I don't like to jump to conclusions about single-source stories, but
this one seems like a pretty sober, detailed account.
Forty U.S. Army soldiers who were in Israel as the advance team for what they thought was a routine training exercise last October 7 suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war, unarmed, and being forced to beg reluctant Pentagon officials to send an Air Force plane to extract them.
Approximately a quarter of the soldiers were just miles from Gaza in off-base housing near the IDF’s Tze’elim base when the attack began. A group of local Israelis – IDF reservists, police officers, and ordinary citizens – got them to the base, which Hamas terrorists were quickly heading toward. With his men in mortal danger, the U.S. team leader requested permission to open the arms locker so they could retrieve their firearms but was denied at the US Central Command level and “denied and/or ignored” at a level above that, according to a military intelligence analyst with knowledge of the mission and exfiltration.
7 comments:
It's hard to say if the journalists didn't understand the story they were being given, or if the story doesn't make sense on its own terms. However, there is no level "above" Central Command; the Combatant Commander owns his space, and really only the SECDEF or the President is above him.
Likewise, Israel isn't in the Central Command area. It's in the European Command (for what amount to diplomatic reasons: CDRUSCENTCOM can't be seen meeting with the Israelis regularly). So the story is a little confusing in the details provided, at least as the journalists relate them.
It sounds like the request to open the weapons locker should have gone to EUCOM, not CENTCOM (and at one point in the story it says it did go to EUCOM, and that EUCOM rather than CENTCOM was the source of the denial). The extraction went through CENTCOM because it used air assets assigned to Kuwait.
Those sorts of details need to get ironed out to understand who did or said what on the day.
testing
Hey, it worked, I signed in through Chrome instead of Brave. Grim, thanks for the review. I wish all journalists had equally good sources to run their stories by before publishing.--Now I'm going to see if this trick restored my ability to publish images.
"Not getting permission to open the arms locker".
This is a classic case of the rule of law, paper version.
There are actually two rules of law.
The second rule of law is the natural rule, and the penalties are far more onerous.
The corrolary is this- would anyone want to serve under someone who refused to provide them with weapons in the face of imminent peril?
One would not wish to; but what one wishes is of little account in military order.
If this happened as described, the US commander (safely in Germany) probably thought that a bunch of armed Americans doing their own thing out of coordination with the IDF might cause an international incident. The IDF apparently didn't have the same fear, if the report is accurate: they provided the American soldiers with rifles of their own.
Israel may be a EUCOM command, but this sounds like CENTCOM units deployed there for the exercise, so it could have involved either or both commands, I'd guess.
"About 400 U.S. soldiers – infantry, armor, and aviation units – who were deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Spartan Shield were slated to participate."
Insofar as they were in EUCOM, they’d answer to the CDRUSEUCOM on these matters. There’s an opaque set of control designations, but basically when (say) 3/3 ID is in America between deployments it is owned by FORSCOM, which governs training and preparation at home; when it deploys to Kuwait control transfers to the CENTCOM commander; when it travels into EUCOM for an exercise, control transfers again. It’s a modular BCT, so the division HQ it reports through to the combatant commander need not be 3 ID, nor the Corps HQ III Corps. Any one of several deployable division/Corps HQs can serve, and sometimes other arrangements can be made for things like exercises.
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