Introduction

This chapter aims to evaluate whether the military preparations made by the United States in the aftermath of Central Command’s (CENTCOM) establishment. It examines the implications of the creation of CENTCOM for US-Israel relations. The chapter proposes a model for American regional security planning for the 1990s. Since the end of World War II, US military operations in the Far East - first in Korea and later in Vietnam - appeared to be the focus of American strategic planning and force allocations outside of Western Europe. During the Reagan administration, however, the Middle East has increasingly become an arena of expanded American military presence and activity. Little investigative work has been done on past patterns of American military interaction with the Middle East, to serve as a basis for comparison with the current CENTCOM effort.