Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich leads Air Forces Central (AFCENT), a post he assumed in July 2022 following a two-year stint as Director of Operations at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). While global attention has shifted away from U.S. wars in the Middle East, Grynkewich’s forces support the ongoing fight against ISIS as part of Operation Inherent Resolve. He spoke to Air & Space Forces Magazine in late September during a visit to the Washington, D.C., area to participate in the International Air Chiefs Conference and AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
Q: You’ve stressed the importance of partnerships since taking command. What steps are you taking to expand and further those partnerships?
A: I would argue CENTCOM writ large, and AFCENT as part of CENTCOM, is in this transition phase from a lot of combat operations to some combat operations.
As we start to look at partnerships, it becomes more of a campaign approach outside of combat in terms of how do we stitch together a series of exercises, a series of subject-matter exchanges by our experts, and other partnering events where we might not have an exercise, or maybe it’s some other kind of training even on a smaller scale.
There’s a campaign plan that we are in the process of fully fleshing out that will define, country by country—multilaterally and bilaterally—here are the things that we would want to accomplish over the next while. We already have a fair amount of that.
We have a couple of different areas that we’re focusing on. One is in the counter-UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] area. … We do a series of exercises across the region with almost every regional air force, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula and in the Levant [Eastern Mediterranean], where we launch small UAS, and we go out and try to find them as a team, stitching together U.S. capabilities, other coalition capabilities in the area, and then host nation capabilities.
Q: Are you including more partner participation at your headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar?
A: We are always encouraging our partners to not just be at Al Uleid, but then looking at how we integrate those partners when they do show up at the CAOC [Combined Air Operations Center]. Some partners are better integrated than others, I would argue, and that’s usually not a partner nation issue. It’s usually a how we’re running the CAOC issue. So I have challenged the team to increase the participation so that we don’t just have liaison officers. We certainly need liaison officers and national representatives in the AOC [Air Operations Center]. But we also need people who are fulfilling AOC functions and are fully integrated into the battle room. So that’s a key part of it.
Q: Are there any specific exercises that you can point to as a good example of collaboration?
A: A great example is Eager Lion, which we just concluded. It’s a joint exercise, but a CENTCOM exercise. Our participation in it was fairly robust. We had JTACs [Joint Terminal Attack Controllers] on the ground, we had a Bomber Task Force mission come in and we expended live ordnance. So a huge success from an exercise perspective. There’s a whole bunch of joint aspects in it. It was focused on a wide range of mission objectives. … There are few exercises that really have as broad of a swath of objectives and as many participants.
We also do bilateral exercises from time to time. … We might take off and go fly a mission with the Qataris, let’s say, and meet in the airspace and come back down and debrief that exercise, that mission. I flew a sortie out of Saudi Arabia about a month ago, where I was talking to Saudi controllers. It was a counter-UAS exercise. They were practicing vectoring me toward a UAS-threat, and I was practicing trying to find the UAS threat and doing those sorts of geometries. So there’s a really robust set of them both bilaterally and multilaterally.
Besides counter-UAS and just these exercises, another big focus is going to be regional air and missile defense and stitching together the awareness that each of the countries have and trying to get shared situational awareness on ballistic missile threats and air-breathing threats, including counter-UAS, but this is not an exercise, this is building an integrated structure where we’re sharing radar data across nations and whatnot. It’s a really powerful construct, or it has a potential to be, because everyone faces kind of the same 360-degree threat from ballistic missiles that can come out of Iran, they could come out of Yemen, they could come out of Syria, they can come from any direction, same with UAS. So that’s a key place. And then the last place is we’re standing up a new detachment called Detachment 99. It’s going to look at applying unmanned digital and emerging technologies in order to solve some problems about air-domain awareness and integrating joint fires. And that’s a collaborative space as well.
Q: What does AFCENT’s footprint look like today?
A: I can’t go into specifics on the exact numbers. … I’ll tell you how we’ve tried to define our footprint and what our requirement is. … Our baseline requirement is to cover Inherent Resolve and make sure that the combat air power is over there for defensive purposes. … We would like to have some excess capacity to do other partnering events. So we’d like to do high-end training exercises, like those UAS exercises. If someone’s flying a defensive CAP [combat air patrol] over Syria, they’re not available to go do a counter-UAS exercise, so we need a little bit of additional capacity for that sort of thing.
Q: Do you have that ability?
A: We do. I would say it kind of ebbs and flows as to how much we have. And sometimes we are forced to make trade-offs. … OK, what’s the priority right now? Is it to have a little excess coverage up in the combat area? Or does the situation allow us to not have that coverage.
Q: Israel was recently added to CENTCOM’s AOR. How is your relationship there?
A: The AFCENT relationship with the Israeli Air Force is really good. … They’ve escorted our Bomber Task Force missions and things of that nature. We look forward to continuing to deepen that relationship. There is a fair amount of crosstalk, a fair amount of strategic level crosstalk, at the CENTCOM level and below too about how do we perceive common threats in the region.
Q: How well have other countries interacted with Israel?
A: Most of the countries in the region look to the east when they think of the threat of Iran and its threat network. I won’t go into specifics about which country has what kind of relationship, but I’ll just say that there’s a lot of opportunity.
Q: You’ve kept a close eye on Iran for a while, and you’ve been in this area for a while. Are you seeing an increased Iranian threat? And without a nuclear deal, will that threat continue to increase?
A: Honestly, I think whether we have a deal or not, the Iranians value the threat network that they’ve created. The increased threat is related to the increased capabilities that they’ve provided to these proxy and partner forces. It’s related to the training that they’ve provided them, and the imperfect Iranian control over these groups. So now you have a bunch of very well-armed, well-provisioned groups that could—either under Iranian direction or for their own reasons—decide to lash out in some way. So that’s where I see the increase. … Certainly, the nature of the threat, the strategic threat changes at the nuclear level, but the threat network threat remains. The Iranians will continue to pressure us in the region, continue to pressure our partners, irrespective of a nuclear agreement.
Q: Where do you see your command in a year?
A: Where I would like us to be is in terms of our partnerships in the region: to have not just the general officer or air chief level agreement that we’re going to cooperate, but then make that into real substantial cooperation and collaboration with our partners. That requires not just the generals getting together, but it requires the majors and lieutenant colonels doing kind of hard technical work on what are the standard operating procedures. How do we make different systems communicate, machine to machine, that different countries own? How do we integrate the air defense picture so we all see the same thing and have a common understanding of threats that different nations are facing? My nirvana would be to have made a ton of progress on that.
Q: You mentioned at the CAOC, the obstacle is sometimes the U.S., not the partner nations. What does that mean?
A: This is a common issue that many other senior leaders have talked about over the years, which is we have a tendency to stamp everything ’no foreign’ right off the bat, meaning no foreign national can have access to this without really thinking through the implications, or if that stamp is really appropriate. … In a situation where you’re trying to draw people together and share information and gain common understanding, the moment I stamp ’no foreign’ on it, I can’t share with anybody.
Q: And the CAOC is ‘Combined?’
A: That’s right. The CAOC is the Combined Air Operations Center. Right now, I’ve got a Canadian who’s serving as the CAOC director. I’ve embedded officers from a whole host of our partners from outside the region and inside the region that are embedded in the CAOC. Every time we put the wrong classification marking on something, I say the wrong one, either because we over classify it by mistake, an error of omission, or because some policy restriction says if you talk about this, you can only about it with these countries. … That’s what I mean by it’s kind of us. It’s a cultural thing and a policy thing most of the time. … What I’d say is when you go to the person who has the authority to change that rule, and explain it, they usually do. So you’ve just got to work through those things. That’s almost the easy part. The hard part is, OK, let’s get in a culture of sharing. … How do we make it so we think about working with our partners first?