Military and intelligence officials discuss smaller presence in the Middle East as US looks for another post-9/11 strategy

By Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — In offices across the military and in the intelligence community, there have been recent quiet discussions about cutting the number of people and facilities typically stationed in the Middle East if the Trump administration succeeds in ending the Iran conflict, six sources say.

If those cuts happen, it would mark another shift in how the US national security apparatus treats a region that successive presidents have sought to leave behind.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the US exponentially expanded a constellation of permanent military and intelligence facilities to fight wars and conduct strikes in half a dozen countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya.

But the recent fighting with Iran has laid bare deep vulnerabilities in the American infrastructure in the Middle East as many of those sites have become targets of repeated Iranian attacks in an unpopular war that has killed 18 American service members.

Officials involved in the informal discussions in the military and the intelligence community indicated they are now acting at least in part to predict what might be acceptable to a mercurial president who sources say has articulated no clear strategy for a postwar future — and who, in the past, has staked his political identity on reducing American forces overseas.

Those discussions are happening even as there are still 50,000 troops and a large number of military assets in the Middle East, including two aircraft carriers and more than a dozen guided-missile destroyers. CIA officers who were sent home during the hottest part of the fighting earlier this year are being sent back to the region, one of the sources said.

The US military is also evaluating how to harden its defenses for those troops who are expected to remain in the region, even once the war ends. That includes by moving some installations underground to better defend against missile and drone attacks like those launched by Iran in the monthslong conflict, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

While the Pentagon has long discussed moving some bases in the region underground, the idea took on new urgency after the first weeks of war as Iran exposed how vulnerable they were to drone and missile attacks.

“The vulnerabilities were always known, but the US never acted on it with urgency,” said one of the sources, a US official.

The military has developed several potential courses of action for changing the US force structure in the Middle East as soon as next year, two of the sources said — noting it would not make sense to abandon those strategic locations for launching aircraft while the conflict is ongoing.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense directed questions to US Central Command. Central Command did not respond to a query from CNN before publication. The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

In the background of today’s discussion are the repeated planned pivots out of the region: 25 years of military intervention in the Middle East since September 11 with cycles of promises to pull back.

‘If we do’

The US military started dramatically increasing its footprint in the Middle East in the years before 9/11, maintaining a presence of roughly 27,000 active-duty troops across the region starting in 1998 — significantly more than in the decades prior.

That number would only continue to grow after the September 11 attacks, as US basing grew to support first the war in Afghanistan, then Iraq, then a metastasizing series of counterterrorism conflicts in hot spots around the region.

Two years after the September 11 attacks, the US had an estimated 250,000 troops in the Middle East during the invasion of Iraq. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of Americans in the region fluctuated but never dropped below roughly 100,000, according to publicly available estimates.

In 2011, then-President Barack Obama announced that “the tide of war is receding” in Afghanistan and that the US would begin drawing down tens of thousands of troops whom he had surged to the fight. The US would not withdraw fully from Afghanistan for another decade.

That same year, Obama withdrew combat troops from Iraq in a bid to extricate the US from a war widely seen as a failure. But he was forced to return when the vacuum of American power arguably led to the rise of ISIS.

Even as the total of US troops in the Middle East dropped in the years following 2011, it still hovered between 30,000 and 60,000. Throughout that time, the potential threat from Iran also loomed large in the mind of US policymakers, in particular proxy groups that launched fatal attacks on American service members in Iraq.

Though planners are discussing options for potential cuts now, the US appears no closer to negotiating a settlement with Iran that would end the conflict. Iran continues to target US bases and forces deployed to the region, launching attacks against American installations in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates last week as the two sides exchanged fire for the first time in roughly a month.

The damage has been substantial, US officials say: The CIA’s outpost in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for example, was effectively destroyed by an Iranian attack, according to one US official and a former intelligence officer. Although Pentagon officials have sought to downplay the impact, American military installations in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have all been struck by Iranian drones and missiles, and sources say the damage has been significant.

For the CIA and the military’s elite special operations command, some officials have considered whether the same sensitive jobs can be done without permanent basing, according to two US officials: leave personnel and equipment stationed in the United States, send them to the Middle East for individual missions, then return home.

In some cases, the US government may simply decline to rebuild assets that were severely damaged or destroyed by Iranian attacks — in part due to cost considerations, one official and two other sources familiar with the discussions said.

Pentagon officials have publicly refused to say what they might rebuild.

In April, Pentagon comptroller Jules “Jay” Hurst III told reporters it was not clear how much it would cost to repair bases and facilities damaged from the war with Iran, “and part of it is we would assess what our posture should be in the Middle East.”

Hurst later added that the Pentagon does not “have a final number for what the damage is to our installations overseas,” and it depends “on how we decide to rebuild those, or if we do.”

Senior Pentagon officials have privately made clear they want to scale back the US military’s troop presence in several Gulf countries as part of a broader effort to shift more of the defense burden onto regional partners, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.

Sources said there was no official process or direct order to conduct what’s known formally as a force posture review. Officials within different parts of the military and the CIA are instead keenly aware that even as the military continues to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, launch attacks on Iranian infrastructure and threaten strikes against additional targets that would likely further escalate the conflict, President Donald Trump is known to change his mind quickly.

“Is there an implicit task? Is there something coming down the pike where we need to be prepared to go, or are we sitting [forward] just in case?” said another US official, describing the tone of the discussions.

No clear timeline

The CIA was in search of a mission at the time of the 9/11 attacks, former officers and historians say: Its chief adversary, the Soviet Union, had fallen. There were analysts at the agency deeply steeped in terrorism and in the Middle East — but not many of them. Staff in the region probably numbered in the mere hundreds, according to Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence historian at the University of Texas at Austin.

After 9/11, that all changed. The agency recruited heavily and grew a much larger cadre of paramilitary officers who carried guns and worked closely with the US military to hunt out terrorists — a contrast to the traditional picture of a case officer, who was tasked with developing source relationships and gathering secrets.

But both organizations lived through the ebbs and flows of a two-decade engagement in a region that presidents of both parties at times wanted desperately to leave behind. Obama sought to engineer a “pivot” of American military and intelligence resources to Asia; Trump’s administration in his first term ranked China as America’s biggest threat in his first national security strategy.

But the word “pivot” became a running joke in national security circles as successive crises and policy decisions — including the unforeseen rise of ISIS and Trump’s first-term decision to kill top Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani — continued to suck the United States back into the Middle East.

Top US military leaders have recently warned Trump that combat options for escalating the conflict with Iran are unlikely to achieve his stated objectives, CNN has reported, with the president instead opting to focus on ramping up economic pressure in hopes of crippling the regime.

But there is no clear timeline for how long that strategy may take to produce results, and many analysts believe that Iran’s current leadership may be willing to endure months of economic pain and is unlikely to capitulate in the near term.

Broadly, Pentagon officials expect to maintain some of the large, permanent military bases in the region, but rebuilding those installations may depend on the host nation’s willingness to contribute to the cost, which would likely be in the billions of dollars, one of the sources told CNN. The source added that many were originally constructed and paid for by the country in which they reside.

In the short term, US troops and bases in neighboring countries will almost certainly face continued attacks from Iran.

The Navy’s top admiral said last week that personnel would not be returning to Bahrain, the traditional home of the 5th Fleet, “anytime soon.”

“We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

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