The U.S. has 5,000 troops in Syria’s backyard

The Pentagon totally pinky-swears that this has nothing to do with Syria. It just happens to have sent 5,000 troops to neighboring Jordan to participate in a nine-day air defense, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance exercise, dubbed Eager Lion.  

While the Pentagon says this round of the annual exercise — involving thousands of participants from 19 countries — has been in the works for years, the timing is awfully convenient. The fighting in Syria has started to spill over that nation’s borders into Lebanon and Israel. Meanwhile, Congress is continuing to pressure the White House to do something to aid the Syrian rebels in their fight against the Assad regime who has been helped by a recent influx of fighters from Hezbollah.

Earlier this spring, the Pentagon sent several hundred "headquarters" troops from the 1^st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to Jordan to assist U.S. and other NATO troops there in trying to figure out how to secure the Assad regime’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons should they fall out of the Syrian government’s hands.

These headquarters troops are now joined in the desert by members of the 26^th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a host of U.S. Navy amphibious warfare ships, Patriot air defense missile batteries — also from Fort Bliss — and F-16 fighter jets from the Colorado Air National Guard.

All of these troops are in Jordan to demonstrate the U.S.’s commitment "to the Kingdom of Jordan and regional partners and the combined efforts to sustain regional security and stability," reads a Pentagon press release on the exercise.

"Eager Lion is an excellent example of teamwork that brings together military forces and inter-agency partners from around the world," said Maj. Gen. Robert Catalanotti, Director, USCENTCOM Exercises and Training in the announcement. "This exercise challenges the participants to respond to realistic, modern-day security scenarios by integrating a variety of disciplines in the air, on land and at sea. Our relationship with Jordan and the 19 partner nations involved in the exercise is built on a foundation of interoperability that brings us closer together and enhances regional stability."

So yeah, this exercise is focused on maintaining stability — just what the war in Syria threatens.

This air defense and humanitarian relief exercise features units that could make life difficult for Assad’s air force. The 2,200 Marine-strong 26^th MEU, like the six other MEUs in the Marine Corps is basically a self-contained, seagoing crisis response force equipped with everything from an infantry battalion to MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotors and the support staff to back them up. Meanwhile, those F-16s from the Colorado Air Guard’s 120^th Fighter Squadron specialize in keeping enemy aircraft and missiles on the ground — during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 120^th dropped hundreds of smart bombs knocking out Saddam Hussein’s ballistic missiles.  While the Marines may simply be passing through Jordan, for the exercise that’s suppessed to last from June 9 through the 20th, the Patriot missiles and fighters may stick around for a while, providing a hedge against increased aggression by the Syrian government’s air force.

As Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy rmeinds Killer Apps:

"This is the most recent in a series of multinational exercises that started in 2011, and while I believe that a broad range of capabilities are tested during this protracted training exercise, it’s hard not to conclude that at least some aspects of the exercise (particular those focusing on humanitarian assistance, chemical warfare mitigation, and missile defense) were written into the script because of ongoing developments in Syria."