Just one day after announcing an extremely temporary deployment of Patriot missiles and warplanes to Jordan as part of a “training mission,” the Pentagon has announced they’ve decided the missiles are just going to stay in Jordan permanently.
This move had sort of been telegraphed by CENTCOM, whose officials said it was possible some of the assets could stay in Jordan beyond the brief training exercise “at the request of the government of Jordan.”
The Pentagon now insists that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had signed off on keeping the missiles there over the weekend, suggesting the whole training exercise pretext was never really the plan to begin with.
Jordanian officials insist the deployment is “purely for defensive purposes,” but it adds to concerns of the US attempting to impose a “no-fly zone” across Syria. The US has already deployed similar missiles to Syria’s northern border with Turkey.
