Junipers, Oaks, and Killer Tomatoes

The United States and Israel conducted the Juniper Oak 23 multi-domain military exercise in late January. The Pentagon calls it the “largest” and “most significant” bilateral U.S.-Israel exercise in history.

This exercise comes as the Islamic Republic of Iran deepens its relationship with China and Russia, continues to export terrorism, inches toward a nuclear weapon, and expands the missile means to deliver a weapon of mass destruction to its target.

So, what was this military exercise all about? What makes it unique? Why does it matter? What comes next?

Filling in for Cliff May, senior director of FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power Bradley Bowman asks Lieutenant General Gregory Guillot.

Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot is the Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command, which is the Pentagon’s regional combatant command responsible for the Middle East. CENTCOM was established a few years after the  revolution in Iran in 1979 and views deterring Iran as its number one command priority.

Lieutenant General Gregory Guillot

General Guillot received his commission from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1989 and has commanded a flying squadron, operations group, and two flying wings. Most recently, he served as the commander of the Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central), Combined Force Air Component Commander within CENTCOM. He’s a senior air battle manager with more than 1,380 flying hours.

BOWMAN:

Lieutenant General Guillot, it’s great to see you. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me.

GUILLOT:

Thanks, Brad. Good to see you again, and thanks for your interest.

BOWMAN:

Oh, absolutely. Definitely interested. I’m excited to dig into the details of the recent Juniper Oak ’23 military exercise and some of the issues related to that. But first I’d like to talk just a little bit about your background, career, and current position. I understand you grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Is that right?

GUILLOT:

Yeah, that’s right. I’m from Tucson, the son of an Air Force officer, and his last several assignments were in the Tucson area. My mom is from Tucson originally, so that’s where I spent most of my time growing up, certainly from high school years on. Went to the Air Force Academy, of course, followed them in football, but a big follower of Clemson Tigers. Any spare time I have, that’s usually where I’m focusing that.

Then throughout the career in the Air Force, I’ve spent a lot of it in the CENTCOM AOR at various levels from junior officer through command. Prior to being here at CENTCOM, I was the air component commander, for a couple years out of Qatar. Really enjoy the ties to the Middle East and working the nation’s issues with our Middle East partners.

BOWMAN:

Well, that’s a great, effective, and quick summary of your background. I was stationed years ago at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, when I was attending the US Military Intelligence Officer Advanced course. We’d drive up to Tucson from time to time, and really enjoyed that part of the country, but we’ll talk more about that over coffee sometime.

But you mentioned your last position before this one was as commander of AFCENT or US Air Forces in the Central Command Theater, and you were there from August 2020 to July ’22, if I’m not mistaken. That’s quite an important position. I’d love to hear just a tad more about that quickly, if you’re willing.

GUILLOT:

Well, the current commander, General Grynkewich, was at CENTCOM as the J3 before, so he also has a lot of shared experience in the region. And what that position does is it’s the service component, so responsible for all Air Force activities in CENTCOM, but also it’s a functional component as the Air Component Commander, which means it’s joint. So, Naval air power, Army power, US Air Force, and plus the partner nations that contribute air power all fall under the Ninth Air Force commander, AFCENT commander, who’s also the CFACC, the Combined Forces Air Component Commander.

And it’s a great and rewarding position, get to work with top air forces from around the world and their airmen. And a lot of it is focused at the CAOC [Combined Air Operations Center] at Al Udeid, where we have members of 21 nations, as well as the US, in that facility, planning, executing, and debriefing all air operations for CENTCOM in the Middle East.

BOWMAN:

That’s incredible. And of course, if I’m not missing, you were in that AFCENT position during the withdrawal from Afghanistan where, from my perspective, the Air Force played a heroic role in withdrawing our forces and getting some of our Afghan partners out of Kabul and trying to save as many lives as possible. So, that was quite an endeavor.

GUILLOT:

Well, thanks. Maybe we can talk about that sometime.

BOWMAN:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

GUILLOT:

But you’re right. There was some great, just really heroic activities by a lot of people from different countries and services, and I was really proud to be working with them at that time.

BOWMAN:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s jump in, just for the second time. Let’s just jump into your current position as Deputy Commander of US Central Command. And just for the sake of time, for the listeners, Central Command is one of the Pentagon’s Geographic combatant commands. That’s the way the Pentagon organizes the world and its efforts around the world, if you will, covering basically a large swath of what we think of the Middle East and a little bit more.

And in that role, you oversaw the recent Juniper Oak ’23 military exercise. And I want to dive into that in a moment. But before we do, let’s just talk very quickly about the headaches in the region. According to the March 15th, 2022 CENTCOM posture statement to Congress, Iran is, “The greatest single day-to-day threat to regional security and stability,” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. How do you, General, and how does CENTCOM see the Iranian threat and how is it evolving?

GUILLOT:

Well, what you just quoted is certainly accurate. Of course, we watch the Iranian threat in the theater very closely, every day. One of the command priorities is to deter Iran and then defeat VEOs, the violent extremist organizations.

And then when you talk about deterring Iran and defeating VEOs, really between them are a lot of the proxy groups that are sponsored by Iran that routinely attack US and coalition locations and personnel in the theater.

So, it is certainly the most single destabilizing entity in the Middle East. And from start to finish of the day, which with CENTCOM, there really is no start to finish of the day. They kind of flow one to the other. It certainly takes a lot of our attention.

BOWMAN:

For sure, for sure. And the same posture statement, as you’ll know better than me, talked about their pursuit of regional hegemony and their use of terrorist organizations as you just touched on, their massive ballistic missile force and how they’re on the cutting edge of the development of aerial and maritime unmanned systems. And the list goes on and on. And we’ve seen them trying to ship weapons to the Houthis recently, some of which have thankfully been interdicted because of the great work of Central Command and some of our partners. And we know Iran is helping to arm Russia, and Russia’s using those weapons in Ukraine. And we see a growing relationship between Iran and China and the list goes on and on and on.

But enough on the headache. Let’s move to Juniper Oak ’23 exercise. General, can you talk about how the planning for this exercise came together? When did it start and how did it come together? To get to the genesis of this exercise.

GUILLOT:

Sure. With any of our partners, we have a robust exercise program, and some of it longer range and some shorter term, more tactical types of exercises. And over the last year and a half to two years, as Israel transitioned from partnering with EUCOM to partnering with Central Command, we looked for future exercise opportunities.

Some we inherited that were run very well by European command, the Juniper Series, Juniper Cobra, Juniper Falcon. And we’ve been working on a transition plan for CENTCOM to assume responsibilities for those. For an example, next week we’ll be out there conducting Juniper Falcon.

But those are kind of long range. A lot of times they don’t involve active forces. And we wanted to see what we could do somewhere between what the Air Component, for example, does very frequently, we’ll send maybe a four-ship over to Israel, work with them closely, just as they do with other partners throughout the region: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, as two quick examples, Jordan. But not quite to the big scale of the Juniper Cobra and Falcon series.

And Israel was very interested in doing the same thing with us, and we were trying to figure out how to work that in. And we noticed a couple of events that were going to confluence in January. And as we looked at this in November, that was a bomber task force mission, which are routinely done by US STRATCOM and the US Air Force to send bombers all over the world. We had one of those missions coming to our region. We knew with Juniper Falcon coming up and the transition from European command, that we needed to test our command and control and coordination between the US forces and Israeli forces because we would need a new entity.

EUCOM used JTF, Joint Task Force Israel, and our mission is a little different than EUCOM, and so we wanted to use that as a basis for our CENTCOM forward Israel. And we wanted to try it out before the first exercise, which is Falcon, coming up here in a week. And then finally, we wanted to do it very jointly. And if we could use cross-combatant command capabilities, and the availability of the USS George Herbert Walker Bush Carrier Strike Group, look like they might be in the part of the Med where if world situation permitted, we could borrow them for a short period of time and conduct this exercise.

And so when you took those three requirements, it all pushed it towards in the 20s of January. And that’s ultimately where we executed, mostly 23 through 26 January, were the big execution days for Juniper Oak. But because we started talking about it in November, that’s really, really short. As I mentioned, most of these exercises have an annual training or development plan where you have initial planning conference, several intermediate planning conferences and a final panel conference, and then you actually do it.

But we kind of merged all this into a two-month period, which required some hyper planning between the components forward with their counterparts, and then between us and the headquarters and the components. And so I held a VTC every morning

BOWMAN:

Video Teleconference, yeah.

GUILLOT:

With all of our components to make sure that everything was moving on track, any problems that we needed to solve that I could solve directly with my counterpart, the Deputy CHOD, or Chief of Defense for the Israeli Defense Forces. And it actually worked out really, really well. That’s one of the lessons learned that came is that the smaller exercises that we’ve done over time really set the foundation for us to expand this to a much larger scale, even on a fast timeline, because we had some pretty strong and disciplined coordination and planning processes that we’re able to fall back on.

BOWMAN:

Well, what a great overview of the lead up to it. What I’m hearing you say, just in summary, and feel free to push back or correct anything I say here, is that when Israel was transferred from European Command, EUCOM, to Central Command, there was kind of a long-standing desire to do something big in terms of a bilateral exercise. And as you said, you had kind of a confluence of events come together where you said, “Hey, we could not only do it, but do something quite significant. Let’s see if we can pull this together relatively quickly.” I mean, is that essentially what happened here?

GUILLOT:

That is. And then there are a couple of other factors that were important that we could build on there. One is, at any time we’d like to show that the US can very quickly deploy, employ, and redeploy forces across the world, even when very focused in other regions simultaneously.

So, obviously a lot of commitment to the Pacific and commitment to European Command due to the Ukraine crisis. And I think this shows, demonstrates, that the US is still capable of amassing a large force, which hopefully deters adversaries. And then at the same time, assures our partners in the Middle East that the U.S. is very committed to not only the defense of Israel, but the defense of the region as a whole, and we can quickly act on that.

BOWMAN:

That’s such an important point. I want to foot stomp that for the listeners, just from my perspective is that sometimes you hear people in the region and elsewhere saying, “Oh, the U.S. is leaving, the U.S. military is leaving.” Of course, the quantity of US forces in the Middle East changes from time to time, and of course, there was the Afghanistan withdrawal. We’ll set aside that debate for another time. But the bottom line is the U.S. maintains a really robust and well-designed posture in the Middle East that serves American interest. More than that, as I think I hear you saying, we retain an unmatched ability; we, the United States of America, retain an unmatched ability to flow in additional forces to secure our interests and support contingency operations. It seems like this Juniper Oak exercise demonstrated that in spades.

GUILLOT:

Yeah, thank you. That was one of our goals. In our lessons learned in hotwash, we feel that we had achieved that while still meeting some pretty impressive operational level and tactical level goals at the same time. So we didn’t just deploy for the sake of deploying, as we’ll talk about when we talk specifics about the exercise, we did some very, very complex training with a highly capable partner. Certainly, each of our two countries left the exercise with a higher level of readiness than we entered it, which is always desirable.

BOWMAN:

Yes.

GUILLOT:

It’s a great platform for us to use as we work across with our other partners in the Middle East. For example, this week we’re starting the Spears of Victory exercise with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia up in Dhahran at their Air Warfare Center. So we have a number of forces that will be operating primarily air and air defense forces. Then I think the next one we’ll do is Magic Carpet with Oman. These are regularly scheduled opportunities with our partners, but I think that we’re taking lessons from each of these exercises and we can apply them to the next one and for the benefit of not only the U.S., but all of our partners.

BOWMAN:

No, that’s great. The readiness of the individual forces, their ability to operate together, the fancy term being interoperability and creating a more unified and capable coalition to deter aggression from Tehran and its terror proxies and others, that’s outstanding. I got to say, Spears of Victory, Magic Carpet, Juniper Oak, the Pentagon loves its cool names for exercises, doesn’t it?

GUILLOT:

Well, the Juniper Oak is attributable to us, but Spears of Victory is named by the Royal Saudi Air Force and

Magic Carpet, it was named by the Royal Omani Air Force.

BOWMAN:

We’ll have to take a poll and see who thinks the coolest name is. Juniper Oak, though, when I first saw that, I was like, “I get it, oak, strong, durable, reliable,” but it’s two different trees. Come on, we got

GUILLOT:

Yeah, that’s true-

BOWMAN:

Yeah.

GUILLOT:

… because we wanted to stick with the Juniper theme ’cause they had Falcon and Cobra and then … So I’ll talk to our J-3 about-

BOWMAN:

Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.

GUILLOT:

…the trees.

BOWMAN:

No, hey. No criticism from the cheap seats. I just think it’s fun.

GUILLOT:

Yeah.

BOWMAN:

Anyway. Okay.

GUILLOT:

It does flow pretty well. That was-

BOWMAN:

Yeah. Yeah. No, I like it.

GUILLOT:

That was good.

BOWMAN:

I like it. Juniper Oak, sounds very strong. That’s good. Okay, so back to seriousness and details here. Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of the exercises in general. So what U.S. Forces participated, and feel free to be as detailed as you want, and what Israeli forces participated?

GUILLOT:

Well, let me go macro with just the big numbers and then I’ll go into some specifics. There are a total of about 7,400 total forces, roughly 1400 Israeli, and the remaining 6,000 from the U.S. Of those 6,000, roughly 5,500 were from the carrier strike group and remained in the East Med near Israel. The other 500 were actually at various bases in Israel, a total of 10 different locations with a couple of them, Nevatim having the most and then spread out. So that in itself, I think, is very important ’cause usually at a exercise, you might go to one location, one bed down location.

But the fact that we were spread out at multiple places increased the complexity of the logistics, but it also increased the number of touchpoints we could have with our partners and the number of opportunities to get face-to-face briefings, debriefings, and side-by-side execution. The specifics on the aircraft, we had about 140 aircraft total that were involved throughout the four or five days, and 100 of those came from the U.S. Probably two-thirds of those from the carrier strike group, maybe more. Then 40 to 42 from the Israeli Air Force. The types range from both countries, F-35s, multiple fourth-gen fighters, had AC-130s. Both countries participated with Apaches, which are AH-64s. We had the KC-46 came out, which is our newest tanker. Then the Israelis provided two of their Boeing 707 tankers, and they operated in parallel orbits out over the East Med to feed the fight, if you will.

We had space in involved. We had army ground forces that conducted both surface-to-surface fires training, as well as a small team urban warfare training. Again, both of those side-by-side with Israeli counterparts with special operators operating. Then we had 12 ships, six from the carrier strike group, and six from the Israeli Navy that operated side-by-side and conducted both AOMSW, which stands for Air Operations in the Maritime Support Warfare and-

BOWMAN:

That was essentially going after surface targets, both with the rotary wing or helicopters and also naval surface warfare, if I’m not mistaken. Correct?

GUILLOT:

That’s exactly right, and it’s usually with the AOMSW. So I clarified the acronym once, but I-

BOWMAN:

No, yeah, go for it.

GUILLOT:

… I’m going to have to stick with the acronym now, but that’s a lot of the small craft that you might see that could be harassing or in danger to our craft. You’re exactly right, and this-

BOWMAN:

Of course, as you know better than me, that’s a favorite tactic employed by the Islamic Republic of Iran to harass shipping in international shipping lanes. So that’s a good thing to practice, I’d imagine.

GUILLOT:

Yes. So we used the Apaches, as you mentioned, to do live fire on, they’re called killer tomatoes. They’re these big red targets that they put out afloat, and we

BOWMAN:

Do the killer tomatoes move? I have to ask.

GUILLOT:

Well, they can, but mostly they just flow with the-

BOWMAN:

The currents.

GUILLOT:

… the current, or they can put them on something that moves. In this case, I think they were all fairly stationary.

BOWMAN:

All right.

GUILLOT:

Then as you mentioned, we also did a gun ex, coordinated fires between the different surface ships.

BOWMAN:

Next time you’re going to have to make sure the killer tomatoes can move at about 40 miles per hour to make it more challenging for the navy. I’m just saying, I’ll look for that next exercise.

So what a great overview. Thank you. So all in sum, CENTCOM and the Pentagon and the administration is saying this is the largest and most significant bilateral military exercise in U.S. and Israel history. Is that right?

GUILLOT:

Yes, it is, and both largest in terms of numbers and also, largest in terms of complexity by involving all of the domains and some complex missions within the domains simultaneously. So we did a CSAR, which is combat search and rescue, which is, both countries provided helicopters that worked in tandem to go pick up crew members that we had put out in the desert and to pick up, find, fix, rescue and egress. We talked about the AOMSW and the gun ex.

We did what’s called the Urban Ops Training, I think I mentioned, but we did the HIMARS simultaneously with our HIMARS-

BOWMAN:

The high mobility artillery rocket systems. These are the systems that have gained a great notoriety in Ukraine where they’ve been used with great effectiveness against invading Russian forces.

GUILLOT:

That’s right, and yes, tremendous accuracy. Then the Israelis use their MLRS which is the multi-launch-

BOWMAN:

Launch rocket system-

GUILLOT:

Yep.

BOWMAN:

… which is the tracked version more or less of the HIMARS. Exactly.

GUILLOT:

Yep. That’s right. Then within the large force employment or the airstrike, which was on the last day of the live fly on the 25th, we had this strategic bombers, which took off out of the U.S. about 17 hours prior to their time on target … and multiple refuelings as flowed into the Eastern Med, gathered in front of them was a SEAD, which is suppression of enemy air defenses, a package of Israeli and U.S. F-35s that went from feet wet, which is over the water, over Israel and down into the range and defeated multiple surface-to- air emitters to clear the path. Then right behind the F-35s, and in concert with the F-35s, we had F-18s from the carrier, Super Hornets along with F-15s and F-16s from the Israeli Air Force that defeated a fourth-gen-plus- plus threat array of about 10 aircraft; paved the way for the B-52 to come in without having to spin or orbit and deliver all of their weapons, live weapons that they’d carried from the U.S. on time, on target, to the second, which was extremely complex.

If they couldn’t have gotten through the air threat or the surface threat, we would’ve had to spin them and it would’ve been a lesson learned, but we didn’t need to do that. Then behind the B-52s, we had three waves of fighters that came in with various types of weapons and dropped live drops on the targets in the target area. So we had standoff weapons that were simulated that would’ve been … You’ll have to … I’ll just say the acronym if you want

BOWMAN:

Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re doing great.

GUILLOT:

The TLAMs, which are Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, that were simulated fired from the ships. Then we had JASSM, which is the Joint Air Surface-to-Surface Munition, a longer range munition. So we did those and we graded ourselves on those and did all the planning and all of that. Then we came in and did the SEAD, the OCA, which is Offensive Counter-Air, to clear out all of the enemy air and then the strikes themselves. So even in that was very complex and that was just one part of the four days of complex operations.

BOWMAN:

What a great rundown. I hope the listeners heard what you said there. B-52 bombers taking off from the U.S., flying those many hours, synchronized, coordinated, joined up by American and Israeli fighters, defeating enemy air defense, going in and doing multiple waves attacks on targets. One might imagine how those kind of skills would be useful. I’ll just leave it at that. I do have to ask General, why were there not B-2s involved in the exercise?

GUILLOT:

Well, we didn’t pursue them just because, like I said, we had the bomber task force was already lined up to give us the dates and those were assigned. They can be any type of bomber, so we didn’t specify and they just happened to be B-52.

BOWMAN:

Can you speak very quickly, if you wouldn’t mind, about the role of the KC-46s? This is something I had called for last April to say, “Hey, let’s send KC-46s to the Middle East for Dynamic Force Employment purposes, practicing our ability to be unpredictable and also Air Force Agile Combat Employment purposes, and by the way, also to help the Israelis get ready for the receipt of their own KC-46s.” What role did the 46s play in the exercises, who did they refuel specifically?

GUILLOT:

Yeah, they played a key role. They flew in a Dynamic Force Employment, or DFE manner, as you mentioned. They ended up pairing up with the F-35s as they came in Europe. Landed at the same base, were able to quickly brief and turn the next… Either one or two days later, I can’t recall right now, and two full aircraft passed several hundred thousand pounds of gas to all the US strikers. They did not refuel any of the Israeli strikers because they already had the Boeing 707s lined up for them. But while on the ground, they were able to do a lot of exchanges with the Boeing 707 tanker crews. Different fighter crews were able to look at the airplane and we could do some face-to-face exchanges there.

The airplanes performed magnificently, came in, did the mission, came back, landed, did the debrief, and were able to follow on to the next AMC and TRANSCOM, Transportation Command, US Transportation Command, tasking that they had, which fit as a microcosm of our overall goal, which is quickly get them in theater, employ, and redeploy. So we have forces just in time for need, not just in case we need them. So the KC-46s did a great job there. Plus, as you’ve probably told your followers before, the KC-46 is a huge advance over the KC-10 and the KC-135, which are our workhorse there, with data links and other avionics that just make it a fantastic airplane. So it’s nice to have it in the AOR just even if it’s just for a couple of days.

BOWMAN:

Absolutely. Yeah. I’m excited for more and more of them to be fielded to our forces, to Japan, our great ally in Indo-Pacific, where I know you served as well at one point, and ultimately to our Israeli allies in the Middle East. And I’m so glad to hear that Israeli crews were able to spend some time on the aircraft to learn so that they can scrunch the time from when they receive theirs and be able to use them in combat operations. And for my part, I do hope that in a future training exercise that we’ll have an opportunity to refuel Israeli aircraft on American KC-46s. That would seem to be good for us and good for them. So I don’t know if we can be able to work that into a future exercise.

GUILLOT:

Yeah, I hope to.

BOWMAN:

Yeah, exactly. I think that would be good for both sides from my perspective. Very good. I want to keep well within the military lane where you’re comfortable, but what do you think messages were sent from this exercise, broadly speaking, to Israel, to Arab partners, and to any adversaries? You want to just talk about the messages you think that are being sent here or does it speak for itself?

GUILLOT:

It probably speaks for itself. The ones that I took from it, we’ve discussed, Brad, different points, but I’ll just pull them together. One is that the US’s commitment is ironclad to the region and we can very quickly bring forces, execute, and redeploy to help promote stability or respond if necessary in the region. I think our partners across the board saw that and certainly the Israelis saw it as well. I think it showed our partners and probably our adversaries that we can operate effectively at a high level simultaneously in multiple domains. When we do an exercise, it doesn’t have to be only a surface to surface exercise or a land maneuver exercise, air defense exercise. We can do all of those at the same time, with a high level of complexity, with our partners. And I think that that’s something I would expect our friends and potential adversaries to notice.

And then not as immediately evident, but what I hope becomes evident over the coming days is that the lessons learned are exportable to all of our partners. We all operate with very similar systems, with very similar goals, and so therefore the lessons that we gain in an exercise in Jordan or Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Israel are all transferable and applicable to other parts of the region. And we’re all willing to share to make us better, because certainly the sum of our parts is certainly going to make the whole much, much stronger. And that’s always one of our goals in any exercise. Well, I’d say those are probably the big takeaways that I hope both friends and potential adversaries saw.

BOWMAN:

Well, for sure. Well said. Some of the listeners may know in general that the US military maintains a stockpile in Israel called the War Reserve Stock Allies Israel. I’m curious, was any equipment pulled from that stockpile for use in this exercise?

GUILLOT:

No, it wasn’t. So, there’s that stockpile and then the US of course keeps readiness material all across the region that the various component commanders can tap into if they need to, but we didn’t need to access any of what we call the WRM or war readiness material. We didn’t have to tap into any of that for this exercise.

BOWMAN:

Okay. My sense, and push back if you want to, is that I think the fact that we forward station weapons and equipment around the world is obviously helpful. We know that some of our stockpiles were used extensively during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It allows the equipment to already be there, and in a contingency, US forces can fall in on it, quickly draw that equipment and employ it in a contingency, which saves time and makes us more agile. And so I think stationing that stockpile in Israel, like other ones around the region, around the world, makes sense. And there’s also some arrangements by which Israel could potentially use it in a contingency. Just kind of zooming out from the exercise, as Deputy Commander of CENTCOM, do you believe that the stockpile in Israel consists of the weapons and equipment that you need? Is it there in sufficient quantities? Is it well maintained and modern? What is your general assessment of that stockpile there in Israel?

GUILLOT:

The quality is all high. I have no concerns about the quantity or the content, but what I would just say is that we’re always looking to adjust and move different types at different locations around the world to make sure that we can respond globally where and when we need to. And Israel’s just one of many, some floating, some static, and such across the world. So we’re always moving and cross leveling there. So no concerns, certainly no concerns with the quality of it or the condition that you mentioned.

BOWMAN:

Okay. Do you see value in every now and then, every few years, and as part of an exercise, in pulling that equipment out so that if you have to do it in a contingency, it’s not the first time that you’ve done it, particularly doing it alongside our Israeli partners?

GUILLOT:

Yes. I think there is value in doing that because it’s a fairly complex system. There’s a lot of stuff in a lot of warehouses, and it’s not always located in one location. To go back to your opening comments, during the Afghanistan withdrawal, that’s something that we had to do quite a bit is to pull, just to bed down the evacuees at Ramstein and Al Udeid and other places, going into those stocks. So knowing that they’re in the good condition, exactly where they are, set them up, and then once it’s done, clean it up and put them back in. It was an operational training, but we do conduct exercises and such to make sure that the material is in the condition we need, where we need it, and we can get to it when we need to.

BOWMAN:

Yeah, it’s my sense that the Islamic Republic of Iran wants to divide and distract its adversaries as much as possible. So when it sees tension between Israelis and Arabs or Arabs and Americans, from their perspective, that’s a good thing. So conversely, I think it’s in our interest to create as much unity as possible among Americans, Israelis, and Arabs. That’s one of the reasons why I was so glad to see Israel move to frankly where it belongs within Central Command and why I’m so glad to see some of the exercises, some of the maritime exercises we’ve seen that included both Israelis and Arab countries like the Emiratis and Bahrain.

As you look forward, General, as Deputy Commander of US Central Command, Juniper Oak, Juniper Cobra, Juniper Falcon. I’m thinking the Noble Dina exercise. I’m thinking of the Iron Union exercise in the UAE. Do you see opportunities to invite Arabs to these Israeli exercises and invite Israelis to the exercises we do [with] Arabs to try to have more American, Israeli, Arab combined military exercises and improve the readiness of each of the militaries, improve their ability to operate together and send a more positive deterrent message? Is that a goal that you have and are we moving toward it?

GUILLOT:

Yeah, that certainly is a generic or a general goal that we have is to maximize the benefit of our bilateral, and when it makes sense, multilateral exercises. And some of those are tabletop exercises and some of those are field exercises using equipment. And I think in the days, months, and years ahead, you’ll see more and more bilateral exercises that might not even involve the US, might be between different partners. And then certainly as the multilaterals, starting to see 2, 3, 4, 5 and more countries participating together to some degree.

So that’s certainly a goal. We’re seeing some of that with, for instance, in the Navy, as you know, in the maritime, we see that quite frequently with dozens of countries, to include Israel. And then in the air, there are two high level air warfare centers that we work with quite frequently, UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s. And they have multilateral exercises and we’d like to see the participants there grow in the coming years as well. And then keeping the bilateral relationships going, as I talked about with the various… Just in this one month period, three different bilateral exercises where we can work one-on-one with our partners.

BOWMAN:

Yeah, no, that’s great. You mentioned the bomber task forces earlier, and for the listeners, that’s where we’ll send a number of bombers, often B-52s, around the region. And as they kind of circumnavigate the region, the various partners and allies will send up fighters to escort them. A recent one I remember, the Israelis did that, and then later the Saudis sent up their fighters to escort it, and other countries as well. And to me, that just sent a really positive message that, “Hey, we’re looking for peace, we’re looking for stability, but we have the means to defend our interests.” And that here you have in one exercise, not at the same time, but yet Israeli fighters escorting American bombers, and then you had Saudi fighters. And I think that’s a wonderful tiptoe toward where it’s in our interest, all of our interests, to go. And I’m so glad to hear that that’s a priority for you. One kind of… Yeah, go ahead.

GUILLOT:

On those bomber task forces, General Grynkewich is planning those now and has done, I think his most recent one had more, but the last one that I was associated with, we had nine different countries that escorted the B-52s through the region and handing off country to country as the aircraft went. And so it sends a powerful message, but it also has valuable training that we hope for a combined defense of a region and letting the partners know that we would certainly trust them to protect our aircraft just as they would probably trust us to defend theirs.

BOWMAN:

Exactly.

GUILLOT:

So we get a lot out of those bomber taskforce missions.

BOWMAN:

That’s outstanding. People like us have been talking about a regional security architecture forever, and it’s easier said than done, of course. What I’m talking about is in our security architecture, not a NATO or anything like that, but just a means by which Americans, Israelis and Arab partners start to share intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, start to build combined air and missile defense capability, all for the purpose of not of aggression, but of defending, deterring, and defeating. How’re we doing in the progress toward more of a regional security architecture in the Middle East?

GUILLOT:

It’s something that is high on our list. We have a number of conferences run by our J5 across the region. In fact, they just finished one last week and there’ll be a higher level one coming up here very soon where we talk about in the individual domains, regional cooperation in the maritime domain, land, air, and then we hope to grow that into cyber and space in the future. And then like you talked about, the overall picture, I think there’s some common areas we see it day-to-day in the maritime where there’s a yes, that common approach. We’re seeing it more in the air.

General Grynkewich is now leading a thing called an Air Chiefs Conference where they talk about common interests and how we can share information and capability. I think the best place to unite is with defensive systems. And so we’ll look to expand counter UAS, shared air picture, those types of endeavors I think would be very positive because they ultimately benefit everybody in a defensive way. So we will look to pursue those and if our partners are interested in doing that, we would like to advance those initiatives.

BOWMAN:

That’s great to hear. And you mentioned the maritime, which reminds me of course, of the Combined Maritime Forces, which is a 34-member nation organization focused on freedom of navigation and regional stability in a wonderful way. And a lot of our Arab partners are part of that. It has four combined task forces as you know better than me, but the listeners may not know. Combined Task Force 150 that focuses on the Gulf of Oman, Indian Ocean, 151 on counter piracy, 152 on the Arabian Gulf, and then 153, the maritime security in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

And if I’m not mistaken, Egypt is currently leading that, and we’ve seen a lot of tangible results of the Combined Maritime Forces generally and also specifically Combined Task Force 153 in the Red Sea.

GUILLOT:

Yeah, you’re exactly right there. There’s so much evidence each day of advances out there in the maritime by Vice Admiral Cooper and NAVCENT, the Fifth Fleet doing tremendous work. And as you said, with a number of partners with both manned and unmanned systems, that’s probably one you’ll want to talk to him about is his Task Force 59.

BOWMAN:

Exactly.

GUILLOT:

Doing some really fantastic work. Speaking of the maritime, if I could hijack just for a second, what I didn’t mention is after all the Juniper Oak, we did the combined hotwash on the carrier.

BOWMAN:

Yes. That was something the Israelis had been interested in for a long time, if I’m not mistaken.

GUILLOT:

It just made sense with all of the large number of-

BOWMAN:

How cool. And for the listeners, I didn’t mean to interject there, but for a hotwash, in the Army would call that an after-action review. It’s just the idea that after you do a training exercise, you get together and you talk about what worked well, what didn’t go well, and what you can learn and how you can do better next time. And so you’re saying from the Juniper Oak exercise, the hotwash or the after-action review that I just described happened on the USS George H. W. Bush aircraft carrier, right?

GUILLOT:

That’s correct.

BOWMAN:

That’s pretty cool.

GUILLOT:

The thorough debrief for each of the mission areas that we talked about before was conducted prior, and then the facts were sent forward to the main planners. And then General Grynkewich ran the debrief for the Israeli CHOD, Chief of Defense, General Halevi and General Kurilla. And we were out on the ship. So we got a tour of the capability of the ship and then spent over an hour talking about the individual elements of the debrief and what we need to see from the future.

One of the takeaways there is we see future, and I know this is one of your questions, future Juniper Oaks, certainly not necessary to go to the size and scale of this one, but we do want to keep them multi-domain. And then where we go even deeper, and so where we were combined-

BOWMAN:

Hopefully bring in more partners.

GUILLOT:

Certainly, as I mentioned a moment ago, we’re always looking to, when it makes sense, go multilateral or use this as a framework or a template for other parts of the region if partners are interested in doing that. So it was a really neat demonstration, and I think everybody of your listeners were really proud of the shipmates and sailors on the Bush. They were great to show our partners that much professionalism in just a short period of time. It had quite an impact on the Israelis and certainly on the US personnel as well.

BOWMAN:

Outstanding. As we move to conclude here, General, you’ve been so gracious with your time. Let me just do a lightning round if I could, and you can take them however you want them. So someone’s sitting in Los Angeles or Seattle or Kansas City or New York saying, okay, we’re talking about the Middle East here. I thought that China and Russia are all the rage. Why should we continue to have a US military presence in the Middle East? Or why should we retain the ability, why does the Middle East matter to your average American? How would you answer that question?

GUILLOT:

Well, there are so many reasons, but one is it’s the confluence of multiple regions. And the strategic competition is often centered there. There’s some long-standing hotspots in the Middle East itself, but there is Russian and Chinese influence in the region that certainly deserves attention and stability in the Middle East for so many reasons. The smooth flow of commerce and energy through the region, just to name one, make it a global priority for stability in the Middle East. So that’s probably the first thing that I would say there.

BOWMAN:

That’s a great answer. I mean to use the cliché that problems in the Middle East tend not to stay there, as we’ve learned painfully as a country, unfortunately, resilient terrorism threats, people there that would like to kill us here, and if we don’t forward deploy our troops between them and us, then it’s going to be easier for them to do that. Continued nuclear proliferation challenges, obviously with Iran, energy interests, and by the way, as you said so well there, great power competition is a global competition. It happens everywhere, including the Middle East. And if the United States leaves the Middle East, I would say that among those smiling and waving goodbye will be the Chinese because they’re moving in. And I suspect you’re seeing that day to day.

GUILLOT:

Yeah, absolutely. And we look at the National Defense Strategy and there are priorities that they’re in, but certainly I think the best way to keep the National Defense Strategy on track is to have a stable Middle East. And so we work really hard each day to provide that to our country.

BOWMAN:

Exactly. And if we want to do what we need to do in an Indo-Pacific, a major new war in the Middle East would not be helpful to that. So if we can make smaller investments now, make sure our deterrents are strong, then maybe we can prevent that from happening.

BOWMAN:

All right. Well, let me conclude by saying, thanking you sincerely for your distinguished and continued service to our country. Thanks to your family as well for the sacrifices they make. And thanks to the men and women you lead who keep us safe here at home. And I look forward to connecting with you again soon.

And thanks also to our listeners for joining us here on Foreign Policy.