Components
No fighting units are directly subordinate to this command; rather, the five subordinate service component commands are:
- U.S. Army Forces Central Command (ARCENT), Headquartered at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, USA
- U.S. Marine Forces Central Command (USMARCENT), Headquartered at Camp Pendleton, California, USA
- U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (USNAVCENT), Headquartered at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, Kingdom of Bahrain
- U.S. Air Forces Central (AFCENT), Headquartered at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, USA
- Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT), Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, USA
There are major subordinate multiservice commands reporting to Central Command which are conducting operations in various areas:
- United States Forces – Iraq (see also Iraq War order of battle)
- International Security Assistance Force, now taken over by NATO. Formerly the U.S. force in Afghanistan was Combined Forces Command Afghanistan.
- Unpublicized temporary task forces
On 1 October 2008 Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti was transferred to AFRICOM. During the Israeli incursion into Lebanon of 2006 a temporary task force, Joint Task Force Lebanon was also operational.
CENTCOM staff sections include personnel, operations, logistics, and intelligence, as well as other functions. The intelligence section is known as JICCENT, or Joint Intelligence Center, Central Command, which serves as a Joint Intelligence Center for the co-ordination of intelligence. Under the intelligence directorate, there are several divisions including the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence.
There are also elements of other Unified Combatant Commands, especially United States Special Operations Command, operating in the CENTCOM area. It appears that SOCCENT does not direct the secretive Task Force 77, the ad-hoc grouping of Joint Special Operations Command 'black' units such as Delta Force and Army Rangers, which is tasked to pursue the most sensitive high value targets such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership since 11 September 2001. Rather TF 77, which started out as Task Force 11 and has gone through a number of name/number changes, reports directly to Joint Special Operations Command, part of USSOCOM.
Read more about this topic: United States Central Command
Famous quotes containing the word components:
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)