TEHRAN – Over the Possible Iranian strike at US Base in Qatar, US Militaryshifts Command Centre from Middle East for the first time in a decade.
The United States Air Force Combined Air and Space Operations Center at theAl Udeid Air Base in Qatar was shut down for a period of about 24 hoursover the weekend, the Washington Post has reportedlink.
The quiet process, which saw regional operations command shifted from AlUdeid to the Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, over 11,500 km (7,150miles) away, was the first time in over a decade that the US has moved thecommand and control center out of the region, Sputnik has reported.
Maj. Gen. Chance Saltzman, deputy commander of the US Air Forces CentralCommand, commented on the shift, saying that “the functions that the CAOCprovides for air power are so critical and so essential that we can’tafford to have a single point of failure.”
Saturday’s operation was the first time in 13 years that the key US base inQatar was not the focal point commanding the hundreds of US drones, fighterjets, bombers and other aircraft regularly operating under US CentralCommand (USCENTCOM), a military command stretching from Egypt, Sudan andKenya to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, and whichincludes Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
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Col. Frederick Coleman, commander of the Al Udeid Air Base-based 609th Airand Space Operations Center, seemed to confirm that the exercise was basedon a hypothetical Iranian attack against the US presence in Qatar.
“Iran has indicated multiple times through multiple sources their intent toattack US forces,” Coleman said. “Frankly, as the war against ISIS [Daesh]*winds down and as we continue to work through a potential peace process inAfghanistan, the region is calming down and potentially more stable that ithas been in decades, except for Iran,” he added.
