US Established ‘Contingency Plan’ for War With Iran, New Report Finds

As the Biden administration continues pursuing Trump’s hardline anti-Iran policies, a new report suggests the US inclination to pursue military conflict with Tehran is even greater than previously known.

The US Department of Defense has developed a ‘contingency plan’ for pursuing a war with Iran, according to a new report published Wednesday.

Funding for a plan bearing the code name “Support Sentry” first began in 2018, according to an American outlet which says it obtained a classified Pentagon budget manual that lists emergency and special programs.

Per the article, Support Sentry was developed as a so-called “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, which was meant to be unleashed on Iranians in the event of a full-blown military conflict.

CONPLANs are the second most-detailed contingency plan for armed conflict that the US military creates, and they’re considered an ‘abbreviated version’ of the most fleshed-out war plans referred to as OPLANs, or operational plans.

The military’s Joint Operation Planning manual explains that OPLANs identify the “specific forces, functional support, and resources required to execute the plan and provide closure estimates for their flow into the theater.” A CONPLAN doesn’t necessarily need to be quite as thorough, but it still provides the broad outline of a planned military response to a potential crisis.

While the publication made no mention of the specific contents of the contingency plan, the revelation that the US has been plotting war with Iran is just the latest in a series of worrisome displays by the Biden administration, which looks increasingly intent on cementing former President Donald Trump’s hawkish stance towards the Islamic Republic.

Last December, video surfaced showing Biden telling an anti-Iranian protester that the Iran nuclear deal is “dead,” but that the US government is “not gonna announce it” publicly.

A month later, the American military concluded what the DoD hailed as the “largest US-Israeli exercise in history.” The so-called ‘Juniper Oak 23.2’ war drills saw US service members train Israeli militants on the previously-withheld techniques they would need to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran, including aerial refueling. The war games also saw B-52 bombers used to drop so-called ‘bunker buster’ munitions on targets resembling Iranian nuclear facilities.

The US denied it was sending a threat to Tehran, but Israeli media almost universally understood the military drills to be a “message for Iran.”

Then on February 19, US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides declared the administration’s position is that “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal” with Iran – “and we’ve got their back.”

As Quincy Institute President Trita Parsi recently explained, “the US very much wants to signal to Iran that even if Washington doesn’t have an appetite for war, we’re willing to support Israel, which does.”