The seamless U.S.-Israeli air campaign over Iran did not materialize overnight. It was built over five years through a deliberate series of bureaucratic shifts, personal diplomacy, joint exercises, and real-world tests under fire - a process that remained largely out of public view until this week's strikes made its results unmistakable.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing a Foreign Affairs analysis by Dana Stroul, who served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from 2021 to 2023, the foundation was laid in 2020 when Trump directed the Pentagon to move Israel-related operations from European Command to Central Command (CENTCOM). Before this shift, CENTCOM's top leaders had visited Israel only twice. General Erik Kurilla, CENTCOM's commander from 2022 to 2025, visited "at least 40 times during his tenure."
CENTCOM already had deep ties to Arab militaries and quickly found ways to bring Israel into regional frameworks - sharing intelligence, integrating radar feeds, and leveraging rapid advances in defense technology that made air-defense cooperation faster and cheaper. The January 2023 Juniper Oak exercise marked a critical milestone: the first "all domain" exercise between the U.S. military and any partner in the Middle East, testing combined air, land, sea, cyber, and space operations.
Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack turned theory into practice. Washington surged its military posture in the region, backed Israeli operations, struck Iranian proxies across Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and in April 2024 helped coordinate a multinational coalition to defeat an Iranian ballistic-missile barrage against Israel. By October 2024, the United States was directly intercepting at least half of Iran's missiles - a significant escalation in its role.
Still, under Biden the line held: the United States supported Israel's defense but stopped short of joint offensive strikes, viewing Iranian retaliation as a risk to American lives, Arab civilians, and critical infrastructure. Even the June 2025 12-day war maintained this separation - Israel cleared an air corridor first, and the United States joined more than a week later with specialized bombs to destroy deeply buried nuclear enrichment facilities.
That line is now gone. The current campaign features fully fused strike and defense operations, coordinated information warfare, and offensive cyber-campaigns designed to "blind" the Iranian regime. Stroul calls it a partnership the United States has not had with any ally since World War II - and warns that this "publicly underappreciated" collaboration now faces its greatest test not on the battlefield, but in the politics of both countries.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported: $1.5 Trillion and a National Mobilization: Inside the Pentagon's Radical Plan to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy