US Military ‘Watching Egypt Closely’

On Jan. 29, Adm. Jim Stavridis, commander of U.S. European Command, tweeted: "Watching Egypt closely. Talking with Gen. Jim Mattis of U.S. Central Command about it."

But despite the chaos of the ongoing anti-government protests, so far all the American military has had to do is watch as the State Department directs the effort to secure and evacuate U.S. citizens.

While an undisclosed number of Marines and diplomatic security service personnel were sent to Cairo in recent days to augment the embassy's existing guard detachment, top State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the security situation doesn't demand a military response.

"Obviously, it's an uncertain situation on the ground," Crowley said at a Jan. 31 briefing. "That said, we have no information to suggest that American citizens have been targets. No American citizens have been killed or injured."

But if the threat grows suddenly, there are American forces in position to respond.

According to the Pentagon, the Enterprise carrier strike group sailed into the Mediterranean Jan. 31, including a cruiser, two destroyers and a carrier air group. The Marine Corps has less of a presence, with the Kearsarge amphibious assault ship in the Indian Ocean and most of its 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit troops ashore in Afghanistan.

Marine spokesman Capt. Brian Block said the MEU still has most of its aircraft, including MV-22 Ospreys and CH-53E Super Stallions that could be used in an evacuation if things go downhill in Egypt. But he declined to comment on potential Marine role in an evacuation.

An Air Force spokesman said the service is standing by to assist in any evacuation efforts but has not received orders. The Air Force has mobility aircraft, including C-17 Globemaster IIIs, operating out of several bases with relatively short flight times to Cairo. The nearest is Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, which is about two hours away.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said non-combatant evacuations typically are last-resort operations. Planners look at various scenarios to accomplish the mission, factoring in distance, available aircraft, flight times, weight and possible refueling requirements, he said.

"You'd like to be close enough to fly helos in and out without refueling if you can. But if circumstances don't permit, you find other options," he told reporters at the Pentagon.

Regarding U.S. military assets in the region, he said, "I wouldn't describe any of it as increased because we have a robust military presence in that region normally, both in the Mediterranean and the [Persian] Gulf."

Lapan refused to speculate on when the Enterprise CSG would reach the Egyptian coast or continue through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf.

"It all depends on the schedule that it gets according to circumstances," he said. "They don't put out a schedule that says on this day we go here and this day we go here, and so it'll all be circumstantial."

According to the State Department, so far around six charter flights per day have managed to get a total of just over 1,500 Americans out of Egypt. There are about 50,000 Americans registered with the embassy in Cairo.

"We have used a couple of military flights that happened to transit Cairo so the military is modestly supplementing the flow so far," State Department spokesman Crowley said in an e-mail to Military.com. "If things got ugly, we would use all transportation means at our disposal, helping to move people by commercial air, overland and even cruise ships that dock in Egyptian ports. If we had to tap into military assets in the area, the use of military cargo aircraft could be expanded as needed. But at this point there is a sufficiently permissive environment that the use of military assets is not needed."

But regardless of the situation on the ground, an evacuation mission by the American military would be met with significant pushback from the Egyptians. "It is exceedingly unlikely that the Egyptian government or any successor would request U.S. presence, since that would tend to delegitimize whoever made the request," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute.

And Thompson doubts how effective American forces could be in the event things got beyond the control of the locals. "The Egyptian military is highly professional and capable of controlling any disturbance so long as it remains unified," he said. "If the military divides into factions ... that could lead to violent chaos -- not the sort of situation where inserting U.S. forces would make sense."

Crowley had a similar view regarding the role and ability of local troops: "The important thing to focus on right now is the performance of the Egyptian military which has turned out and is a stabilizing force. It is a professional military and has trained extensively with the U.S. military."

-- Military.com editor Ward Carroll, associate editor Bryant Jordan and DoD Buzz editor Colin Clark contributed to this report.