The Washington Post—Haunted by an Anti-Israel Ghost?
A warning about scarce missile-defense ships became another morality tale about Israel. The facts are less convenient.
On August 1, 2026, The Washington Post returned to one of its favorite themes: American support for Israel is not merely costly but dangerous to America itself. Under the headline “U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel,” the paper reported that Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, had warned the Pentagon that he lacked enough naval forces to keep defending Israel against ballistic missiles.
According to reporter Dan Lamothe’s anonymous officials, Grynkewich said that without another Aegis-equipped destroyer he might eventually have to choose between defending Israel and defending the American “homeland.” That is an alarming sentence. It is also a wonderfully tidy one—almost as though it had been designed for a newspaper already committed to the conclusion.
The story followed a May report by John Hudson, ominously titled “U.S. bears brunt of Israel’s missile defense, Pentagon assessments show.” Hudson wrote that the United States had consumed a substantial share of its most advanced interceptors while defending Israel from Iran—more, he said, than Israel itself had expended.
To which the appropriate response is: balderdash and columny!
The U.S. Was Also Defending Americans and American Assets
The central omission is obvious. American missile-defense systems in and around Israel (Aegis’ Standard Missile-3, Standard Missile-6 and THAAD) were not protecting only Israeli civilians and military installations. They were also protecting American aircraft, crews, fuel, munitions, communications nodes, and support personnel operating from or through Israeli bases during the campaign against Iran.
Large, slow refueling aircraft are not decorative accessories. They are indispensable to sustained long-range air operations—and extremely attractive targets on the ground. The dozens of KC-46 and KC-135 tankers at Ben Gurion airport and Uvda and Ramon airbases, together with their crews and fuel infrastructure, enabled American combat aircraft to reach Iranian targets and return. Any Iranian ballistic-missile attack on the Israeli airfields supporting those operations threatened American combat power directly.
So, the relevant choice was never “defend Israel or defend America.” The United States was defending a joint military operation, including exposed U.S. assets. The Post’s framing turns an integrated campaign into an act of unilateral charity, which is analytically sloppy but editorially useful for the newspaper.
A Command Map Only the Pentagon Could Love
There is, however, a genuine military problem beneath the melodrama: the Pentagon’s command structure does not fit neatly over the battlefield.
Israel was transferred from EUCOM’s area of responsibility to Central Command in the Middle East in 2021. The move made operational sense. Israel’s intelligence, air-defense systems, and combat experience could now be integrated more easily with American forces and with friendly Arab militaries in the region. Recent operations demonstrated the value of that arrangement.
But geography did not move with the organizational chart. The U.S. Sixth Fleet and the forward-deployed destroyers based at Rota, Spain, remain under the European naval command structure. Those ships may operate in the eastern Mediterranean and contribute to Israel’s missile defense, while CENTCOM remains responsible for the Israel-Iran theater farther east.
In plain English: CENTCOM owns the problem, while EUCOM may own some of the ships needed to solve it. This is less evidence of Israeli perfidy than of a Pentagon wiring diagram drawn by M. C. Escher.
The U.S. destroyers in Rota, Spain are not a private security detail for Israel. Their stated mission includes NATO’s integrated air and missile defense, and they can be tasked across the waters of Europe and Africa. When they intercept Iranian missiles in the eastern Mediterranean, they are defending U.S. forces, allies, regional bases and major air and sea routes—not standing guard outside a Tel Aviv café.
The Missing Pacific Footnote. It’s Not a Question of Whose Tub Has More Toys
Nor is EUCOM the only command being asked to surrender ships for the Middle East. Destroyers assigned or homeported in the Pacific have repeatedly been sent toward the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf to protect American carrier groups, bases, and shipping from Iranian and Houthi missiles and drones. Today, the U.S. Navy has deployed at least 12 destroyers, with another three in the Indian Ocean – under CENTCOM’s command.
Seven of the 12 Aegis destroyers operating in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea come from the Pacific Fleet, specifically, Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and Yokosuka (Japan). Mr. Hudson and Mr. Lamothe: Almost 60 percent of the destroyers identified in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea were drawn from Pacific Fleet home ports.
That diversion carries real strategic costs. Every Aegis destroyer sent west to the Middle East is one less available for deterrence in the western Pacific. Yet the public discussion rarely treats this as evidence that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, commercial shipping, or American carrier groups are draining the Navy. The alarm bell seems to ring most loudly when the defended ally is Israel.
Perhaps Israel has the misfortune of not being located in the South China Sea.
The Ghost of General Brown
There is an unpleasant historical echo here. In 1974, Gen. George S. Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained about Israel draining U.S. weapons when they were airlifted to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He claimed that Israel’s access to American weapons was enabled by Jewish control of Congress, banks, and newspapers. His remarks were not a strategic assessment. They were a familiar antisemitic conspiracy theory delivered in uniform.
No one needs to accuse today’s officers or reporters of sharing Brown’s prejudice. But his ghost appears whenever a legitimate debate over force structure is distorted into a story about Israel manipulating America into sacrificing its own security. The insinuation is usually cleaner now and free of antisemitism. The anonymous sourcing is better at masking the source. The underlying picture—Israel as the uniquely grasping ally—is remarkably durable.
The Pentagon should debate interceptor inventories, ship deployments, and the division of responsibility between EUCOM and CENTCOM. Those are serious questions. The Washington Post should report them. But it should also tell readers what the American weapons were defending, whose aircraft were on the ground, and why those aircraft were there.
America was not depleted while standing helplessly between Israel and Iran. It is fighting Iran, alongside Israel, and defending the American forces required to do it. That is not a footnote. It is the story.