PENTAGON DEVELOPED CONTINGENCY PLAN FOR WAR WITH IRAN

The Intercept-March 1st 2023

In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted the largest joint military exercise in history.

THE U.S. MILITARY allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept.

The contingency plan, code-named “Support Sentry,” was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. It classifies Support Sentry as an Iran “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, a broad contingency plan for war which the Pentagon develops in anticipation of a potential crisis.

The existence of Support Sentry has not been previously reported. It is not clear from the document how much the Pentagon spent on the plan in those years. When asked about the program and whether it is still in place, Maj. John Moore, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on numbered plans. Iran remains the leading source of instability in the region and is a threat to the United States and our partners. We are constantly monitoring threat streams in coordination with our regional partners and will not hesitate to defend U.S. national interests in the region.”

Support Sentry is one example of the U.S. military’s growing comfort with — and support for — Israel’s aggressive stance toward Iran. As U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides’ bluntly put it last week, “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran] and we’ve got their back.”

As major U.S. attempts at diplomacy with Iran collapsed under Trump, the Pentagon quietly moved Israel into its Central Command area of responsibility, officially grouping it with the mainly Arab countries of the Middle East. The reshuffling, which occurred in the final days of the Trump administration and has remained under President Joe Biden, is the military corollary to the financial and diplomatic alliances laid out by the Abraham Accords, a normalization agreement negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner, between Arab Gulf states and Israel. The accords were touted as a peace deal, but in fact served to align these countries against a common enemy: Iran.

The U.S. and Israel have also collaborated on a growing number of military exercises in recent months that Israeli leaders say are designed to test potential attack plans with Iran.

Contingency plans such as Support Sentry provide “the general outline—the overarching ‘concept’—of a plan to take some major action against an enemy,” Dakota Wood, a senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation and retired U.S. military planner who served as a strategist for the Marine Corps’ Special Operations Command, told The Intercept in an email.

For instance, in June 1994, the Pentagon requested a CONPLAN for military operations in Haiti; by July, U.S. forces invaded and deposed Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The manual also notes that Support Sentry is a “COW,” or cost of war item.

Though conventional wisdom might be that the military has contingency plans for everything, CONPLANs are, in fact, quite limited since preparing them is time consuming, Wood explained. “Since staff, time, and resources are always limited, no military command at any level would develop CONPLANs … for every conceivable contingency.”

The existence of Support Sentry, then, suggests that the U.S. military takes the possibility seriously enough to prepare a strategic framework for it. CONPLANs also lead to consequences short of war, like military exercises.

“CONPLANs serve as the intellectual framework or context when developing military exercises because it makes sense for units that are honing their skills to have that work be relevant to likely tasks,” Wood said.

BY 2018, President Donald Trump had vocally withdrawn the U.S. from the Iran deal. In January 2019, he tweeted a picture of a poster displayed at a cabinet meeting and directed at Iran that read “sanctions are coming” — a reference to the “Game of Thrones” TV series.

Under Biden, U.S. policy toward the region remains much the same.

On January 16, 2021, just four days before Biden’s inauguration, Trump ordered the military to reassign Israel to CENTCOM, its Middle East combatant command. Historically, the U.S. military has rather counterintuitively kept Israel under its European Command, or EUCOM, in order to avoid tensions with Gulf Arab allies like Saudi Arabia. This was one of a volley of last-minute decisions by Trump designed to force the Biden administration to abandon diplomacy and adopt the framework of his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran. “For decades, DOD placed Israel in the European Command (EUCOM) AOR due to significant tensions between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East,” a Congressional Research Service report about the move observed, noting that “improved Israeli ties with some Arab states may allow more open coordination to counter Iran.”

Trump’s order followed a December 2020 bill introduced by several Republican senators, including Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to study the transfer of Israel to CENTCOM.

“Tasking CENTCOM to serve as the primary U.S. defense coordinator with Israel instead of EUCOM would acknowledge the new political reality of the Middle East under the Abraham Accords,” Cotton said in a press release. “Our bill requires a study of the potential transition, which could increase U.S.-Israel military cooperation with regional partners and help better secure the Middle East against threats like Iran.”