America’s Kwantung Army
Iran, Civil-Military Relations, and the Strategic Vortex of CENTCOM
U.S. Central Command or CENTCOM has become something of a meme in certain defense and foreign policy circles, a shorthand for the United States’ strategic inertia in the Middle East, where resources, attention, and political will are endlessly consumed with little lasting return.1 Yet there comes a point when the meme becomes reality. For years, successive administrations have pledged to “pivot” or “rebalance” toward Asia, publicly stating that the defining challenges of the 21st century, China’s rise, great power competition, and maritime security, lie in the Indo-Pacific.2 Despite this rhetorical clarity, the region’s gravitational pull persists. CENTCOM remains the operational and institutional center of gravity for the U.S. military, absorbing high-demand assets, dictating deployment rhythms, and monopolizing policy bandwidth. The last 6 months have had an open-ended air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen that cost billions in ordinance and lost planes to accomplish precisely nothing of value.3 The strikes against Iran’s nuclear strikes on Saturday have also not appeared to have the intended effect.4 Thus, it is a bureaucratic and strategic vortex that resists de-prioritization, even as its theater becomes less strategically vital. This paradox highlights a deeper dysfunction in American grand strategy: the inability to align military structures with geopolitical priorities. At the center of this dysfunction stands CENTCOM, America’s own Kwantung Army, not as a neutral executor of policy, but as a deeply entrenched institution whose influence increasingly shapes the very policies it is meant to implement.
CENTCOM was formally established in 1983 as the successor to the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, created in response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Its purpose was to provide a unified command structure for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, a region increasingly viewed as strategically vital due to energy resources and geopolitical instability. CENTCOM’s authority and prominence grew substantially after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which strengthened unified combatant commands and imposed joint operational planning across the services.5 Even still, the original command was viewed as a backwater, a command that no enterprising officer wanted if they wanted to continue up the chain.6 But who knew that the task force and its successor would become the centerpiece of American foreign and defense policy for the next 40 years.
The 1990–91 Gulf War marked a decisive turning point, elevating CENTCOM from a peripheral command into the centerpiece of American expeditionary warfare.7 Under the leadership of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the swift and decisive execution of Operation Desert Storm catapulted CENTCOM into national prominence and established the Persian Gulf as the proving ground for modern U.S. warfighting. This newfound prominence was not fleeting. The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 solidified CENTCOM’s central role in U.S. military strategy, ensuring that its area of responsibility would dominate both the operational tempo and the strategic imagination of American defense policy for the next two decades.
The Kwantung Army was the Imperial Japanese Army’s most prestigious and politically influential command, stationed in Manchuria from the early 20th century until the end of World War II. Conceived initially as a frontier garrison to safeguard Japanese interests in southern Manchuria following the Russo-Japanese War, it gradually transformed into a semi-autonomous power center, one that operated with increasing independence from Tokyo. Most famously, it engineered the Mukden Incident in 1931, fabricating a railway sabotage as a pretext for launching a full-scale invasion and occupation of Manchuria without formal authorization from the emperor, civilian government, or the Imperial General Headquarters.8 In doing so, the Kwantung Army not only initiated a significant escalation in Japanese continental ambitions but also demonstrated its capacity to shape national policy through military action unilaterally.
Over the next decade, the Kwantung Army became deeply entrenched in the political fabric of the Japanese Empire. It absorbed a disproportionate share of Japan’s military resources, developed its own intelligence and industrial infrastructure within Manchukuo, and actively dictated strategic priorities far beyond its original defensive remit. Its officers wielded considerable ideological and bureaucratic influence, championing aggressive expansionism and marginalizing civilian and moderate military voices in Tokyo.9 The command operated with near-total autonomy in its theater, frequently overriding central authority and distorting imperial policy in favor of its own ultranationalist vision.10 As Japan's military commitments expanded across China and into Southeast Asia, the legacy of the Kwantung Army’s unilateralism set a dangerous precedent: regional commands operating without restraint, dragging an entire nation into protracted, unwinnable wars driven by momentum rather than any sort of coherent strategy.
The structural parallels between CENTCOM and the Kwantung Army are not merely historical curiosities; they reveal a deeper insight into how regional commands can evolve into autonomous centers of gravity that shape national strategy in ways that exceed their original mandates. Both institutions emerged in response to perceived strategic crises: the Kwantung Army from Japan’s concern over continental insecurity following the Russo-Japanese War, and CENTCOM from U.S. anxieties surrounding the collapse of Iran and the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan in the late 1970’s. In both cases, these commands were designed as regionally focused instruments of national policy. But over time, each developed a kind of institutional self-interest, projecting influence upward into national decision-making circles while monopolizing resources and attention.
In the case of the Kwantung Army, this dynamic became particularly dangerous: its unilateral decision to provoke war in Manchuria set Japan on an irreversible path toward militarism and continental entanglement. Tokyo's civilian authorities lacked either the will or the means to rein in the army’s adventurism. Similarly, while CENTCOM has not acted outside of civilian control, it has accumulated disproportionate influence over U.S. global posture. In the post-9/11 era, CENTCOM became the hub for America’s war in the Middle East, drawing in intelligence assets, special operations forces, and global logistics infrastructure.11 Presidential Administrations have repeatedly promised to pivot to the Indo-Pacific, but CENTCOM’s persistent centrality has undercut these efforts. Its operational demands create strategic inertia that diverts attention and readiness away from theaters more relevant to great power competition.
Both the Kwantung Army and CENTCOM illustrate how regional commands, once empowered by crisis, can distort national strategy by creating sunk costs, bureaucratic constituencies, and a logic of continuous engagement. In both cases, the home nation struggled to exert discipline over an increasingly autonomous command structure. Where the Kwantung Army ultimately led Japan into catastrophic overreach, CENTCOM has not produced disaster on the same scale, but its gravitational pull has contributed to the erosion of strategic clarity. The result is a U.S. military that remains tactically active in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, even as its long-term strategic objectives lie elsewhere.
In short, the comparison is not exact, but it serves as a cautionary example. When operational commands begin to shape policy rather than merely execute it, when they become the default setting for strategic attention and resource allocation, they risk becoming ends in themselves. In both the Japanese and American cases, this institutional momentum makes adaptation difficult, even when national leadership recognizes the need for a shift. The challenge, then, is not only one of policy direction but of structural reform, realigning command priorities with the geopolitical realities of a new era.
CENTCOM’s rise also carries profound implications for American civil-military relations, particularly in how operational necessity can gradually encroach upon strategic discretion. While the U.S. military remains firmly under civilian control in a constitutional sense, the persistent dominance of CENTCOM in defense planning illustrates how influence can migrate upward from the operational level to shape civilian policy preferences and political risk tolerance. Because CENTCOM has become the locus of combat experience, intelligence flows, and interagency coordination, senior civilian leaders often find themselves structurally dependent on its assessments and framing of regional developments. This dynamic creates a subtle but powerful asymmetry in civil-military relations: CENTCOM commanders become authoritative voices not only on military feasibility but on broader geopolitical assessments, often constraining policy options to those that align with the command's operational paradigm.
This has had two major effects. First, it has privileged short-term military solutions over long-term strategic recalibration. Civilian leaders across multiple administrations have pledged to reorient U.S. policy toward strategic competition with China. Yet, the daily churn of events in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, terrorist threats, Iranian provocations, and regional instability continuously pull attention and resources back into the Middle East and Central Asia over and over again. Just two days ago, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of CENTCOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “At the tactical level, I think they’ve been degraded,” referring to Iran’s military capabilities.12 However, he cautioned that Iran still poses a “considerable” threat to U.S. forces in the Middle East despite years of sanctions, proxy conflicts, and the lingering impact of COVID.13 So, which one is it? The mixed messaging and contradictions are emblematic of the broader strategic confusion surrounding CENTCOM’s posture toward Iran and the region more broadly.14 On the one hand, Iran’s conventional military capabilities have been weakened, as its proxies have suffered battlefield losses, and maximum pressure policies have had some effect. On the other hand, CENTCOM continues to frame Iran as a persistent, even escalating threat, one that justifies the ongoing deployment of forces, the maintenance of regional bases, and the constant readiness for crisis response.
This tension reveals more than just rhetorical inconsistency; it underscores the institutional logic that drives CENTCOM’s continued dominance. If Iran is truly degraded at the tactical level, then the strategic justification for a robust forward presence should diminish. But if Iran remains a “considerable” threat despite degradation, then one must ask what metrics are being used to measure success, and what the endgame of this posture actually is. CENTCOM, like any entrenched command, has an incentive to maintain the perception of threat to preserve its share of resources and relevance. As
observed in his recent piece,The Big Bad Wolf that every CENTCOM commander and cable news guest has screamed about and stolen Aircraft Carriers to TLAMs from INDOPACOM for the last decade is actually just like…a starved Coyote: feral, but hardly a real threat to your existence.15
Civilian policymakers, in turn, often defer to these assessments, as they are unwilling to risk being seen as complacent or inattentive to regional instability. The result is a cycle of strategic hedging that substitutes presence for purpose, and inertia for clarity.
Second, CENTCOM’s operational tempo has contributed to the normalization of a state of low-grade, perpetual war that blurs the line between wartime and peacetime civil-military interaction. Congressional oversight has atrophied under the weight of Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) that were never regionally or temporally limited, and civilian leadership has often ceded initiative to CENTCOM in the name of responsiveness and military judgment. In turn, the command has become a primary interface not only for military operations but for regional diplomacy, intelligence sharing, and partner force development, functions that traditionally belong to the State Department or the National Security Council.
For example, in the days leading up to the Israeli air campaign against Iran, there were multiple stories implying that Eric Kurilla, the combatant commander, had more knowledge of Israel’s activities than publicly disclosed and either intentionally or unintentionally was not telling his civilian or military superiors.16 A source on background was quoted as saying, “He had better information about what they (the Israelis) were up to and what they were seeing in their intelligence before we got it than anyone else in our government.”17 Another source on background in a Politico story stated that he was overriding other senior Pentagon officials and exerting a “quiet” yet “decisive influence” over the United States’ next moves on Iran.18
That is problematic for any number of reasons. If accurate, it suggests a serious breakdown in the chain of command and the principle of civilian oversight. It raises questions about the extent to which he or other commanders in the region are independently managing sensitive relationships with regional partners and whether critical intelligence is being filtered or delayed as it moves up the hierarchy. Even if not willfully negligent, the perception that a regional commander might be more closely aligned with a foreign ally’s activities than their own national leadership undermines the foundational norms of accountability and unified decision-making in U.S. national security.
In this light, CENTCOM is not merely a combatant command but a symptom of a broader pathology: the erosion of strategic discipline in U.S. foreign policy and the over-militarization of national security. Civil-military relations are distorted not because generals defy orders, but because institutions like CENTCOM have become so deeply embedded that they shape what civilian leaders believe is possible, necessary, or prudent. The challenge going forward is not just to reduce CENTCOM’s operational footprint, but to reassert civilian strategic control in meaningful ways—rebuilding policy capacity, rebalancing interagency processes, and crafting a defense posture that reflects long-term priorities rather than habitual engagements. Without such reforms, the gravitational pull of CENTCOM will continue to warp U.S. strategy, dragging it further from the Indo-Pacific pivot that successive administrations have promised but failed to deliver.
While the institutional gravity of CENTCOM reflects real dysfunction within the military command structure, it would be a mistake to assign blame solely to the armed services or their regional commanders. Civilian policymakers, across both parties and multiple administrations, have repeatedly enabled and entrenched CENTCOM’s primacy through a combination of strategic drift, political risk aversion, and bureaucratic short-termism. Rather than asserting disciplined control over military deployments and clearly articulating the limits of American engagement in the Middle East, civilian leaders have often defaulted to CENTCOM’s operational tempo, treating the command’s activity as a substitute for a coherent regional strategy. In this respect, the civil-military imbalance is not simply a matter of uniformed overreach—it is also a failure of civilian initiative.
Presidents, National Security Council staff, and key congressional leaders have all played roles in sustaining the military's centrality in regions where political solutions were either absent or deemed too difficult. The frequent use of open-ended Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs), the reluctance to publicly debate or sunset extended deployments, and the consistent underfunding or sidelining of civilian agencies, such as the State Department, have created conditions in which CENTCOM becomes the path of least resistance. Even when civilian officials recognize the need for strategic rebalancing, as evidenced by repeated calls to shift toward the Indo-Pacific, they often fail to impose the bureaucratic discipline necessary to reduce CENTCOM’s footprint.19 The political cost of disengagement, or the perception of abandoning partners, tends to outweigh the longer-term cost of entrenchment, especially in a domestic political environment where short-term optics dominate long-range planning.
Moreover, the revolving door between political appointees, think tanks, and defense contractors has reinforced CENTCOM’s institutional momentum. Many of the civilian architects of the post-9/11 era, whether in the Pentagon, Congress, or the broader national security establishment, have built their careers on CENTCOM-centric conflicts, partnerships, and programs. As a result, the strategic status quo is often reinforced not through explicit decisions, but through a kind of bureaucratic inertia rooted in careers, relationships, and deeply embedded policy assumptions. Civilian leaders have the authority to impose change, but too often they either internalize CENTCOM’s worldview or lack the political capital to override it.
In this sense, CENTCOM is not a rogue command exactly like the Kwantung Army; but the natural outgrowth of a civil-military system that has failed to realign policy with purpose. The military may execute operations, but it is civilians—elected and appointed—who define the ends and authorize the means. If CENTCOM has become a strategic vortex, it is because civilian policymakers have allowed, and at times encouraged, it to remain so. In the end, CENTCOM’s overreach is not just a tale of military power gone awry, but of strategic imagination gone fallow. The comparison to the Kwantung Army is not about personalities or regimes, it is about the dangers of allowing regional commands to become the gravitational core of national strategy. Japan paid the price for allowing its military periphery to dictate its imperial center. The United States may not face the same scale of reckoning, but the longer it delays realignment, the more hollow its Indo-Pacific pivot becomes, and the more deeply entrenched its strategic vulnerability grows.
There is a wealth of commentary and scholarship on this topic, but for some examples, see Congressional Research Service, Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Administration’s “Rebalancing” Toward Asia (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2012), Zack Cooper and Adam P. Liff. “America Still Needs to Rebalance to Asia: After Ten Years of Talk, Washington Must Act.” Foreign Affairs, August 11, 2021, and Robert G. Sutter, Michael E. Brown, and Timothy J. A. Adamson, with Mike M. Mochizuki and Deepa Ollapally, Balancing Acts: The U.S. Rebalance and Asia-Pacific Stability (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, 2013).
Natasha Bertrand, “Cost of US military offensive against Houthis nears $1 billion with limited impact,” CNN, April 4, 2025.
Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, “Exclusive: Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say,” CNN, June 25, 2025.
If you want to learn more about the act and its effects, seee Jeremy Feiler, “PENTAGON LEADERS MULL SWEEPING CHANGES TO GOLDWATER-NICHOLS ACT.” Inside the Pentagon 20, no. 24 (2004): 1–18 and James R. Locher, “HAS IT WORKED?: The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act.” Naval War College Review 54, no. 4 (2001): 95–115.
David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 41
See Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).
Robert H. Ferrell, “The Mukden Incident: September 18-19, 1931.” The Journal of Modern History 27, no. 1 (1955): 66–72.
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (New York: Random House, 1970).
James B. Crowley, “Japanese Army Factionalism in the Early 1930’s.” The Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 3 (1962): 309–26.
Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016)
Tom Porter, “Iran has been hurt but is still a 'considerable' threat to US forces in the Middle East, says US admiral,” Business Insider, June 25, 2025.
Ibid,.
For the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, see Crist and John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021).
Akbar Shahid Ahmed, “The Pro-Israel U.S. General Quietly Influencing Trump On Iran,” The Huffington Post, June 17, 2025 and Jack Detsch and Paul McLearly, “Hegseth defers to general on Pentagon’s plans for Iran,” Politico, June 18, 2025.
Ahmed, “The Pro-Israel U.S. General Quietly Influencing Trump On Iran.”
Detsch and McLearly, “Hegseth defers to general on Pentagon’s plans for Iran.”
See “Give INDOPACOM its Money.”
Again: rich, detailed, fact-driven, and relevant. The Kwantung Army analogy resonates. I learned things. Recommended.
Actually you could also draw parallel to Soleimani's Quds Force and IRGC as a whole. Endless foreign "grey zone" activities will eventually result in this kind of monstrosity. (I would argue US will be going down the path of Iran if the current trends continue, US was well on such path during Vietnam)