Window of opportunity. Iran and the network of militias it backs across the Middle East have launched hundreds of drones, missiles and rockets into neighboring countries from increasingly new directions in recent years, exploiting a major gap in US and Arab military defenses that officials worry could fuel violent escalation, economic disruption and Gulf states’ defense industry ties with China.
Biden administration officials say diplomatic outreach to Iran has done little, if anything, to slow the attacks, and that the best way to prevent them is for local militaries to shoot them down.
But two years after the Gulf Cooperation Council formally ended its blockade of Qatar, some regional militaries still refuse to talk to each other.
That was a main focus of this week’s US-GCC working group meetings in Riyadh, where two- and three-star US general officers led by the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy director Dana Stroul sought to impart the urgency of creating a common air defense picture — as one US general put it, “a single shared pane of glass” — as Russia is poised to enhance the lethality, speed and range of Iran’s already vast arsenal of kamikaze drones.
