Spotlight on Admiral Cooper
The appointment of Admiral Brad Cooper to command U.S. Central Command was not an accident of timing. It was a strategic decision that reflected a clear-eyed reading of the emerging threat environment and a recognition that the officer best prepared to lead the campaign against Iran was not a ground-warfare general shaped by Iraq and Afghanistan, but a naval officer who had spent years living inside the region’s maritime architecture, building the tools and relationships that Operation Epic Fury would eventually require.
For most of CENTCOM’s history since its founding in 1983, the command had been an Army officer’s domain. That era, for now, appears to have passed. When President Trump nominated Cooper to lead CENTCOM in June 2025, selecting him over Army General James Mingus who had been widely expected to receive the post, the signal was unmistakable: what was coming would be a maritime and air campaign against a state adversary, not another grinding counterinsurgency. Cooper took command at MacDill Air Force Base on August 8, 2025, becoming the first naval officer to lead CENTCOM since Admiral William J. Fallon in 2008.
The Bahrain Years: Building What the War Would Require
What made Cooper’s elevation consequential was not simply his rank or his surface warfare background. It was the depth of regional experience he brought with him. From 2021 to 2024, Cooper served as Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. Fifth Fleet, and Combined Maritime Forces, all headquartered in Manama, Bahrain. That triple-hatted role placed him at the center of the most consequential maritime geography on earth: the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. The three chokepoints that govern global energy flows and commercial shipping all fell within his area of responsibility.
In Bahrain, Cooper was not merely a forward-deployed American admiral. He was the operational hub around which the entire region’s maritime security architecture revolved. He expanded Combined Maritime Forces to over forty nations. He established Combined Task Force 153, a multinational formation focused on the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb, and the Gulf of Aden — the waters that would become operational terrain for what followed. He described the island kingdom as a ‘second home’ for Fifth Fleet, noting that American and Bahraini families lived side by side, with children attending school together. These were not diplomatic courtesies. They were operational prerequisites.
Cooper spoke publicly and consistently about what he called ‘the four most important ships in the Middle East’: relationships, partnerships, friendship, and shared leadership. His view was that in a region as complex as the Gulf, where trust between the United States and its Arab partners had been tested by years of perceived strategic retreat, those four ‘ships’ were operational prerequisites. Without them, no coalition would hold under fire. The resilience of the GCC coalition during Operation Epic Fury, even as Iran attacked twelve countries and struck Bahrain’s Fifth Fleet headquarters directly is the measure of how seriously that investment paid off.
Task Force 59: Kill Web Architecture Made Operational
In September 2021, Cooper established Task Force 59, the Navy’s first unmanned and artificial intelligence task force, based in Bahrain. What began as an experimental formation grew under his command into an operational entity that fielded unmanned surface vessels from multiple nations, conducted the world’s largest unmanned maritime exercise with over 80 unmanned systems from 10 nations, and achieved what Cooper described as the ‘first use of weapons aboard an unmanned platform’ in the region’s operational history.
The concept TF-59 pursued — what Navy and industry participants described as a ‘digital ocean’ — is a direct maritime expression of kill web architecture. Large numbers of low-cost unmanned surface vessels, including Saildrone Explorers and MARTAC MANTAS T-12 craft, were deployed carrying electro-optical, infrared, and other sensors. Their continuous data streams fed into AI-enabled command and control tools, creating automated anomaly detection and cueing capability that extended maritime domain awareness across areas no manned force could cover at comparable cost. Manned ships and aircraft were freed to intercept, board, deter, and strike — cued by the unmanned grid rather than searching for targets themselves.
Cooper drove a particular operational discipline inside TF-59 that reflects a core kill web design principle: the importance of a unified operational picture. He insisted on what he called a ‘single pane of glass’ through which operators could see and task the entire distributed unmanned force, aided by AI flagging anomalies and potential threats in near-real time. That interface is not a convenience. It is what makes the web operable: the point where distributed sensing becomes actionable intelligence, and actionable intelligence becomes directed force.
The influence of Cooper’s TF-59 work extended well beyond Fifth Fleet. The Chief of Naval Operations publicly credited Cooper’s work with small unmanned systems in Fifth Fleet as having changed his own thinking about unmanned systems and their role in the future fleet. Theater-level operational experimentation rarely drives that kind of strategic redesign from the top. What it tells us is that TF-59 was not simply a regional solution to a regional problem. It was a proof of concept for a different model of maritime warfare — and Cooper made it credible by making it operational.
A Kill Web Practitioner: The Logic of Orchestration
The kill web concept, which Ed Timperlake and I have been developing and writing about for more than a decade, is fundamentally about replacing the linear kill chain with a distributed, interactive combat architecture. Rather than sequencing effects through a fixed hierarchy of platforms, the kill web operates through interlocking nodes, sensors, shooters, decision-makers, and enablers, that can reconstitute targeting solutions dynamically and faster than an adversary can adapt. What has distinguished Cooper’s career is that he has been building and operating kill webs before the term became fashionable.
His engagement with F-35 operations in CENTCOM illustrates this perspective. In describing high-end air operations over Iran, Cooper emphasized not individual platform performance but the orchestration of waves of advanced fighters, supported by tankers, legacy aircraft, ISR assets, and space-based enablers, cycling through contested airspace faster than the adversary could respond. The F-35’s contribution in this architecture is its ability to fuse multi-spectral data in a contested environment and pass that fused picture across the force in near-real time. The aircraft is a node; the network is the weapon.
What is particularly notable in Cooper’s public articulations of these operations is his insistence on orchestration over heroics. His language is operational and architectural. He speaks of sequencing, repositioning, and re-targeting inside the adversary’s decision loop. That is not the vocabulary of platform-centric warfare. It is the vocabulary of someone who has internalized the idea that speed of decision and continuity of effect matter more than the performance ceiling of any individual system.
Operation Epic Fury: Kill Web at Operational Depth
On February 28, 2026, Cooper ordered the commencement of Operation Epic Fury, a jointly coordinated U.S.-Israeli campaign that represents the most significant American military action in the Middle East since the Iraq War. The stated objectives were fourfold: prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, destroy its missile arsenal and production infrastructure, degrade its proxy networks, and eliminate its conventional naval capability. Cooper’s own framing was characteristically direct: ‘The goal of CENTCOM’s operation is to dismantle the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.’
What distinguishes the operation is not simply its scale though the scale has been extraordinary, with over 50,000 U.S. troops, 200 fighter aircraft, two aircraft carrier strike groups, and strategic bomber packages all committed to the campaign. What distinguishes it is its character: this is fundamentally a naval and air campaign, executed from maritime platforms, targeting maritime and missile infrastructure, in a theater where the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Gulf form the decisive terrain. By day six, ballistic missile attacks against U.S. forces and partners had decreased by 90 percent, and drone attacks by 83 percent. Over 30 Iranian naval vessels were sunk or destroyed. Cooper confirmed that there was not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, or Gulf of Oman — a statement no CENTCOM commander had been able to make in the modern era.
The Measure of a Practitioner
The kill web argument is not that unmanned systems or AI will replace judgment. It is that connecting sensors, shooters, and decision-makers through resilient networks and then using that connectivity to out-cycle adversaries produces military advantage that no single platform, however exquisite, can match. Cooper has lived that argument through two major commands and proven it operationally in both.
There is also the question of what comes after the kinetic phase. Whoever holds power in Tehran when the shooting eventually stops will need to be engaged. The GCC states, who will be living with the consequences of this campaign long after American forces have drawn down, will need to be managed. The maritime architecture of the region, the task forces, the coalitions, the shared operating picture that Cooper built over three years in Bahrain, will be the foundation of whatever security order emerges. Cooper knows that architecture from the inside. He built much of it himself.
As U.S. and allied forces move deeper into an era of major power competition and contested domains, the critical leadership question is not who understands the concept but who has proven they can execute it under operational conditions. By that measure, Admiral Brad Cooper stands out as one of the most consequential kill web practitioners in the current U.S. military leadership. The record is operational, not theoretical and that is precisely what makes it significant.