Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, 22 August, 2023. (Photo: Israel Defense Forces)

The highest ranking US military officer’s trip to Israel this week caps off years of improved defense cooperation between the two countries but comes at a time of concern about both American commitment to the Middle East and Israel’s own military readiness amid an ongoing domestic political crisis, according to experts who spoke to The Algemeiner.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley arrived in Israel on Tuesday as part of an international farewell tour ahead of his retirement in October.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Milley as one of Israel’s “most significant, true friends,” while Milley’s counterpart, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi, said in a statement that Milley’s tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, which began in 2019, was defined by “unprecedented” military coordination between the US and Israel.

“The strategic alliance between Israel and the US continues to be a significant pillar of our national security, and it has been strengthened over the past two years with the transition of the IDF to [US Central Command] under your leadership and command,” Halevi said.

In 2021, the US military shifted Israel from its European Command area to Central Command, which covers the broader Middle East.

Jonathan Lord, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told The Algemeiner that this shift was probably the most significant development in US-Israel military relations under Milley and helped enable the largest ever US-Israel military exercises to be held earlier this year.

“These are … exercises that are both multi-domain and joint,” Lord said. “So multiple services from both the IDF and the US military, operating combined, involving air, space, sea, land, and cyber assets. There are probably a handful of countries in the world with militaries themselves sophisticated enough to perform those operations independently. But it’s really something to behold that the US military and the Israeli military are sophisticated enough and developed enough in terms of their cooperation to be able to do those things jointly.”

Col. (res.) Eldad Shavit, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, added that while these exercises promote US-Israel military cooperation, they also send a message to Iran.

“I think they are being conducted first to find ways to improve the cooperation, organization, and coordination between the two, but maybe also project a message,” Shavit said. “We cannot throw out that one of the real objectives is to send a message to Iran [and others] here in the Middle East that Israel and the US are cooperating.”

Despite the intensive military cooperation between the two countries, the US under President Joe Biden and Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have had public political disagreements, especially over American commitment to the Middle East and the Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary. The former concern about US commitment is also shared by Saudi Arabia, which is reportedly seeking security guarantees from Washington as a condition for normalizing relations with Israel.

Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told The Algemeiner that a formal US-Israel defense agreement would help resolve these concerns from America’s regional partners.

“I think it would be a major step forward and answer, at least in part, that nagging question that our partners in the Middle East have about whether the United States is going to have their back,” Misztal said. “Making a similar sort of commitment to the Saudis I think would also have a very strong effect both in enabling Saudi-Israeli normalization and making clear to the Iranians that they can’t just think about attacking US partners in the region and getting away with no consequences.”

CNAS’s Lord added that one of the things enabling Iran and its proxies to believe that they can get away with provocations in the region is the political and military crisis surrounding Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, with thousands of IDF reservists not reporting for duty out of protest.

“The head of Israel’s defense intelligence Amit Saar was briefing the [Israeli Parliament’s] foreign and defense committee that there were real concerns about the perceptions of Israel’s deterrence capability and posture among Iran and Hezbollah,” Lord said. “So I think part of this is absolutely that there is an impact if these troops stop showing up to train, but also the perception is reality if in fact Israel’s adversaries see weakness and then seek to take advantage of this with aggression.”