US Outpost did not give appropriate aerial defenses before a deadly attack

For the past three years, the United States has given Ukraine everything it needs through offensive and defensive weapons in its war with Russia. Above all, this included air defense systems, a large part of our own national stocks.

Now it turns out that our own troops may have been denied Access to anti-drone air defense systems and months of radar detection more sophisticated before a deadly attack on a small American outpost in Jordan on January 18, 2024. The drone assault, which would have been launched by Islamic resistance in Iraq, a militia group supported by Irania, led to the death of three soldiers of the American army.

According to the Washington Post, which obtained access to the internal investigation of the massive army on the incident thanks to a request from the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA), the small outpost was poorly prepared for the attack on a certain number of levels. But that’s the key:

The conclusions of the investigation seem to have contradictions. For example, the investigators were lacking the managers of Tower 22 for omitting to “visualize the risks” and not to assess the probability of an attack.

However, commanders above them also did not imagine the vulnerability of the base. Four months before the attack, Army Central, which oversees operations across the Middle East, denied a request for air defense system capable of slaughtering drones because, the investigators found, only one of these systems was available and troops in the United States had to prepare for deployments. A radar system request that could better detect drones has also been refused, according to the report.

According to the investigation and previous reports, the only defenses counter-drones of Tower 22 were the electronic war systems designed to deactivate the plane or disturb their path to a target, depending on the investigation and the previous reports.

A spokesperson for Army Central has not responded to repeated requests for additional information, in particular with regard to the Central Army Call, the Tour 22 call for an air defense system.

This “previous report” revealed that:

The first conclusions, which have not been reported before, indicate that the drone may have been missed “due to its low flight trajectory,” said an American defense official with direct knowledge of the Washington Post assessment. In addition, this person said that the base, known as Tower 22, was not equipped with weapons that can “kill” air threats such as drones, and rather relied on electronic war systems designed to deactivate them or disturb their path to a target.

It is scandalous to think that after the attacks of Hamas of October 7, 2023 against Israel, when the whole region was put in increased alert, that this outpost was not considered enough to obtain what it needed to protect itself, in particular after some 160 drones and attacks of rockets which were launched against similar American outposts in Syria and Iraq at the time.

Meanwhile, the Council for Foreign Relations has a clever tracker of all the specific funding and weapons (more than $ 70 billion) that the United States has given Ukraine since February 2022, including all kinds of anti-drone and anti-missile air defense systems. On October 11, 2023, only three months before the attack on Tower 22, the United States announced a new branch of arms, “up to 200 million dollars” of stocks, including “additional air defense capacities, anti-tank weapons and other equipment to help Ukraine as a result of Ukraine.” It was the series of a series of falling slices that included drawing of DOD stocks and helping to contract to find out more.

Experts had warned that until the end of the Biden administration, DOD stocks were low of sophisticated weapons systems, including air defenses.

An e-mail at Centcom Public Affairs to ask questions about this thread in the Washington Post report was not returned on Monday afternoon.

“This report is exasperating for me,” said Ret. Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, principal military member of the defense priorities and host of the Podcast Deep Dive. “It is unacceptable to have denied an adequate air defense for the risk that all our troops are confronted. We have spent hundreds of billions for the Ukrainian defenses and we launched ourselves. Shameful.”

He added the long-time criticism according to which subsequent administrations, including the current Trump team, did not explain why these troops are even in the Middle East today (2,000 in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq). The outpost in Jordan would have been one of the “anti-Isis” operations in this region just above the border in Syria.

“These troops have no strategic advantage in the United States,” he added. “The assertion that we are there for the” sustainable defeat of the Islamic State “is a complete military nonsense. It is simply false. The troops should be removed, immediately.