WarSclerotic

America’s second-highest ranking officer arrives in secret | The Times of Israel.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in Israel this week amid rising tensions between the two countries

Admiral Winnefeld, left, a former F-14 Navy fighter pilot, with Secretary of Defense Panetta in 2011 (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The only unusual thing about the second-highest ranking officer in the US armed forces’ trip to Israel this week is that, apparently, it was a secret.

Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited an Iron Dome battery near Ashkelon Wednesday and, as a guest of IDF Deputy Chief of the General Staff Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, took part in security meetings that addressed “the cooperation between the two armies,” Army Radio revealed Thursday.

The visit comes amid significant tension between American army brass and Israeli leadership. General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed a possible Israeli strike against Iran last week and said that while Israel had the power to ”clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he also, according to a report first published in the Guardian, took the unusual step of adding “I don’t want to be complicit if they choose to do it.”

The remark drew plenty of anonymous ire in Israel. Senior government sources said that it showed “vehement American oppositon” to an Israeli strike before the November 6 elections.

That same week Time magazine reported that the largest joint American-Israeli military exercise, Austere Challenge 12, scheduled to be held in late October and to include missile defense warships and thousands of troops, was significantly reduced in scale. The reduction, the magazine reported, “may make it more difficult for the Israeli government to launch a pre-emptive strike on Tehran’s nuclear program.”

Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin of the US Air Force, a former F-16 pilot, will command the joint drill in October (Photo credit: US Air Force)

Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin, Commander, 3rd Air Force, Ramstein Air Base, Germany, commander of the upcoming exercise, is slated to arrive in Israel next week.

General Winnefeld’s visit will be formally announced later Thursday.

This entry was posted on September 6, 2012 at 11:25 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.