Army Gen. Lloyd Austin III, the commander of U.S. Central Command, made the call Monday morning to order airstrikes against jihadi targets in Syria and has the authority to order more, according to the Pentagon.
Austin, whose office is located on the top floor of the four-story Centcom headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, is in charge of U.S. military operations in Syria, Iraq and 18 other nations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Though it was President Barack Obama’s ultimate decision to call for the airstrikes in Syria, which he authorized the day after visiting Centcom last Wednesday, Austin ordered the strikes that hit 14 Islamic State targets and eight Khorasan Group targets in Syria, the Pentagon said.
And he will continue to do so, according to the Pentagon, which says the strikes will be ongoing for quite some time.
“Gen. Austin has the authorities he needs to continue to conduct strikes when he needs to do it,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesman, speaking to reporters Tuesday morning.
Centcom planners have been developing targets in Syria for a while now, Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon.
“It was through the careful planning and coordination of U.S. Central Command’s combined air operations center located in the region that these strikes were successful with minimal collateral damage,” Mayville said.
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As the man who ordered the attacks in Syria, a nation we are not at war with, Austin has a great deal on his plate, said William Fallon, a retired Admiral who ran Centcom in the George W. Bush administration.
“It is a lot of responsibility,” said Fallon, who assumed command shortly after Bush announced a surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq in 2007. “From my experience, you have to look at all the pieces. Ask a lot of question. Have the staff give you something that gives you confidence it will really work. Then do your own assessment on it and hope you have most of the bases covered and try to minimize the loss to your own people, and be as effective as possible.”
Mayville said at first blush, the airstrikes in Syria appeared successful. Initial success is key, said Fallon.
“Once you start things, you don’t get a second chance to improve on what you did the first time,” he said.
And, once attacks commence, there’s no time for a commander like Austin to either relax or fret.
“You learn there is not much you can do once you put things in motion,” said Fallon. “You depend on the people who carry out the plan to execute the plan. As a commander, you are thinking about where does this go? What are the next steps? What is the end state and how do we get there? You are well beyond the tactical execution of the plan.”
As a four-star commander, Austin has another responsibility as well, said Fallon.
“A big job is pushing the deciders, the policy guys, on where they think this is going and what they are trying to achieve,” said Fallon, who declined to talk about specifics from his year-long tenure at Centcom. “And you give advice about what is really going to be executable and whether you can get to where they want to get.”
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Even though U.S. aircraft delivered the vast majority of the ordnance on Islamic State targets in Syria, and though most of the coalition aircraft flew in the third wave of attacks, any multinational aerial operation takes a lot of coordination, said retired Air Force Col. Jim Waurishuk, the former deputy director of intelligence for Centcom who before that served as deputy chief of staff for intelligence for NATO.
“You have to have deconfliction, so aircraft are not flying into each other,” said Waurishuk. Overflight rights had to be worked out for the coalition nations, he said, because only Jordan borders Syria.
One benefit of more than two decades of constant U.S. aerial presence in the region is that Centcom planners have developed tremendous targeting skills there.
“We’ve been doing stuff in the same general region for so long and have been looking at Syria for, gosh, 30 years,” said Waurishuk. “Centcom has a well-trained staff and they’ve developed an extremely talented pool. Most of it is in Tampa.”
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Centcom is not the only organization from MacDill contributing to the air campaign against the Islamic State.
There are 16 KC-135 air refueling tankers based there. Two crews recently returned from assisting the effort in Iraq and one of the tankers was featured in a Centcom video released Tuesday showing it refueling an F-16 about to take part in the first wave of attacks in Syria. So far, of the more than 3,500 individual flights in Iraq since the bombing campaign started there on Aug. 8, about a third have been flown by tankers like the ones at MacDill, according to Air Force Capt, Malinda Singleton, a spokeswoman for U.S. Air Forces Central.
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During the question and answer session at the Pentagon, Mayville said that one objective of the strikes in Syria is to give the Iraqi security forces time and space to reorganize, replace leadership and work with the new government in Baghdad. He also said it will take a while to determine the effect of the strikes on the Islamic State.
Waurishuk said that the intelligence networks he helped create in Iraq that could have assisted with that task withered with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011, adding to the difficulty of assessing the damage.
Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel who served as an intelligence advisor in Iraq to both Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, said there is a long road ahead.
“We are at the beginning of a 2,000-mile trek,” says Harvey, now director of research and strategy for the University of South Florida’s Global Initiative on Civil Society and Conflict. “And we are walking. We are not in a roadster and we are not in an RV.”
Airpower, he said, “will have a very limited utility affecting the course of the campaign over the long haul.”
While Mayville said there are no U.S. ground forces and will be no U.S. ground forces in Syria, Harvey said there is a “75 percent chance” that special operations forces, CIA operatives, or some combination might wind up there under what is called Title 50 Authority, federal law that allows military personnel to operate under the auspices of the CIA, meaning that technically there would be no U.S. military presence.
Harvey said one role would be to hit Islamic State financial centers in Syria and gather intelligence gleaned from computers and storage devices to help unravel IS funding networks, oil purchasers and other critical data. As for Iraq, he says he would bump up U.S. military presence, currently about 1,600 troops, to between 6,000 and 8,000 U.S. troops, with about 1,000 commandos, who would be able to take direct action against key targets there and gather the same types of intelligence on Islamic State financial and support networks.
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