Crippling Iran’s ability to launch volleys of missiles at targets in the Middle East will likely be a priority for U.S. and Israeli military planners over the next few days, a former commander of U.S. Central Command said Sunday.
Iran has fired dozens of ballistic missiles and drones toward Qatari territory as part of its response to the U.S.-led Operation Epic Fury and Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion. The country’s air defense network intercepted almost 75 missiles and drones, officials said.
“If you’re going to strike out, you’d want to hit Al Udeid Air Base with 120 missiles, but they have not been able to do that,” Gen. Frank McKenzie said in a briefing hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “Central Command is working very hard to ensure that they do not regain the capability to do that.”
Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East.
U.S. Central Command has been considering the tactics needed to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile force for several years. Gen. McKenzie said many, but not all, of the missiles require some sort of transportation system to deploy.
“You go after the transporters, you go after the launch sites, and you go after the ‘Command and Control.’ You go after the lots where people who work at the facilities have parked,” he said. “There are a lot of things that we’ve been looking at for many years in order to do this.”
Burying the missiles in some sort of underground launch site would actually make their destruction easier for any attacking force, Gen. McKenzie said.
“The underground facilities are great. You can’t move, and we’ll get you,” he said. “I would encourage [Iran] to do that. They should dig more.”
Gen. McKenzie said he was told that lower-level commanders outside Tehran have been making tactical decisions on their own as a result of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against the senior echelon of military leaders. He called that a mixed blessing.
“It’s bad because you can’t control them any more, and if you reach an agreement to stop shooting, they might have trouble getting it down to them,” he said. “It’s good because they’re going to have less information. They’re not going to be able to do targeting as well and effectively.”
While Iran has the ability to lay a carpet of sea mines across the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow strip of water that connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean, doing so would amount to a “nuclear weapon” from Iran and dramatically escalate the conflict, Gen. McKenzie said.
“They will have crossed a Rubicon that it would be hard to come back from. It would have a significant effect on international commerce, because of the hydrocarbons that move through there,” he said. “But, they have practiced it, and they have a lot of mines.”
Gen. McKenzie said the U.S. has a “modest” mine-clearing capability in the region. The Navy recently decommissioned its last purpose-built Avenger-class minesweepers that had been based in Bahrain.
The mission was assigned to Littoral Combat Ships equipped with a minesweeper package.
“We can get it cleaned. We can get it cleared, and we will. But, it will not be an easy process,” he said. “The United States Navy learned all these lessons many years ago, and it’s been forgotten. I’m sure now we’re going to possibly have to relearn those lessons in the days and weeks ahead.”
