“Totally defensive” in the Middle East: The void and the non-deterrence

How NOT to deter a rogue nation like radical Iran.

By J. E. Dyer, THE OPTIMISTIC CONSERVATIVE      9 Jan 2024

Houthi boats January 2024

It doesn’t help that the U.S. military chain of command was basically, as far as we can see right now, in Status Unknown around the New Year.  It’s being reported that neither the National Security Council nor Congress was informed on New Year’s Day when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was put in intensive care following an “elective procedure” performed sometime before (probably Christmas week).  Austin was in the ICU for four days before the NSC was told.

At the same time, his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico.  Apparently this information wasn’t conveyed to the NSC or Congress either.

Keep in mind, President Biden was in St. Croix acquiring a sunburn from 27 December 2023 to 2 January 2024.  The retinue that travels with POTUS to keep him functional, including the strategic weapons “football” and its custodian, would have been with him.  But it’s not clear if POTUS knew SECDEF was out of the loop (or for that matter what exact status SECDEF was in, and what DEPSECDEF was handling – or not – from Puerto Rico).

This is very peculiar.  The NSC and its watchstanders, along with those at the Pentagon, are supposed to know the exact same thing about the status of the National Command Authority principals; i.e., POTUS and SECDEF.  In my experience, if the Pentagon watch gets emerging information about SECDEF, it would require affirmative intervention to keep that from being conveyed to the White House.

It’s important to wait to see how this all shakes out, including reading between the lines of how the story and the explanations develop.  But it’s unnerving at all times, and when U.S. troops are in constant danger from Iran-backed attacks in the Middle East, it’s even more so.

Update: OK, it’s later, we’ve seen some of how it has shaken out, and it’s even worse than it appeared at first.  (Subsequent updates to those updates have only dug the hole deeper.)

The record of what happened versus who knew or didn’t know anything just doesn’t add up.  There’s something very wrong here.

Meanwhile, to step through this update without piling on too much background and commentary, here’s the source of the “totally defensive” reference.  This past week, White House spokesman John Kirby made a big point of the U.S. military posture for countering the Houthis at sea being “totally defensive.”

It will be entirely about waiting for the arrow instead of taking out the archer, or his stash ashore.

We can correctly deduce that this posture is being justified by the preferences of the OPG coalition.  For reasons we’ll see below, there’s also reason to suppose it’s the actual preference of the Biden administration.

A number of diligent researchers have pointed out that commercial maritime traffic is now avoiding the Red Sea in droves.

But 50 years later, in a more economically diversified and trade-dependent world, it will have adverse effects for the local economies, especially Egypt’s, which draws important revenues from operating the ports around the Suez Canal.  It will also affect shipping and port operations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Eritrea, and Sudan.

That won’t be good for regional stability.  It will, however, benefit Iran, China, and radical extremists as regional governments have to scramble for new or temporary arrangements and address discontent from their domestic constituencies.

The role that only the U.S. can play is the sorely-needed one of maritime superpower:  guarantor of free, safe navigation, unextorted and available to all, on the seas.  No other nation has the comprehensive package of national power to play that role, nor does the next “navally” powerful nation, China, have the will or intention to do it.  China will never waste more than the shortest possible period – days or maybe weeks – pretending to enforce free and safe navigation even-handedly.  With the CCP in charge, the hegemonic extortion in the chokepoints would begin almost immediately.  (If you actually doubt that, just ask the other reasonable claimants to islands and shoals in the South China Sea – and the trading nations aware of China’s excessive claims there, and intent to demand special vetoes over the navigation practices of all shipping.)

On land and sea

The maritime realm isn’t the only one in which there’s no serious deterrence at work.  Americans are, of course, acutely aware of the long list of uncountered attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three months.

One is the recent attack on the Iraqi base at Al-Harir, an airfield northeast of Erbil, in northern Iraq, being used by the U.S. 82nd Airborne for helicopter operations.  The special interest of this attack on Christmas Day is that an Army helicopter pilot, CW4 Garrett Illerbrunn, was badly injured in it and had to be evacuated to Germany for treatment.

My tweet/X-post thread on the situation at Harir:

The Biden administration has conducted a handful of meaningless air strikes on ground targets, but the strikes and targets have had no relevance to the attacks being made on U.S. forces.  The strikes have been merely punitive – with no actual punishment resulting – rather than having operational significance to the Iran-backed forces attacking our troops.  As with our “totally defensive” maritime posture, our approach to date is leaving Iran’s proxies in the driver’s seat, and American forces in reactionary mode.

Naturally, this is not producing any deterrent effect.

There is an interesting twist in the most recent American strike, however, which reportedly killed a leader of Iran-backed Iraqi militia forces on 4 January 2024.  The individual was Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari, or Abu Taqwa, a leader and operations planner for the Hezbollah- and Iran-backed group Harakat-al-Nujaba (HAN).

In the Pentagon briefing that followed, Major General Pat Ryder (USAF) declined to say what attack(s) HAN, the Iraqi militia, had been responsible for.  HAN was attacked by the U.S. in the vicinity of Kirkuk back in early December, and five other operatives were reportedly killed.  At the time, the Islamic Resistance in Iran (IRI, an umbrella group of Shia PMFs) implied a connection with HAN, although HAN had reportedly dissociated itself from IRI some years before.  (This will briefly matter below.)

It’s noteworthy that HAN’s history goes back to at least 2012, and involves Iran-backed operations (at the time under the direction of Qasem Soleimani) in eastern Iraq, including Diyala Province and military routes to Baghdad (and points west along the Euphrates) and Tikrit.

Iran’s method of infiltrating and taking control of territory in that period was, precisely, to move Qods Force cadre through the Zahab pass from Iran into Iraq, connecting with the Iraqi militias, and proceeding westward on the pretext of “fighting ISIS.”  Fighting ISIS was a tremendous convenience for Iran in the period 2011-2017, justifying the Iraqi militias in seizing Iran-backed control of a vast swaths of territory stretching throughout most of the country.

I wrote it up in a number of articles at the time, with this one being canonical (sorry about the loss of graphics and images over time).  The point now, in January 2024, is that the pattern looks to be coming back.  During the Trump years, although Iranian influence was never driven out of eastern Iraq or the Euphrates Corridor into Syria, Tehran was still effectively deterred from doing more with it.  I wasn’t fond of the minimal nature of U.S. presence flanking Iran’s Euphrates-hugging “land-bridge” into Syria, but while Trump was in office it sufficed to keep Iran quiet – especially after ISIS was pushed out of Mosul, and U.S. forces rocked Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries on their heels in eastern Syria.  The drubbing ISIS took in northern Iraq and Syria removed Iran’s pretext for a more active “fighting ISIS” profile in both countries.

This is a key reason I’m leery of ISIS’s claim of responsibility for the blast that killed dozens of Iranians in Kerman in the last week.  The old “fighting ISIS” band, with HAN going active and ISIS suddenly handing Iran a reason to counterattack, looks like it may be getting back together.

If it is, what’s making that enticing for Tehran is the unabated passivity of the U.S. posture in Mesopotamia.  We clearly have no plan to defend more robustly the positions we occupy.  The debacle in Afghanistan in 2021 would be Iran’s biggest indicator of what Biden will do if the IRGC can make push come to shove.

The HAN militia group isn’t relevant solely to U.S. forces, for that matter.  It may have been behind a still-mysterious attack on Eilat (Israel) on 14 November 2023.  Houthi missiles were also launched toward Eilat at the time, accompanied by drone activity.  But at least one apparently missile-involved event was recorded as generating an impact in Eilat, and HAN claimed responsibility for it afterward.

The recurrence of the aforementioned IRI in a similar incident – or at least the report of an incident – brings us full circle on the HAN/PMFs/IRI slice.  On Sunday 7 January, IRI claimed it had launched “cruise missiles” at Haifa from Iraq.  There is apparently nothing to substantiate this, and HAN would probably disavow any link to it.  But the type of incident, with a Shia PMF group claiming long-range air attacks on Israel, fits the same profile.

The void

For this last major point, a picture is worth 1,000 words.  Most readers will be aware that the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) strike group has left the Mediterranean and is heading for home on the U.S. East coast.

This satellite imagery update, posted on 7 January, shows Ike in the central Red Sea.

The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have rarely been so well populated with premier navy warships.  And Djibouti remains stocked to support local operations by the coalition, from resupply to supporting reconnaissance flights and helicopters.

But there’s a major void left entirely unfilled in the region.  It’s in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. naval force would have to operate to deter Iran.

The cruise missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN-728) is still in CENTCOM too, and probably near the Persian Gulf, after entering the theater back on 5 November 2023 – but Carney and Florida are not the platforms to deter Iran-backed militia ops in Iraq and Syria.  Together they could make a dent in Iran’s own high-value bases and infrastructure, including a limited number of  nuclear program targets.  But it would be only a dent; a Tomahawk barrage, while formidable, wouldn’t put Iran at risk comprehensively and sufficiently to daunt the radical regime.

For credible deterrence of Iran in its homebase, and in Iraq and Syria (where U.S. troops are, as well as being the land pathway to Israel), the Persian Gulf is where the Eisenhower needs to be, her 50 strike-fighters bristling on the flight deck.

There are U.S. Air Force assets in the Gulf, of course.  For the most effective possible deterrence effort against Iran, they would be essential.  But when the carrier is not in the Gulf, there’s another “essential” that can be yanked out from under U.S. operations at any time, and that’s permission by Gulf host nations (principally Qatar) to launch combat sorties against Iran, or against Iran’s known interests in Iraq or Syria.

With little fanfare, only a short time ago, the U.S. and Qatar renewed the host agreement for Al Udeid Air Base in Doha, where our Air Force aircraft deploy and are maintained, and from which they routinely operate. But renewing the host agreement doesn’t guarantee that Qatar will agree to all the purposes the U.S. may have for launching combat aircraft.

Qatar in the past has quietly announced that it will not allow the use of its facilities for attacks on Iran.  And Iran, of course, is always maneuvering to extract such policy concessions from Doha, as well as other U.S. hosts in the Gulf:  Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman.

The U.S. has recently shifted some air operations back to Prince Sultan Air Base (PSAB) in Saudi Arabia.  The 378th Expeditionary Air wing operates a squadron of F-16Cs there, along with the E-3G Sentry airborne early warning/command and control aircraft, KC135 tankers, and E-11A electronic warfare aircraft.  It remains to be seen, however, how much latitude for U.S. operations the Saudis want to put themselves on the hook for.

The more passive, tentative, and incrementalist the U.S. deterrence posture is, the less interested Gulf nations will be in exposing themselves to Iranian retaliation on its behalf.  A pick-up game with no carrier in it isn’t likely to seem like the best bet to them.

A key point in all this is that what Eisenhower and her airwing bring to the Houthi-maritime problem – as we’re now addressing it, with no power projection ashore – isn’t actually needed.  The Aegis escort ships (cruisers, destroyers) and their helos are better suited to the problem, and would continue to be ably assisted by the surveillance and combat capabilities of P-8 maritime patrol aircraft.

The reason to have Ike and an airwing off Yemen would be to attack Houthi targets on dry beach or inland from the closest launch points.  But that’s exactly what our OPG coalition is committed to not do.

And if we did decide to do it, the Air Force coming in through Saudi air space would be a good solution to much of that problem.  We are privileged to have an Air Force that can walk, chew gum, and tune a turbofan engine one-handed all at the same time.  The Air Force at the theater air ops center in Doha would be running the air campaign anyway, and could put sorties on both the Houthi problem and an Iran-deterrence package across the northern landscape without mussing its hair.

The carrier could participate from the Gulf, for that matter, just as the Air Force could participate from Qatar.  The same flight profile would work for both.

In spite of appearances, U.S. military resources are stretched in CENTCOM.  The Air Force has had to backfill its theater strike-fighter bullpen with A-10 ground attack aircraft, which are the baddest tactical ground support platform known to man, but not the aircraft of choice for scaring Tehran about Iranian air defense infrastructure, missile-program survivability, navy targets on or offshore, or nuclear sites.  For those applications you want strike-fighters, and plenty of them, ready to roar in with your Tomahawks, big bombers, and armed drones.

For deterrence, the visible and operationally daunting presence of the aircraft carrier needs to be not wandering around the BAM launching helos (and using F/A-18 Super Hornets to shoot down drones), but in the Persian Gulf.

It’s not there.  And Iran knows that.  The fact that it’s not there, when, if we wanted to deter Iran, it so obviously should be – that’s the loudest statement being made by the Biden administration’s posture in the region.  There’s hardly any naval presence capable of power projection in the Gulf.  Tomahawks and drones are great, but they can’t do everything.  We’re tending the theory of deterrence with insufficient box-checking, keeping some platforms there but not enough to actually be convincing to the select audience in Khamenei’s inner circle.

The reluctance of the Biden administration to put U.S. carriers in the Gulf reflects the low priority deterring Iran is for Team Biden.  A credible deterrent presence vis-à-vis Iran is the “hack” needed to lock the gates on regional escalation, and Biden isn’t putting the most obvious asset behind that.  Instead, he’s got it hundreds of miles away, acting like an escort ship without the escort-ship agility and sea-combat superiority, while prevented by policy from doing what it was born for: mangling Houthi – or Iranian – stash ashore.

Feature image:  Houthi boats operate off Yemen. Houthi video via Hindustan Times, YuTube.

 

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