Sept 21, 2023. Posted by Balkan Periscope - Hellas
Washington DC.
The U.S. Senate, on Wednesday, confirmed the appointment of Gen. Charles Q.
Brown Jr. (U.S, Air Force) as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s
top military officer.
Brown is
the son and grandson of Army veterans: his grandfather served in World War II
and his father in Vietnam.
Brown will replace Gen. Mark Milley, whose term ends next month. President Joe Biden first nominated Brown to the position four months ago. But a Republican senator from Alabama had been holding up Senate confirmation of Pentagon nominees to protest the Defense Department’s policy on abortion.
Critics
complained he was undermining the national defense—a charge more often leveled
against Democrats, and he appeared to give way with Wednesday’s Senate vote
that confirmed Brown in his new position.
Brown’s
Involvement in Fighting ISIS
Brown was
responsible for a good part of the U.S.-led aerial campaign against ISIS. He
led the design of a more effective approach toward identifying bombing targets.
He also brought the B-52 bomber back to the region for the first time in nearly
three decades—since the 1991 Gulf War.
Brown
secured those achievements following his appointment in June 2015 as head of
U.S. Air Force Central Command. A year later he became deputy head of CENTCOM,
and a year after that, President Donald Trump nominated him as Chief of Staff
of the U.S. Air Force.
Brown,
thus, became the first black American to hold that position. Now he follows the
late Gen. Colin Powell as the second black American to be named as the
country’s top military officer.
Brown is
also the first U.S. military officer to assume a very senior position in many
years who has worked closely with Kurdish fighters. The last such person may
well have been Gen. David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division,
headquartered in Mosul, during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF.)
Much later,
Petraeus would explain that while in Mosul, he “oversaw relationships with the
Kurdistan Regional Government,” which he described as “very, very easy, given
how much control and how good a security situation they had.”
Describing
the Kurdistan Region some 20 years after his time in Mosul, Petraeus said,
“It’s been quite impressive—it’s downright miraculous—to see how well they have
done, to see what they have achieved, in so many different respects.”
Brown’s
experience came a decade later, when, as head of U.S. Air Force Central Command
(AFCENT), he assumed responsibility for a significant part of the U.S.-led
aerial campaign against ISIS.
Writing in
November 2015, five months after Brown had assumed AFCENT command, The New York
Times reported, “The United States and its allies have sharply increased their
airstrikes against the sprawling oil fields that the Islamic State [ISIS]
controls in eastern Syria in an effort to disrupt one of the terrorist group’s
main sources of revenue.”
“Lt. Gen.
Charles Q. Brown Jr., the head of that campaign, headquartered in Al Udeid Air
Base in Qatar, said in an interview last week that allied warplanes are
intensifying attacks on a series of fixed sites such as oil production
facilities, bomb-making factories and other so-called critical nodes that
support the Islamic State’s war effort,” the Times continued.
The
revamped targeting “comes after weeks of intense study,” it added. “Instead of
putting the group’s oil production capability out of action for days, the new
goal is to knock out specific installations for six months to a year.”
“The art we
had of building target sets and doing deep studies on adversaries, in some
cases, was a lost art,” Brown told the Times. “What targets are we not striking
that we could go strike? How do we bring all the intelligence together?”
In
considering his own questions, Brown evidently decided that he needed more
firepower. In April 2016, the Air Force announced that the B-52 Stratofortress,
a long-range heavy bomber, was joining the anti-ISIS Coalition.
For the
first time since the 1991 Gulf War, the powerful military airplane was
returning to the region. “Crews will be available to carry out missions in both
Iraq and Syria as needed to support air tasking order requirements,” the Air
Force announced.
Brown, for
his part, explained, “The B-52 demonstrates our continued resolve to apply
persistent pressure on [ISIS] and defend the region in any future contingency.”
Kurdistan24
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