Pride of the Neighborhood

Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. David Goldfein said Tuesday he thinks there will be “a great deal of pride” among the Middle East countries that participated in the attacks on ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq Monday night. Speaking at an AFA-sponsored, Air Force breakfast in Arlington, Va., Goldfein said “from everything I’ve seen thus far” the airstrikes were “a pretty successful event.” Based on his time as head of US Air Forces Central Command, when he was charged with cultivating relationships with US partners in the region, he thinks they will be proud “not only that they participated, but that they were part of something big.” The partners are “making a difference, against a threat that’s an existential threat to them. And I hope it will play out that way,” he said. During his tenure as the CENTCOM CFACC, Goldfein emphasized to regional allies that whatever equipment they invested in needed to be able to interoperate with what everyone else was buying. He also supported development of the Gulf Air Warfare Center in the UAE, and the development of a regional exercise comparable to the USAF’s Red Flag. That interoperability has now paid off, he said. “This came together very quickly,” he said of Monday night’s air raid. The partners “were able to become interoperable very quickly.” Not long ago, they “couldn’t have done it.”