US, 18 other nations, wrap up Eager Lion military exercise in Jordan

The sprawling Eager Lion military exercise was tied by some news outlets to the war in Syria. Though that was incorrect, the US is looking to deepen its military engagement with the region.

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A very special operation

Mr. Eisenstadt points out that while the exercise included all branches of America’s armed forces, it had a particular emphasis on Special Operations Forces (SOF) one of the reasons that a Special Operations Command general was chosen to head the event.

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“Admiral [William] McRaven, [the head of America’s special forces], has talked about building this global SOF alliance. This is part of his vision,” says Eisenstadt. Admiral McRaven told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March that America is now fighting “insurgents, transnational terrorists, [and] criminal organizations” and said special operations forces will bear much of the burden of that fight.

Eisenstadt agrees. “That’s one of the lessons we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan: The value of conducting these intense campaigns against violent extremist networks. You can constantly conduct night raids, every night, over the span of months and years, and you constantly [deplete] their leadership cadre and their bomb-building cadre.”

Special operations, he said, is one of the few areas of the US military that is slated to grow in the coming years. It’s been frequently reported in the past decade that between 70 and 80 percent of America’s deployed special operations forces are in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in the greater Middle East. But there is need for them around the world, Eisenstadt says. He points to Uganda, where US SOF are helping local military in the hunt for Joseph Kony.

The Monitor got a glimpse of Eager Lion in Jordan’s southern desert, where Jordanian and US soldiers worked with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, the Jordanian Red Crescent, and Jordan’s police and civil defense to simulate a camp for people displaced by fighting.

“Every hour or two you have a different scenario, and this forces the Jordanian Army, who are doing the role-play, to act as in real life,” says UNHCR Jordan head Andrew Harper, who was on-hand for the exercise. “It’s really working well on both sides. Certainly the Jordanians are finding out about how to work with humanitarian organizations, and we’re finding out how to work in this type of environment, too.”

“One of Jordan’s big training objectives is for their civilian affairs to interact with their military affairs,” explains Capt. Tom Gresback, a public affairs officer for the US Central Command. He says Eager Lion planners identified 1,300 different challenges to be worked on based on participants' priorities. Other countries wanted to work on countering chemical and biological attacks, while others were interested in learning more about operating in mountains or improving their naval search and seizure capabilities, he says.

Getting to know other militaries may seem less exciting than planning an invasion of Syria – but Rubin says it’s important.

In times of crisis, when political relations break down, “the military officers who have drilled together, had exchanges together... tend to do much better than diplomats,” he says. “Usually the back-channels are going to involve two people who were colonels at the same time, two majors at the same time, what have you. … The irony is it’s usually the military-to-military exchanges that do more to enable peace than anything else.”