppressors, and during that time, our contracting and our acquisition models changed immensely.
During that time, not only were we buying less and living off the fat of the Reagan years and things, but we were beginning to limit the way that contractors could act. Most of the time because there had been bad behavior somewhere where somebody was abusing a contract. We have a lot of laws that literally restrict building excess capacity into a contract. You can’t buy 100 widgets and build on the same contract to build a line that could build 200 widgets. You will be taken down legally for something like that. What we have done across the past several decades is creating an acquisition model and a relationship with the primes and industry. Whereby we do not invest in excess capacity. Now we get to a point where, as you set it up, Ari. We need some excess capacity, and we need to start doubling, tripling, and quadrupling in some cases prime end items, and the excess capacity is not there.
The first statement I would like to make about this is: we, meaning DOW, Congress, and the executive branch, have got to figure out how we incentivize but retain oversight of industry such that they can invest in excess capacity. If we just sit here buying 25 packs a year, don’t build capability to go well beyond that. That number is a foolish number. I’m just throwing it out there. The fact of the matter is that we have got to figure out how we permanently incentivize the major primes or industries such that we can surge.
The days of Rosie the River Riveter are long gone. These end items are not built like that. The way the supply chains are built is not like that, and we’ve got to develop capability and capacity. We learn that lesson every single day.
Okay, now Ari, remind me of the first part of the question.
Ari Cicurel
Yeah, thank you. You answered most of it. As a reply, the rate of fires that have occurred in these wars, does that surprise you? Is that what you would expect from these kinds of conflicts, and I guess that probably affects the production levels that you talked about.
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Well, it goes back to what we were answering a minute ago, and Lieutenant General Bergeson hit it right on the head when he said we’re perfectly prepared to execute Desert Storm, but we’re not perfectly prepared to fight the fight we see in front of us today.
We have second-tier militaries with thousands and thousands of drones. They are uninhibited. We have lost deterrence. They are uninhibited from firing those things at an opponent, and we’re not prepared for that. We still have, I’m sure, quite a few weapons because we still have to remember there’s a couple of war plans out there that we still have to answer to if called, but the fact of the matter is, our magazines are thin because I do not believe we prepared for what we’re seeing. Widely dispersed U.S. and other allied forces and limited air defense domes to cover them. We have to think through both sides of this problem.
I would also offer that one thing that hurts us in this fight is our country, and probably rightfully so, but just call me a fighter pilot and get over it. Our country thinks of defense. We think of defense. A good fighter pilot will tell you that the best defense is a missile in the air headed at the bad guy. He’s not focused on you when he’s dodging your missile, and so we need to be thinking about our ability to shoot the archers rather than focus on shooting down the arrows. We need to get after them early in a conflict, and we need to make sure we’re not limiting ourselves.
How many years? The Ukraine-Russia war. People keep talking about it as it has only lasted nearly five years. It’s 14 years old. It started when I was the saucer and so how many years have, we told Ukraine they cannot fire into Russia while Russia was firing hundreds, 1,000s, and now 10,000s of missiles in Ukraine? We should have been attriting Russian forces in the spring of 2014, and what we would be facing now would be very different.
Ari Cicurel
General Breedlove, on that point. Ukraine has become the world’s laboratory for drone warfare as well as counter-drone defense. What lessons from that battlefield do you think are most applicable to how the U.S. forces should be either equipping themselves or engaging in combat?
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
I heard one of my fellow SACEURs reporting on TV the other day reporting after he had just come out of Ukraine. Last time I was over there, the numbers were less, but he said that now the drone kill zone is 70 kilometers deep. It’s 35 kilometers either side of the line of contact is what they’re calling the drone kill zone, and the whole concept of how a land force fights in that drone kill zone has changed.
Here’s something we need to do. I believe we need to swallow our pride and adopt a lot of things that Ukraine can teach us about how we fight in that zone. I’m going to sound like I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth, but I also think that there are some bad lessons being learned. I think that part of why drones have grown so fast in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is because both air forces, both have failed.
The Ukrainian air force was small, and we had diminished it as a part of the agreement in 1994, where we took their forces away from them, but their air force was small and old and fought valiantly, but could not hold air superiority over it, even their own forces. Russia’s air force, which we thought was maybe third or fourth best in the world, still can’t hold air superiority over their forces in the theater. Both air forces have failed some of the basic tasks.
Compare that to what we saw in both incursions into Iran by Israel and the United States. Israel and the United States, went in and very rapidly created air superiority over more than half of the nation, air supremacy over about a third of the nation, and what that gave us was an immediate ability of freedom of action to attack, and that incursions both were a drone, which is not talked about much, and a fixed wing set of attacks. Drones had a big role in taking down the defenses of Iran, and of course our fixed wing speed capabilities, both in the form of F-35s and then the block 50 F-16s, they rapidly accomplished. You saw how much easier it was for us to do what we needed to do. If we had chosen to put boots on the ground in Iran, we had set the stage for that in what we did with the air forces of Israel and the United States.
We need to not learn the lesson that drones are the only air force of the future. We have demonstrated in Iran what happens when drones are used well and fixed wings are used well, and we have seen what freedom of maneuver we gain by getting air superiority, which once again I’ll stomp my foot. Russia has not established it in Ukraine and Ukraine sadly cannot yet establish it.
Ari Cicurel
General Bergeson, when you look at the air domain and the acute problem that drones do cause in the ways they’re hitting targets, Hezbollah has deployed first-person view FPV drones and fiber optic drones, just as being used in the battlefield of Ukraine. What would it take to close the gaps against those kinds of threats? Is the U.S. doing enough to work on those kinds of problems?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
First, I agree with everything General Breedlove just said about munitions capacity and then the lessons to learn and to not learn in the Ukraine Russia conflict. I think you can’t defend everything. You can’t defend every square inch of your territory. There’s just not enough to go around.
When you start a conflict, we build a list of the priority locations that we want to make sure we can defend. General Breedloves points out what is opposed to dispersing widely, maybe aggregating to make sure you can defend a certain area if is a better way to go. So, you can have volumes of fire in defense. But that said, these are the new weapons that are out there that are effective to some extent. They don’t have a ton of kinetic kill power, but they still can pose a problem.
I think the Ukrainians have developed some interesting drone intercepting capabilities, et cetera. It’s all about detecting, identifying, and then intercepting, and it’s a very complicated little busy airspace to be able to do those three things effectively. There’s a lot I think we can learn from the Ukrainians in that regard. Look at the Israelis who have learned a lot of these lessons. There’s a lot the U.S. and other nations can learn from the way that the entire iron dome and multi-layer defense of that nation has been very effective. Now you can’t use that same paradigm over the United States, for example, but you get the idea.
I also think that we completely agree with General Breedlove that we can’t mistakenly believe that this is the new way of fighting wars. It’s the “better way of fighting wars.” We’re back in World War I with fancier artillery. That’s really what it is. Most of these drones are short range, low kinetic kill power, killing a troop or a tank or something like that, very accurately and in large numbers, and that has set up the 70-kilometer-wide World War I trench. We’re just a meat grinder. That’s not a better way of fighting because neither nation really has true superiority, the ability to do an interdiction campaign and prevent the enemy from bringing forces forward. So, that’s where you really win in the deep fight.
When it gets to the closed fight, that’s what you must deal with. But you don’t want to go there as you’re opening your position, and I think that’s what we’re seeing to play out. The army would tell you, “Well, it’s bad armies fighting.” I think if Ukraine possessed the kind of air power the United States did, just hypothesize that this would have been over in the first week when you saw that line of armor stalled due to bad logistics by the Russians. I mean it’s an A-10 pilot’s dream, right? Highway of death.
We’ve seen this movie before, but they had no way of being able to deal with that as an example. So, let’s not learn the wrong lessons here as well.
Ari Cicurel
General Bergeson, Zelensky and Netanyahu briefly spoke in person for the first time in three years. I think they spoke in January 2025, but the first time in person was in quite a few years. Is the United States doing enough to bring together these partners for shared lessons learned? Considering these are a lot of similar platforms that Iranian drones that are being used, and two of its closest partners are engaging in high-intensity warfare. Are there things we’d be doing to kind of convene these partners together better?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
I missed the first part. You said with Zelensky, and I missed who I met with?
Ari Cicurel
Netanyahu, yes.
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
I guarantee you that there are discussions going on at a lower level. These nations are smarter and they have ways of being able to share information. So, I’m confident that there has been some of this information exchange that’s occurred. Maybe not at the highest levels like that, but at more tactical levels. But yeah, I think we absolutely should encourage this kind of sharing of intelligence, tactics, techniques, procedures among like-minded nations that are both in existential fights against enemies that are similar. Why not courage that kind of sharing.
Ari Cicurel
General Breedlove, deterrence is a buzzword used a lot in D.C. But when we talk about threats that are cross feeders, cross regions, Iranian drones being used in Ukraine. What exactly does deterrence look like against that kind of threat against Iran? How should we be thinking about deterrence?
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
I don’t want to get to a high level here. I’ve started thinking about deterrence now in four buckets.
The strategic bucket. I think that there is still a good regime of deterrence that the folks involved in the ability to throw strategic weights at strategic distances understand that there’s not a lot of good purchase in moving towards that. I think that our ability to deter there is still pretty good.
Where I differ from many people, I believe that the tactical and sub-tactical level of nuclear exchange has lowered a lot. In Russia, every time things go bad on the battlefield, there’s a new story about a new weapon, the Sarmod, or this, or that, or new submarine torpedo that goes across the ocean. There’s always something that Russia is threatening in the nuclear realm to keep the West at bay, and it works.
The last two administrations have been completely deterred by Russia’s threats of involvement, and so I think that the bar and the use of the threat of tactical nuclear deterrence have been lowered and we are at more risk than before. The next thing is conventional deterrence. I think conventional deterrence inside of NATO is still pretty good, but the conventional deterrence around the rest of the world is, I think, really not good right now.
Russia is undeterred outside of NATO, and you’ve seen that Iran is not deterred at all for taking on two of the best militaries in the world, Israel and the United States. In a conventional sense, we are losing deterrence there, and a big part of that is that my kids wear the clothes of this country, I’m not advocating for war. But if you watch America for the last 10 years, the first thing out of an American mouth when there’s a possibility of a conflict is no boots on the ground, we’re not going to have any boots on the ground.
I think right now the IRGC sees that and says, “we can survive, and all we have to do is survive to win this war.” I think our conventional deterrence is drifting.
The last thing I would say, if you talk about deterrence in the gray zone or below the line of conflict, or as NATO likes to say, hybrid deterrence. I would offer to you that there has literally never been any deterrence in that field. We are all getting attacked all the time, occasionally by our own friends. We get attacked, and so we must work as a framework of establishing deterrence in those areas.
Ari Cicurel
As a reminder to everyone, if you have questions for the panelists, please submit them through Zoom. General Bergeson, the U.S. has organized its combat commands in these separate spheres. Do the Iran-Russia relationship, the throw in North Korea, and crucially China as well, do those growing partnerships argue for either a different approach, or could you explain how the combatant commands work together?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
I think they work very well together in my experience, and you’re never going to get the lines. In the U.S. hegemonic ways of dividing the world up into geographic regions which is what you do in your superpower, you’re going to have seams. But I think we work very collaboratively to fix those things. When it does become kind of problematic, then you can change the unified command plan, and you can readjust. We saw that happen with Israel moving from General Breedlove’s AOR down to Central Command. The time was right for that to happen. I mean they were EUCOM was rightly so very focused on the Russia problem set, and at CENTCOM we were dealing with the Israelis on a daily basis.
It just made sense for that shift to happen. I think there’s still nimbleness in the system that allows us to be able to change when needed but also collaborate on an almost daily basis with some of these combatant commands. We have other non-geographic commands that are supportive, and those are incredibly important. From Cyber Command or Transportation Command, they’re incredibly into all of these combatant commands around the world. I’m not sure if it’s broken.
Interestingly, the State Department alignment is broken up slightly differently. You don’t have perfect alignment between the diplomatic corps and the military. I just want to go back on my pitch quick about the importance of air power and for people not to understand that I’m advocating as like U.S. Air Force air power. When I talk about air power, what America does uniquely is integrating joint fires, so we can integrate into one plan, one attack plan a Navy T-LAM launched from a submarine or a ship 1000 miles away, and an Army ATACAM launched from a closer range, and a JDAM or other error-delivered weapons to create these effects while we have cyber-attacks occurring simultaneously. No one else does that. That’s the difference; it’s the integrating of the joint fires that provides us with the ability to strike deep and hard.
Ari Cicurel
We have a question from [Questioner]. Last week, a video of soldiers wearing what appeared to be Ukrainian insignia and threatening to strike or Iranian targets spread on social media. Some have said it’s a Russian fake. I think, regardless, though, how can exploiting Iran-Ukraine tensions benefit the Kremlin? General Breedlove, I’ll ask you first.
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Anything that Russia can do to distract U.S. attention and Ukrainian attention away from them, they’re going to try it because let’s just be straightforward. Russia is losing soldiers. Years ago, we said they can’t keep doing this at the rate they were losing soldiers then, and they have more than quadrupled those loss rates in the current days and they seem to be just continuing to throw men at the problem.
The fact of the matter is Ukraine’s ability to retake land and now to strike in depth, precisely the supply chains and the formations that support the front is really changing the nature of the war, and Russia needs Ukraine to be distracted. It does not surprise me in the least; that may be an absolutely correct film, but it would fit very nicely into their disinformation campaign.
Ari Cicurel
General Breedlove does the Iran-Russia relationship—I’ll add Iran’s missile fire at Diego Garcia showing what appeared to be longer than expected, changing how NATO should be looking at its Eastern flank over the long term.
Gen Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.)
Well, I think the answer is pretty simple, yes. Let me just say that occurred a long time ago. You may remember that in the early part of the problems we were having in Syria, Russia fired from the Caspian Sea off ships into Syrian targets. If you just take your string and a compass, and you swing that around, that was a demonstration not of our ability or Russia’s ability to really change the Syrian campaign.
In fact, Tom will probably tell us that the tactical value of those strikes was low. But here’s the message that Europe got: the Russians could sit in the Caspian Sea and range all our capitals. So yes, the ability of Russia and Russia sharing with Iran to the point where Iran can reach and touch European capitals or Diego Garcia or at some point sometime the West Coast of the United States. These are all messages we have to consider in our future job jar.
Ari Cicurel
Thank you. General Bergeson Russia and Iran are not the only two players here. North Korea was mentioned earlier and I just mentioned China. So, where does China fit in with this budding relationship with Iran and Russia going forward?
Lt Gen Thomas Bergeson, USAF (ret.)
When it comes to Iran, China is perhaps their most important strategic partner in many respects. There’s clearly been a deepening of the relationship between Russia or China. We’ll find out at some point whether that was a bad deal that Putin made. Did he sell his soul or not?
They are clearly key players and are experiencing a little bit of Schadenfreude right now. Just to enjoy the suffering of others as they see the U.S. again look like we’re sort of strategically trapped to some extent, with the Strait of Hormuz, but China at this point needs oil to be flowing again from Iran. They built a tremendous oil reserve, but that’s not unlimited, and so they need to get that energy back. That also helps us because it’ll hopefully push a little more pressure on Iran circuitously through China, which is probably in some ways a more effective diplomatic actor than are we right now in that region. China is very important in all this.
Ari Cicurel
Thank you. I will leave it there. Thank you to the audience, General Breedlove and General Bergeson, for joining us. You can find all JINSA’s work on our website, jinsa.org. Please check your email inboxes for our next webinar, we have one tomorrow on Gaza. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day.