Transcript: Webinar – U.S. Force Posture in the Middle East: An Achilles’ Heel?

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PANELISTS

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.)
Former U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT) Chief of Staff; 2025 JINSA Generals and Admirals Program Participant

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.)
Former U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) Commander; 2018 JINSA Generals and Admirals Program Participant

The discussion was moderated by JINSA Fellow for American Strategy Jonathan Ruhe.

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TRANSCRIPT

Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Jonathan Ruhe: Hello everyone. I’m Jonathan Ruhe, the JINSA Fellow for American Strategy. Thank you for tuning into today’s timely webinar on U.S. force posture in the Middle East amid the backdrop of a weeks-long buildup of forces and tensions between the United States and Iran in the Middle East. These developments follow President Trump’s red line to the Iranian regime around New Year’s relating to the Iranian protests.

I’m privileged to be joined today by Vice Admiral John Miller, former commander of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), as well as Major General Charles Corcoran, former Chief of Staff for the U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT). Each of the panelists has been a participant in past JINSA Generals and Admirals programs, including a trip to Israel.

For our audience, two items of business before we get started. First, if you have any questions, please type them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen, and we will do our best to answer them in the time we have today. And second, for each of my questions, I will be asking the panelists to respond to the fullest extent possible, given that this is an unclassified setting.

So, Admiral Miller, I’d like to start with you. A lot of the focus, at least in the press here in America, has been on tracking the journey of the USS Lincoln Carrier Strike Group from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. When President Trump first issued his threat to the Iranians, there was no such U.S. naval power in the region, even though there were other Navy ships in the Middle East. In the past, sometimes the U.S. has sent a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) into the Gulf during tensions with Iran. But it seems, so far, the USS Lincoln has arrived in theater but is remaining several hundred miles off the coast of Iran in the north Arabian Sea.

My first question is: how do you interpret this? Is this just the way it is for the next couple of days, or is this a larger tactical posture?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Let me first talk about getting our forces and the Lincoln over there. The national security strategy and the international defense strategy notwithstanding, the Middle East continues to require a lot of our attention, and in many cases, the plus-up of forces. So, it’s great that we could get the Lincoln over there.

Not lost on anybody in this audience is the fact that if the Lincoln is in the Middle East and then the north Arabian Sea, then it’s not in the Mediterranean, it’s not in the Atlantic, it’s not in the Pacific, and it’s not in the Caribbean. As we juggle the different demands that we have, we have to understand that going someplace comes at the expense of not being someplace else.

I think the north Arabian Sea is a great place for them to be right now. There’s a constant discussion in maritime circles, for those who are familiar with the Middle East, about whether you want the majority of your forces inside the Gulf or whether you want them outside the Gulf. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. You can do more if you’re inside the Gulf, with respect to Iran. Your force protection posture is safer, and your defensive posture is less arduous if you’re outside the Gulf, and you still have the ability to project power if need be.

I think it’s a good place for him to be while things are going on. The Iranians traditionally don’t have great insight into what’s going on in the north Arabian Sea. They are getting cueing information from someone else, either the Russians or the Chinese. In this case, they are very likely receiving this information from the Chinese.

From this information, they can keep track, to a certain extent, of where the Lincoln strike group is and, in particular, where the Lincoln might be. But it’s a good place for the Lincoln to be so that the Iranians understand that we’re there if we’re needed, and that puts a certain amount of pressure on the regime at a time when that pressure advances America’s interests as well as its allies.

Jonathan Ruhe: As a follow-up to that, at the outset of, let’s say, early January, before the Lincoln arrived in the theater, the U.S. Navy had other assets in the region. I believe there were several guided-missile destroyers, presumably a guided-missile submarine as well. These bring a lot of offensive and defensive firepower themselves.

How much of sending the Lincoln to the region is a larger signal versus an increase in operational capability, if the Lincoln ends up being needed?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Well, it’s both. We historically have sent carriers to parts of the world where there’s a crisis evolving in order to cue the world in on the fact that this is something that’s important to the United States, we’re paying attention to it, and we’re prepared to respond. Anytime you move a carrier specifically to a geographic location at the start of a crisis, or during the crisis, like we’re having right now with the Iranians, you’ve sent a signal to Iran and to the rest of the world that that’s of interest to us.

At the same time, we routinely have a maritime force in the region, headquartered out of Bahrain, and there’s almost always a number of destroyers there that are involved in the ballistic missile defense mission and then the broader maritime security mission in the Gulf and in the region.

Sending a carrier sends a strong message, and it brings us a lot of different things. Right away, we think about the fact that you’ve sent a carrier to the region, now you’ve got an air wing with 45 strike fighters aboard that is capable of projecting power. It has its own command and control airborne early warning system. It has its own electronic warfare capability. So, it’s quite a potent force in and of itself, and it’s available to use as the President directs and as needed.

But the other thing the carrier brings with it is a number of staff that are capable of planning and managing operations on a much larger scale than just the Fifth Fleet staff, by itself, is able to do. You add an extra staff that’s capable of handling the surface picture, you add an extra staff for air defense, you add an extra staff for strike, and then, of course, you have the flagstaff that’s embarked on the Lincoln, which has its own unique capabilities. That’s a force multiplier in ways that we don’t typically think about for the Fifth Fleet commander.

Jonathan Ruhe: Thank you very much. So, General Corcoran, I’ll turn to you now. We’ll sort of pivot to the Air Force side of the equation. And I think this actually has fallen maybe a little bit more between the cracks of the headlines here in the United States.

Could you please tell us what U.S. Air Force assets, perhaps on a broad level, you see moved into the Middle East, and what that signals to you about what the U.S. can and cannot do in the region?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): Jonathan, first off, thanks to you and the JINSA team for hosting this discussion. I appreciate the invitation, and it’s great to be here with Admiral Miller.

In broad-brush strokes, we can say that the AFCENT Commander, the other component commanders working with the CENTCOM commander, and in coordination with all the fellow COCOMs and services, are working together. This work is challenging because there are other hot spots around the world. They have to balance all of that.

But they’re methodically walking through the steps necessary to put in place the Air Force assets along with the other joint assets like the Lincoln that the National Command Authority ultimately needs, so he has viable options to achieve the objective against the regime. From the air asset perspective, what this means, flat out, is the ability to conduct kinetic and non-kinetic strike operations against a wide range of regime targets. And you can kind of visualize what all those platforms might be.

But there are other factors. Just as you got to protect the Lincoln and the strike group, there are force protection factors to be considered with where we put these Air Force assets, and there are also access, basing, and overflight considerations. So, from the force protection piece, there’s a full spectrum of threats you have to think about from Iran or that are based in Iran, whether it’s missiles, rockets, or drones. There are also threats from proxies and the surrounding territories where we’re potentially based for these assets.

Another force protection interest you have to be thinking about as you base these assets and consider kinetic action is the potential for asymmetric responses by the regime, such as shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. So, we have to be ready, along with our partners in the Navy and the other components, to protect those commerce lanes.

All the Air Force assets you can think of, based in places around the region to provide the options required, and then the force protection access, basing, overflight considerations, have a lot of thought go into those. Picking up on what Admiral Miller said — this is why the carrier is so important to be honest. Because if you don’t have the access, basing, and overflight you can always do stuff from international waters.

Jonathan Ruhe: Thank you very much. I’ll follow up on that question to you, General Corcoran, and I’ll ask basically the same one to Admiral Miller. From an Air Force perspective, you’re moving forces into the region, and you’re acting as if you know Iran is both capable and willing to retaliate. Based on the statements we’ve seen from Iranian regime officials, they’ve at least suggested that if push comes to shove and there’s an exchange of hostilities, they are not going to telegraph a limited response as they did in June when they fired roughly a dozen ballistic missiles at Al-Udeid Air Base.

So, from your perspective, if you’re an Air Force planner, what are the scenarios you’re thinking through in terms of how Iran and its proxies might realistically retaliate?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): We’ve seen some of this, unfortunately, over the past couple of years. So, we know the big picture of what they’re capable of, whether it’s coming from Iran directly or from proxies in the region. Certainly, the U.S. Air Force assets will play a key role in countering that, but so will joint and partner assets. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Army bring all the missile defense kinetic capabilities that we have. While there’s an area air defense commander, that is, the AFCENT commander, generally, he’s using U.S. Navy and U.S. Army assets. So, land-based and ship-based.

In addition to that, down at the base level, you have your counter-unmanned systems for the smaller threats. Then you’re going to have to depend on partners. We saw this with Israel and the tremendous capabilities of the systems they have.

Regarding the other allies and partners in the region, this is where this combined defense operations cell at Al-Udeid Air Base really comes into play. And this isn’t something you build overnight. Admiral Miller had a big hand in this when he was at Fifth Fleet and AFCENT. Literally decades of commanders over there at the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, special operators, working with partners in the region, have developed these relationships.

We’ve had partners buy compatible equipment, compatible command and control systems, and we trained and trained and trained, and over the years, we finally got them to share data and to work together. And that trust isn’t something we build overnight. We saw that pay some dividends during some of the attempted strikes on Israel, and I think we’ll see it again if, God forbid, Iran tries to take action against U.S. forces or partner forces in the region. So, it’s a team effort.

Jonathan Ruhe: I’m glad you brought that up. I certainly want to return later in the webinar to this underlying picture of broader regional defenses and what it means for the U.S. military writ large. But Admiral Miller, for now, I’ll stick with sort of a follow-up to what I just asked General Corcoran.

From a Navy perspective, at least, how would you plan to counter, but also address, any Iranian retaliation? As context for our audience, we’ve seen in the past couple of days that Iran flew a Shahed drone out toward the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which was shot down. Inside the Gulf itself, the Iranians have also been harassing tankers, and even a U.S.-flagged ship. These come in light of all the comments we’ve seen from Iranian officials in the past couple of weeks, suggesting that their response around the Gulf would certainly perhaps be more robust than it was last June.

What’s the naval perspective on how you would address potential Iranian retaliation?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.):  There are a couple of things to think about here, Jonathan. It’s really a great question. Part of it we probably ought to be based on what the Iranians are saying in private channels, not externally, because when they’re talking into a microphone that’s intended for the wider audience, rarely do you hear anything that’s truthful.

I don’t think they quite understand how unsuccessful they were in the 12-Day War. I think they think that was a more successful endeavor than anybody else who watched it thinks, from an Iranian standpoint. So, there’s that. And then, typically, historically, and it’s kind of counterintuitive, when the Iranians feel threatened, they get more blusterous.

The IRGC Navy, in particular, will be more aggressive in the Gulf. You’ll see things like the seizing of these oil tankers; these were apparently black-market oil tankers, that were seized the other day. On the eve of talks with the United States, you’d expect them to behave. We typically, historically, have seen just the opposite kind of reaction.

So, the question is, how would they react to any kind of strike by the United States? And certainly, there are a lot of things for us to consider. I think if we continue to have our ships in the north Arabian Sea, we can continue to defend those naval assets very robustly. I think that minimizes the threat to the naval assets that are outside the Gulf.

That doesn’t mean that the naval assets and all the partner assets that are inside the Gulf, including AFCENT and ARCENT’s assets in the region, are all at some sort of risk, depending on how the Iranians choose to respond. And so that does require us to make sure that we’ve got robust defenses in place. We’ve got sufficient numbers of missiles in the inventory in the region to do the work that has to be done. All those things are a concern.

And they’re all things that the folks at CENTCOM and within the partner nations are working on all the time, including the access, basing, and overflight. I think the reason our partners have at least publicly said they won’t want to give access, basing, and overflight permissions to the United States for a strike on Iran is because they worry about this greater regional war that might break out, in particular with asymmetric assets. They still have mines. They still have hundreds, if not thousands, of small boats that they can use to disrupt traffic in the Gulf.

I do want to make one comment about General Corcoran’s comment concerning closing the Strait. If you look back at the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians did not mine the Strait of Hormuz because it’s not a great place to mine.

If they’re going to do mining, you can expect to see that in the central or northern Gulf, where they interfere with the routes that the large crude carriers that are going into the GCC countries typically traverse. And that’s a much wider threat footprint than what we’ve seen in the recent past. It would be a significant escalation by the Iranians. So, it is something that we want to watch for.

Jonathan Ruhe: I’m glad you brought that up, Admiral, thank you. So far, we’ve been talking about massive surface ships and big capital assets. We hear a lot about this potential threat from the Iranians themselves to mine the Hormuz and say, “If we can’t send our oil out, then nobody else will either.” What is the Navy’s ability to counter a mining campaign? What might that look like?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Well, as I said, I don’t expect the mining to occur in the Strait of Hormuz. And so, they’ll contest the Strait. There are other ways to do it. They can do it with anti-ship cruise missiles, which they have. They can do it with small boats, which they have in abundance. But if they’re going to do any kind of mining, they’re going to do it up in the Gulf.

Now you’re talking about a countermine effort that becomes much more global in nature, because now you’re talking about the entire regional oil supply having difficulty getting out of the Arabian Gulf. We have mine countermeasure capabilities. We were just bringing online the littoral combat ships with the mine countermeasure package. Some of those are in Bahrain. But mine warfare, to be perfectly honest with you, has never been a priority for the Navy, until somebody puts mines in the water. Then it becomes the number one priority.

It is a difficult task to do mine removal. I learned during my time at Fifth Fleet, the first three words of mine warfare are, “Well, it depends.” It depends on where they mine, how much they mine, what our assets are, what our partners’ assets are. There are a number of partner nations that have good capabilities, including the Japanese, the British, some of the northern European countries, in particular, that have experience with mines left over from World War I or World War II, but it would be a problem.

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): If they do start firing at us or partners from Iran, then we have to immediately signal going on the offense, right? We can only sit back and take volleys of missiles and rockets for so long. And Israel did a great job of that over the 12-Day campaign that they had. They took out a large number of missile launchers in Iran. And we need to be willing and ready to do the same.

Iran needs to understand that we’re going to do that. Take out the launchers. Take out the stockpiles to prevent them from shooting. Take out the archer versus shooting arrows, if you will.

Jonathan Ruhe: I’m glad you added that point, General Corcoran. It leads into my next question. This is drawn from a lot of the sort of commentariat that’s been scrolling around in the last month. So far in Trump’s second term, it seems the sort of template for military action is: go in, do something that’s very tactically successful and decisive, and then get out. The two cases I’m thinking of are Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran’s nuclear sites last summer, and then the snatch and grab of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela at the start of this year. This is sort of an open-ended question. Do you see any applicability of the lessons of those operations to the current standoff we’re in?

I know partly it depends on what military options the President is considering.

But if push comes to shove, and Iran starts firing projectiles from its own territory, could this potentially spin off into a larger operation that would require U.S. Air Force assets that are currently in the region?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): I see similarities from a military perspective, certainly. I mean, the fundamentals don’t change. You want to provide options to the National Command Authority. You have to have trained and ready forces. You have to have them in place. You have to be able to have the ability to get them there quickly, on short notice. You have to really protect them. You have to have cooperation, allies, and partners in the region so you can have access to basing and overflight rights. You want to have the sea-based option. So, it’s not a pick-up game. It’s not something we just turn on. Also, Admiral Miller hit on this early, you have to have enough of it, right?

Readiness matters. The readiness of your people, the readiness of your fleets, magazine depth, and munitions. You can only do these things for so long with the assets that you have until you run either the people or the force structure into the ground, or you run out of munitions. That’s something I know that all the services are keeping a keen eye on, and they’re talking to the administration, and they’re talking to the Hill about that constantly.

Jonathan Ruhe: On that issue, with the keyword readiness, Admiral Miller, are there more U.S. Navy assets that, if needed, could move into the region that would be feasible to do so? At the outset, you talked about the strain on our sort of force posture more globally. Everything we move in the Middle East, at least with the Lincoln group, is something that’s not in the Indo-Pacific. That’s sort of the first half of the question: what more could we feasibly move in the region if need be?

The flip side of that is also, how sustainable is the current buildup of forces in the region, considering this is a kind of an impromptu deployment for the Lincoln? We also know from the last couple of years, during tensions in the Middle East, some of those Naval deployments have had to be extended in the theater.

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): We do have other assets that we can move around and bring into the theater, in particular surface assets, and destroyers, which are equipped with, as everyone knows, Tomahawk land attack missiles. I think we just deployed one the other day on an independent deployment, as we refer to it, so they didn’t deploy with the strike group, and they’re on their way across. It’ll take them a while to get to the Middle East AOR [Area of Responsibility], but we have other assets we can move from the INDOPACOM area. We have assets that we can move from the Atlantic region, if we want.

General Corcoran, I believe you mentioned earlier the possible presence of guided missile submarines, our SSGNs. You haven’t heard any discussion about that publicly, and I wouldn’t expect to. But if there’s one of those within 1,000 miles of Tehran, it’s a threat to the Iranians, and they have no idea where it is, and neither do the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else. That’s something only we know.

So, we don’t know if there’s one or two in the region right now, and so we do have other forces. In terms of sustainability, it’s a great question. Just as a reminder to everyone, we had at least one, oftentimes two, Carrier Strike Groups and an Amphibious Ready Group in the Middle East AOR for decades, for most of this century. So, not having a carrier there for the last several years has been the norm, but it’s been unusual for us.

In terms of our ability to sustain that force over a period of time, I’m not concerned about that. But everything comes at a cost, no doubt about it. And as I said earlier, if we’re there, we’re not someplace else. If they extend those deployments, that affects maintenance schedules on the back end.

Those are things that we have to deal with. They do create some sort of long-term, endemic problems when you can’t get to the preventative maintenance that you’d like to be able to do, but I’m not concerned about our ability to sustain a Carrier Strike Group in that region for as long as we’d like to or think is necessary.

Jonathan Ruhe: Admiral Miller, this is sort of an out of the left field question, but I want to follow up on this sustainability issue. One thing that’s come up in JINSA’s recommendations, since this crisis started, is at least the idea of a naval quarantine against Iran.

If that was one of the options being presented to the President from your perspective, how doable does that seem? How intense an operation is there? What are the complexities and challenges that would come with something like that?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Well, it’s a whole new ball game if we prevent the Iranians from exporting oil. They don’t export a lot, but they need the money. They export, I don’t know, a million and a half, maybe two million barrels a day, and almost all that goes to China. So, China would certainly be interested.

Remember, China used to get Venezuelan oil. That’s a couple of million barrels a day. A million here, a million there, it adds up. So, it’s going to have an impact on the Chinese. But just the mechanics of a quarantine or a blockade, depending on how you want to label that, is enormously resource-intensive; it would be very difficult to do inside the Gulf. You would have this constant asymmetric threat from the IRGC.

A different way to do that is, in part, to continue to do it economically, but more robustly, so that Iranian ships that are carrying sanctioned oil by the U.S. or the EU are unable to make it to where they want to go. There are different places between the Arabian Gulf and China and in the western Pacific, where we can intercept those ghost fleet ships.

Even that would be a difficult endeavor. Likely, the IRGC will be on board to protect those ships. But there are a number of different ways, not just militarily, that we can continue to impact Iran’s ability to export oil, which puts additional pressure on the regime.

Jonathan Ruhe: You mentioned in your response that we’ve seen since the raid against Maduro that there has been something like a quarantine on certain Venezuelan ghost fleet ships. So, there is broader applicability in asking the question.

General Corcoran, I want to jump back to you, but first, before I do, I’d like to remind our audience that if you have any questions for our panelists, please just type them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen, and we’ll address them in the time we have remaining.

General Corcoran, you’ve mentioned in some of your earlier remarks this issue of access in the Middle East. We saw in the run-up to the conflict in June, and again more recently, the U.S. and other countries evacuating some of their forces from certain American bases on the Arabian Peninsula. We’ve also seen this sort of ongoing effort to move air defenses into the region as part of this larger buildup.

Feel free to keep this on as high a level as you like. Could you talk more about what you mean when you say “our access challenges” in the region? And then, given that you were part of a task force that JINSA put together last fall, looking at the possibility of U.S. basing options in Israel, please diagnose what you mean by our questions about our access in the region. Then also tell us ways to potentially address those concerns.

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, forces have to be positioned where you can use them and where they can be protected.

Those are two sorts of distinct issues there. Number one, if I have a base in Partner X’s nation, and they won’t let me take off from that base to do offensive operations or even to do defensive operations or to do air refueling operations; if I have a command and control facility and they won’t allow me to conduct command and control strikes or command and control air defense, then those forces are useless to me.

I need a lot of different options, such that if one partner won’t, but another will, I can then use the forces in the willing partner’s sovereign nation. The other piece is that I have to be able to defend the forces. If I’ve had forces sitting much closer to the threat, and therefore exposed to more of the threat capabilities, rather than sitting further back and/or better defended with multiple tiers of systems — that is a crucial distinction.

We highlighted the latter opportunity in the paper about potential basing options in Israel. If you look at Ovda Air Base, where you have every layer of the Israeli air defenses represented with a really strong, capable defense posture there, within range of the ability to strike Iran, that is good for defensive strategy. That is why we explored those options in that paper.

And then finally, again, we have hit on this a few times: this illustrates, ultimately, the unique value of carrier-based and sea-based power, where I don’t have to worry about the access issues, and again, I’m mobile. So, it’s a different kind of defense, but it certainly adds to the ability to defend.

So, land-based capability is good, but you have to be able to use it. You have to be able to protect it.

Jonathan Ruhe: Admiral Miller, first of all, if you have anything you’d like to add to General Corcoran’s response to my question about regional access, I would welcome that. I do want to jump back to something you said earlier, which is that the Iranian regime seems to have learned some of the wrong lessons from the 12-Day War and how it was concluded.

Since then, the regime has faced the biggest, most widespread, and from the regime’s perspective, most dangerous protests in its nearly 50-year history. The regime also conducted the most brutal crackdown among a long series of such crackdowns in its history.

How do you understand the Iranian regime? Is there a threat? Is their threat calculus different now than it would have been last summer, when they took a sort of guarded approach to retaliating for Midnight Hammer when they telegraphed a strike on Al-Udeid Air Base and basically assumed that ended the war?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.):  Their thinking has evolved somewhat. I don’t think it has evolved to the point where it reflects the reality of the situation. We have clues about where they think they really are, based on what they’ve done since the 12-Day War. In particular, where has their emphasis been? It’s been rebuilding its ballistic missile capability. That’s what they’ve known as long as the regime has been in power, that ballistic missiles are the one capability that defends the regime.

You go all the way back to the Iran-Iraq War and the battle between the two cities, where ballistic missiles were flying in both directions. The Iranians credit the ballistic missile systems with having saved the day and saved the regime. I think they still realize that that’s their best course of action, and that’s the capability that they’re most interested in rebuilding.

So, I think that if we look at things to strike: their ballistic missile capability, the launchers, the facilities that produce the ballistic missiles, where they store them, all of those things we might benefit from, and I think Iran then begins to realize they’re extremely vulnerable.

I don’t think that airstrikes are the activity, regardless of what we strike, even if we strike IRGC barracks or Basij barrack facilities, I don’t think that’s what tips the balance for what’s going on in Iran now. I think continued pressure on them, making sure that they don’t actually see an increase in their defensive capabilities, is what’s going to do the trick.

I think that is the reason they’re so interested in avoiding a conflict coming up, and they’ll negotiate the nuclear file till the cows come home to no sense of progress on either side. They won’t talk about the things that really are important to the region, which is their ballistic missile capability, how they fund their proxies, and what the proxies do in the region, up to and including the Houthis and the human rights violations, which are worse than they’ve ever been, and that’s saying something.

Jonathan Ruhe: Thank you. I want to pick up on a couple of those threads if we have time later on. But General Corcoran, I want to first jump back to something else you mentioned earlier, which is this combined defense operation cell that’s been set up in Qatar. This larger issue of integrated air and missile defense in the region, which has been led by CENTCOM, as we’ve seen on three different occasions in the last couple of years, performed rather confidently, to say the least, in coordinating air and missile defenses against Iran’s attacks.

Could you give our audience some context: what this new cell that is being set up in Qatar signifies? Is it another step in this effort to build more integrated regional air and missile defenses?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): You’re seeing the latest step in a positive direction. I can’t say it’s a combination because there are many more steps to take, but it reflects a lot of hard work by a lot of leaders over a lot of decades. General Goldfein used to say, “You can’t surge trust. You can’t surge trust.” It takes time to build these relationships.

I think [these relationships built on trust] started primarily with the GCC. We had U.S. air defense forces in many of the GCC countries there. But Jordan came in. We got the Patriot in Jordan several years later. Now we brought in Israel after the Abraham Accords. You’ve seen it continue to grow and expand, but getting, even the GCC partners, to share their air pictures, to share their defense information, so that you don’t have multiple systems shooting the same tracks or nobody, God forbid, shooting an invalid threat.

Those are difficult things to get done: to build trust, to get the policies, the tactics, techniques, procedures, in place, to practice those things. So, where we are now is a tremendous step forward from where we started. We’re starting to realize the vision that a lot of leaders had over a lot of years, and it’s great to see it continue to move forward.

Success tends to breed more success. And I think the great work that’s been done in the last few attempts by Iran to lash out at Israel proved the worth, and has gotten more buy-in from the partners in the region, which is a good thing.

Jonathan Ruhe: On that note, I’d like to recommend that everyone check out JINSA’s website. There have been several large reports over the past few years, examining exactly these issues that General Corcoran was mentioning, and looking at the progress thus far and where to go from here.

I want to pull back the aperture a little bit more and situate what we’ve talked about that’s going on in the Middle East in perhaps more of a global context, at least for U.S. strategy and grand strategy. So, I want to start with this issue of air defenses. And I realize this goes beyond just air force and navy capabilities.

We saw in the 12-Day War, and also before that, in Iran’s first two missile attacks on Israel, the U.S. played a role in helping but also extended a lot of critical capabilities. In the Navy’s case [they used] Standard Missile interceptors; the Army [used] THAADs and Patriots.

Admiral Miller, I’ll start with you. Give our audience a general sense, if you could. When you see these high expenditure rates of these very valuable air defense interceptors, looking ahead, what does that mean for the Navy and, more largely, the Pentagon’s ability to defend against threats like these, which keep evolving as our ability to respond to them keeps evolving?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Well, Jonathan, I think the issue continues to be twofold. First, we’re oftentimes using missiles that cost a couple of million dollars for us to build. They take a couple of years to be produced, whether it’s a cruise missile, a ballistic missile, or a drone. The enemy’s missiles or drones are much cheaper and can be produced much more quickly. So, there’s a deficit there.

Then there’s just the basic inventory issue. You highlighted this, and so did General Corcoran. We used a lot of missiles in the missile defense business, and we don’t have a lot of missiles, and it takes a long time to replace them. Now, we’ve taken some steps in the latest defense budget to rectify that to a certain extent, but even with that it still takes time. It takes too long to build these missiles.

Over the long haul, I think we need to look at other systems to be able to defend bases and ships from cruise missile attacks, ballistic missile attacks, and drone attacks. Some of those are being developed, and I think we ought to spend more time doing that. In the meantime, I do think we need to understand that at least in the Middle East region, this is, potentially in the near term, a price we have to pay.

It gets back to one of General Corcoran earlier points, which is to “shoot the archers, not the arrows.” I think that any kind of strike that we might be planning ought to be focused on their ability to launch these missiles. It’s the longer-range ballistic missiles that can easily reach Israel that are of a concern. But there are also a lot of shorter-range missiles that can get to Qatar or to Kuwait, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates that we need to be concerned about as well.

Jonathan Ruhe: And just very quickly on that last point, Admiral. You talked about Iran reconstituting its missile capabilities since the war last June. In general, please correct me if I’m wrong, there we’re talking about Iran’s medium range ballistic missiles, the ones capable of striking Israel directly. Understandably, that was the focus of Israel’s operation Rising Lion last summer.

You also mentioned Iran’s shorter range capabilities. Again, I’m assuming those remain largely untouched. Can you give us a little bit of context about that shorter range arsenal? How do you view that as a threat to American ships and bases in the region?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): They seem to be working on an anti-ship capability, but anti-ship ballistic missiles are pretty complicated things, in particular if the ships are out in a place like the Arabian Sea, as opposed to the more confined waters of the Arabian Gulf. But these shorter-range missiles are an issue for the region, but it also represents, on the part of Iran, a big widening of the war, if you will.

I think the Iranians felt like Qatar was a safe target. The Al-Udeid Air Base, although it’s part of Qatar, is seen in sort of a global context as a U.S. base, even though it’s not. I think they thought that they could get away with the strike on Qatar.

They don’t have that same ability if they strike Bahrain. That’s where the NAVCENT Headquarters is. Same thing if they attack in Kuwait. A strike in those places would bring in all the GCC partners. I think the last thing the Iranians really want to do, or need to do, is to take a group of partners of the United States that are neutral at best on any sort of attack on Iran, and turn them into people that are in favor of attacking Iran.

As General Corcoran mentioned earlier, we’ve spent decades building arsenals and equipment and capability that’s interoperable between all the GCC countries in the United States. We’ve proven during the 12-Day War the ability to operate those systems together in a certain amount of harmony and synergy. It would be an interesting decision on the part of the regime to decide that they want to broaden that war, but if they did, they’ve got a lot of missiles, and it would be a large task to defend the countries, particularly the Arabian GCC countries.

Jonathan Ruhe: Thank you. General Corcoran, I’ll jump back to you. Regarding the larger issue of America’s ability to keep waging conflicts, even if they’re purely defensive, that expend a lot of our interceptors, defensive capabilities, and things like that. As you mentioned at the outset, some of the aircraft we’re moving into the region could potentially help with the air defense mission as well. We’ve seen that in the past couple rounds with Iran U.S.-made combat aircraft shot down cruise missiles, drones, and things like that.

Do you believe that will continue to be a sustainable option for helping with regional, integrated air and missile defense? How do you view what we’re doing in the Middle East in this larger context of defense industrial challenges, and production challenges we face back home that Admiral Miller mentioned?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): The good news is that the systems we have worked. I do think it’s sustainable in the very near term. The idea of these exploited defenses is to absorb that first volley without losing too much, and then you have to have the willingness to go back and use the offense to say, “enough is enough. We’re not going to allow this.”

But we’ve also already fielded some more affordable capabilities. And we’ve worked with partners to get those more affordable capabilities in place on their systems. The APKWS [Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System] is one of those. The rockets that we’re now using to shoot down drones. So, you see those on our F-15 or F-16s, and you see on the helicopters and partners using them now.

So, you’re taking something that costs $10,000-$20,000 per shot, and you could carry seven of those in a rocket pod. And you could carry six of those rocket pods on an F-16. So, you have 42 weapons now that are affordable. They’re pretty much one-for-one. So, I could shoot down up to 40 of these drones from one F-16 in one sortie.

That’s the kind of stuff we need to be figuring out. And, high energy and directed energy weapons. We’re seeing those now on our surface vehicles and army vehicles. We’re seeing them proliferate on our ships. We need these kinds of things that are deep magazine and low cost so that we can continue to take out these new, cheaper, mass-produced weapons from the correct end of the cost curve.

Jonathan Ruhe: And that gives me another opportunity to shamelessly plug some of JINSA’s work. I’d encourage people to go to our website to see various op-eds and other pieces on this challenge of interceptors. This includes work co-authored by General Corcoran and is in the context of defeating the Houthis and their asymmetric strategy that we’ve discussed here, which is forcing the United States on the wrong side of that cost curve.

Admiral Miller, I’ll jump back to you. We mentioned earlier the Houthis in Yemen. The U.S. got a ceasefire with them last year, and then they stopped firing at Israel as part of the larger ceasefire in Gaza. There were some U.S. and Israeli military operations against the group.

Going forward, how much do you expect the Houthis to be a major threat? Would they only target Israel? Would they disrupt the freedom of navigation in the region?

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): Nothing that’s happened and nothing that we’ve done really has changed the Houthi threat significantly. Their ability to control the Bab al-Mandab Strait is largely unchanged even after what we’ve done over the past several years. So that continues to be a problem. The Houthi problem may be something that’s going to solve itself pretty soon. This assessment is based on the efforts that are going on with the various different forces within the Yemeni civil war, the interaction of decisions made between Saudi-backed and Emirati-backed forces.

It remains a complex situation, but I do think that in the longer term what the Houthis provide us with is a great lesson learned. They reflect the ability of a group of people that aren’t really a nation-state to be improperly supplied by countries like Iran to have the ability to take one of these maritime checkpoints, and there are only really six big ones in the in the world, and have an impact on global shipping that impacts every person in the world. We want to make sure that we understand the need to be able to take a threat like the Houthis have presented to us over the last several years and deal with that threat decisively. We’ve not yet done that.

Jonathan Ruhe: For my final question, I’ll go to General Corcoran first and then give Admiral Miller the last word on it. We’ve seen in recent weeks a split between two of America’s core Arab partners: the UAE and Saudi Arabia, over things including, but not limited to, the civil war in Yemen. We’ve mentioned earlier in the conversation the considerations of our various Arab partners when it comes to these tensions between the United States and Iran.

General Corcoran, realistically, are there things that the U.S. can do with our partners in the region? I guess specifically our Arab partners, in this case, because they’re choosing to remain on the sidelines. Are there ways we can continue to work with them, beyond what we’ve talked about in terms of air and missile defense, to build a tighter Iran coalition? Or is the answer that, situated where they are, our Arab partners would rather just try to sit on the sidelines as much as possible and hope that they don’t receive collateral damage from a U.S.-Iran standoff?

Maj Gen Charles Corcoran, USAF (ret.): I’ll try to stick to my lane here: just the military. And I think that if there’s good news here it’s that we have strong military-to-military relationships with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and with all the partners in the region. And that’s because of things like Fifth Fleet headquartered in Bahrain; AFCENT’s presence for many years, and several countries there; the Army’s presence; our special operators, the training they do; the Marines.

I think what we need to do is to continue to sustain and build those military-to-military relationships. Those bleed over into policy, especially in those nations with those types of governments that we see over there, which are a little different than our model of governing here.

That’s the best we can do from the defense side of the house: make sure that we continue to build that trust, so that you know when things happen, we can pick up the phone, and we’re on a first name basis from leader to leader across the different nations. That tends to go a long way when you start to see these types of friction.

Jonathan Ruhe: Thank you, General Corcoran, for focusing on the military-to-military perspective, which I think is particularly relevant. We’ve seen in recent years tensions within the U.S., certainly U.S.-led coalitions or task forces in the region, driven in no small part by concerns from our regional partners that U.S. military presence or leadership in the region is uncertain. With that proper caveat, Admiral Miller, I’ll turn to you for the final word on this larger question about what the U.S. can do from a military-to-military perspective with its regional partners.

VADM John Miller, USN (ret.): To General Corcoran’s point, I think we need to continue to build on the relationships that we’ve worked so hard on over the last several decades. We talked about General Goldfein’s admonition to us that we can’t surge trust. We can’t surge trust, but we have to continue to build trust. You don’t build a trusting relationship and then just put it on the shelf. It’s always better in a crisis to call a friend than it is to call somebody that you don’t know. But to do that you have to maintain those friendships. We need to continue the military-to-military relationships that we have with these countries.

We do a lot of that work bilaterally, which in some cases is a little bit frustrating to us because we fight as a joint force, and we want to fight as a multilateral force, a coalition force. Oftentimes it’s more difficult with the Gulf countries to be able to do multilateral operations. When those aren’t possible, then we ought to continue our bilateral operations with an understanding that they will all come together when there’s a collective threat.

Amid the difficulties that they might have amongst themselves, there comes a point when they’re willing to put those to the side and to fight and to defend the GCC writ large. And we just need to continue to be prepared so that when those circumstances arise, we’re ready to team with those forces and do what needs to be done from a military-to-military standpoint.

Jonathan Ruhe: I can think of no better way to conclude. Thank you, Admiral Miller. Thank you, General Corcoran. Thank you to our audience for joining us on this Friday afternoon. I would encourage everyone to stay tuned to the JINSA emails and website for further announcements as the events we discussed today continue to unfold one way or another. Thank you all again, and I look forward to seeing you on another JINSA webinar.