How Oct 7 upended America’s global military strategy

Flames and smoke rise from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon. Struggling to head off an all-out Middle East war, the Pentagon has deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region for much of the year. (File Photo: AP)
Flames and smoke rise from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon. Struggling to head off an all-out Middle East war, the Pentagon has deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region for much of the year. (File Photo: AP)

Summary

  • As fighting flares across Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, the Red Sea and Iran, some military experts say a substantial U.S. military role will be needed in the region for years to come.

After the U.S. fight against Islamic State wound down, the Pentagon came up with a recipe for keeping watch over the Middle East while using the bulk of its forces to deal with the greater threats it saw from China and Russia.

The U.S. would cut back its military presence in the region to a handful of ships, a couple of Air Force squadrons and a few thousand troops in Iraq and Syria. Carrier battle groups wouldn’t be stationed regularly in the region.

To augment American capabilities, the Pentagon would rely on naval and aerial drones to gather intelligence and lean on an emerging security collaboration among Israel and Arab states to combat threats from Iran. If things threatened to get out of hand, the Pentagon reasoned, it could always temporarily surge forces back into the region.

It was a plan that reflected the heightened priority the Trump and Biden administrations placed on deterring China and Russia in the years ahead. But it collided with the upsurge of violence in the Middle East that began last year on Oct. 7.

The war sparked by Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel in October 2023 that left 1,200 people dead quickly spread. As fighting flares across Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, the Red Sea and Iran, many of the U.S. assumptions about how to cope with dangers in the Middle East tinderbox have been upended.

At the center of the new reality is the recognition that Israel, a nation that has long prized its independence but is now embroiled in conflicts on multiple fronts, has found itself increasingly dependent on the U.S. military. Over the past year, it has relied on supplies of American munitions, and benefited from U.S. help in shooting down enemy missiles and drones, as well as the rapid deployment of American naval and air forces to deter more substantial Iranian attacks.

The U.S. has had to modify its strategic priorities to adapt. Struggling to head off an all-out Middle East war, the Pentagon has deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region for much of the year. Twice, it has had to shift a carrier from the Pacific, leaving no carrier in Asia for weeks at a time. Before Hamas attacked Israel last year, the U.S. hadn’t planned to keep a carrier in the Middle East on a regular basis.

And while the Pentagon is hoping that further escalation can be avoided, some military experts say that a substantial American military role will be needed in the region for years to come.

“We’ve been trying to shoehorn events in the theater into a mental construct," said retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, a former head of the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East. “We need to recognize that if we want to actually have an effect on events in the theater and deter Iran, we are going to have to put forces into the region."

Washington has pulled out the stops to come to Israel’s aid before. During the 1973 war, President Richard Nixon ordered the Pentagon to carry out Operation Nickel Grass—the largest aerial supply of weapons and supplies since the Berlin Airlift, when the U.S. flew supplies to areas of the German city that were under Allied control to get around a Soviet land blockade.

But a growing threat and the prolonged confrontation between Israel, Iran and the Iran-backed militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza and Yemen have combined to present a new challenge for Washington.

The fast-flying ballistic missiles and evasive drones that are used by Iran and its regional proxies allow for limited reaction time and are more sophisticated than the dangers the U.S. and Israel confronted decades ago.

The open-ended conflicts also have gone on far longer than the wars Israel fought in the past, taxing its resources. The 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon lasted 34 days, while the 2014 fight against Hamas in Gaza took 51 days. The current fight in Gaza has just entered its second year.

This wasn’t the Middle East the Pentagon anticipated when the Biden administration took office.

In the early months of the war, the U.S. stuck to the plan of surging in naval and air forces to stave off a wider war. But the commitments began to add up, turning what the Pentagon hoped would be a short-term crisis into an extended military presence.

In April, the U.S. and allied partners rushed to help defend Israel against an Iranian barrage of more than 300 missiles and drones. American F-15 and F-16 aircraft shot down dozens of Iranian drones that were heading toward Israel, while a U.S. destroyer fired an SM-3 missile to knock down a ballistic missile.

Tensions soared in August following Israel’s killing of a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut and a Hamas political leader in Tehran. Concerned that Iran might attack Israel or U.S. forces before all of the reinforcements arrived, the Pentagon took the unusual step of advertising the presence in the region of the USS Georgia, a missile-carrying submarine whose undersea movements are generally kept secret.

To expedite the arrival of American forces and better position them to take action, U.S. commanders also ordered a dozen F/A-18 fighters and an E-2D Hawkeye surveillance plane to take off from the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and operate from a base in the Middle East.

All told, the U.S. has nearly doubled the number of fighter jets in the region over the past year, adding hundreds of airmen to support new squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagles, F-16s, A-10s and drones, the Pentagon has said.

The U.S. has also bolstered its air defense in Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia to protect its forces from attacks by Iranian-backed proxies, adding some of its much-demanded Patriots back into the region.

With Israel facing a continuing threat from Iran and its proxies, some former Israel officials said the country of about 10 million is increasingly dependent on Washington.

Israel understands that the conflict with Iran and its proxies is “about material endurance, about national power, about your industrial base, about your stockpiles and the ability to employ force over long periods of time, which basically are beyond the size and scope of Israel," said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general who served as the head of strategy for the Israel Defense Forces from 2010 to 2015. “The necessity and need for a stronger U.S. role is pretty evident."

Compounding the problem of managing American deployments, Israel has frequently told the U.S. about some of its attacks at the last minute, forcing the Pentagon to hurriedly move its forces to protect Israel or American interests in the region. That has led to tension between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Israeli counterparts, defense officials said.

Since just this past spring, Israel has been linked to an airstrike that killed a number of Iranian military commanders meeting in Damascus, killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in an Iranian military guesthouse in Tehran, killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in Beirut, caused thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members to explode, and killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an intense airstrike in southern Beirut.

It is now contemplating an attack on Iran in retaliation for launching around 180 missiles at Israel earlier this month. The Biden administration is urging Israel to avoid Iranian nuclear sites and oil infrastructure to reduce the possibility of further escalation.

Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he was alerted to the pager attack about an hour before it occurred, when Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, the current head of U.S. Central Command, told him “something big" was about to happen but provided no specifics.

Brown learned about the strikes that killed Hezbollah leader Nasrallah when he was pulled out of a meeting as the operation was under way.

With the sizable military deployments the U.S. is making to protect Israel and its own troops, current and former American officials say the Pentagon needs advance notice before Israel launches major attacks.

“The Israelis have to assume this is costing us a lot," said Dennis Ross, who served as a top official on the Middle East for Democrat and Republican administrations. “I think the next administration needs to have some strategic understanding with the Israelis about how we see the threats, what we’re prepared to do and the kind of boundaries in terms of how we each will operate to minimize surprise to each other. “

Pentagon officials insist they still plan to hew to their longer-time priority of deterring China—in particular the need to be able to defend Taiwan by 2027, the year that the Central Intelligence Agency says the Chinese leadership has told its military to be ready to invade the island.

But the Pentagon has yet to spell out how it plans to cope with new demands the Middle East is placing on it without committing itself to move more forces in and out of the area, expand the size of the American military or both.

U.S. military officials have played down the significance of shifting carriers from the Pacific, saying it provides their crews with valuable experience when they are conducting operations that demand they fend against Houthi attacks on commercial shipping.

Some of the original architects of the Pentagon vision for a more-modest U.S. military presence in the Middle East say that their plan can survive the ramped-up deployment of American military units, providing that tensions ease and diplomacy advances, reducing the need for U.S. forces.

“I think we are in this plastic period," said Mara Karlin, who stepped down last year as a top policy official at the Pentagon, where she helped craft the national defense strategy. “We are in an acute threat environment. And ideally, sooner rather than later, the various parties will step down an escalatory ladder."

But some military experts say the Middle East deployments could begin to undermine the U.S. military posture in the Pacific if they continue into next year. While the Navy has 11 carriers in its fleet, because of the new demands over the past year it can deploy only a couple at a time due to maintenance requirements, training and need for crew rest.

“By next year, we will have a potential gap for carrier coverage either in the Middle East or the Pacific," said Bryan Clark, a former naval officer who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. “The Navy doesn’t have the capacity to have two carriers in the Middle East and one carrier in the Pacific all the time."

Some former Pentagon officials argue that the notion of pulling back U.S. military involvement in the region has always been problematic given Iran’s regional ambitions and potential nuclear capabilities. That has led the Pentagon to confront trade-offs between allocating funds for new weapons programs versus overseas deployments, forcing a choice between preparing for future threats and dealing with present-day conflicts.

“Every White House since President Obama has told the U.S. military they want to do less in the Middle East and every White House has subsequently told the Pentagon to do more because of circumstances on the ground," said a former senior Defense Department official.

Tough questions lie ahead for Israel as well. Hamas’s surprise attack last year has led many Israeli military analysts to conclude their government can’t be assured that it will receive early warning of an enemy attack and needs to have more forces in place to defend its frontiers.

“What the U.S. military demonstrated is that it is flexible and nimble enough to respond to a crisis and that the U.S. has the political will to sustain the increase in posture in support of a strategic partner," said Dana Stroul, who left her post as the Pentagon’s top Middle East civilian official in December.

“The challenge is always going to be that the U.S. can’t sustain that posture in perpetuity," she said.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

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