The extensive targeting of U.S. bases by Iran throughout the yet-unresolved conflict now in its fourth month is raising new doubts about the sustainability of maintaining large, fixed military installations near the Persian Gulf—and potentially elsewhere across the globe.
Among the leading voices calling for a substantial recalibration of U.S. force posture so close to Iran is a man who not long ago oversaw the sprawling base network in the region.
General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from March 2019 to April 2022, said he has long pushed for change on this front, and that the confrontation with Iran has only reinforced his conviction that priorities, including the deployment of aircraft, weapons systems and other capabilities, should be moved further westward.
“What you want to do is you want to spread out that necklace of bases far to the west, where you make it harder for the Iranians to see you, you make it harder for the Iranians to range you,” McKenzie said Monday during a virtual conference hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and attended by Newsweek.
“Although over time we should recognize Iranian missiles are going to increase in range,” McKenzie, who is a distinguished senior fellow at JINSA, said, “but I’m solving a problem for today.”
Responding to Newsweek‘s question regarding lessons learned from the Iran conflict thus far, he offered the example of Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base, which serves as CENTCOM Forward Headquarters, as a “monument to old think” in the midst of a brave new era of modern hybrid warfare undermining the strategic value of static large-scale sites in the Middle East and beyond, to include the Asia-Pacific and Europe.
“We need to be able to move, we need to be able to deceive about where our locations are, and that’s going to require not only significant electromagnetic emanation management, it’s going to require an understanding of what’s in space looking at us, and how do we deal with that,” McKenzie said. “And that will require a very sophisticated understanding of not only military overhead non-air breathing systems, but also the plethora of commercial overhead imagery systems that are out there.”
“We need to know and understand and master how we use that ability, that capability to help us and to hurt potential foes,” he added. “Those lessons apply everywhere in any conflict anywhere.”
When it comes to the Middle East, McKenzie recommended, first and foremost, Israel as a top candidate to consolidate some of the U.S. military‘s most valuable equipment given the country’s robust air defense network. He also saw room to maintain some degree of presence in key Persian Gulf sites, with a focus primarily on shoring up anti-missile and drone defenses, hardening infrastructure and boosting cooperation with host nations.
Such a rethinking could bring the current strategy up to date. After all, he pointed out, the roots of U.S. basing in the Persian Gulf were initially devised as part of a Cold War-era effort to safeguard the oil-rich region from a feared clash with the Soviet Union, and later to serve the needs of post-9/11 “war on terror” counterinsurgency campaigns.
“What you’ve got really is an artifact of earlier posture decisions,” McKenzie said. “No one in their right mind would ever put the CENTCOM Forward Headquarters 100 miles away from Iran, yet that’s where it is, because when we put it in place many years ago, we were thinking Iraq, we were thinking Afghanistan, we were thinking other things, and not the growing threat from Iran.”
“Anticipation is the heart of wisdom,” he added. “Not a lot of wisdom there when we chose the location of the CENTCOM Forward Headquarters.”
…