CENTCOM brings 200 troops to Colorado for Jordan drill

The biennial Eager Lion exercise entered its second week at Fort Carson, shifting complex drills to American soil for the first time.

More than 200 military personnel from Jordan and the United States gathered at Fort Carson, Colorado, as Exercise Eager Lion entered its second week of joint drills.¹² The bilateral training event marks the first time that the United States has hosted the biennial exercise, which is now in its 12th iteration after previously taking place in the Middle East.²³

The current session brings together active-duty units alongside National Guard personnel from Colorado and Illinois to work directly with the Jordanian Armed Forces.²³ Command officials designed the training syllabus around operational planning and coordination across five designated areas: counterterrorism, air defense, maritime security, cyber operations, and disaster response.²⁴³ As the exercise entered its final stretch, bilateral units focused on joint digital defense measures and coordinating responses across shared networks.¹⁵

The decision to host the exercise at an American installation comes amid heightened operational strain for U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces across the Middle East. Administrative disclosures show that regional engagements and munitions expenditures have accelerated over the past year, placing greater value on standardized operational procedures with regional partners.⁴ Jordan has long served as a logistical and operational hub for American forces, hosting shared facilities and routine deployments.⁴

"Our longstanding military-to-military ties with the Jordanian Armed Forces are stronger than ever," Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, said in an announcement on the bilateral drills.²⁴ "Working and training together will further strengthen our collective operational effectiveness and readiness."²³

The tactical syllabus at Fort Carson relies heavily on the administrative foundation established under the National Guard Bureau's State Partnership Program. Created by the Pentagon in 1993 to foster international defense relationships after the Cold War, the initiative paired the Colorado National Guard with the Kingdom of Jordan in 2004.²³ That bilateral relationship has spanned more than two decades, facilitating periodic officer exchanges, joint staff talks, and shared emergency response protocols before expanding into this month's multinational field exercise.²³

By bringing Jordanian personnel to the Rocky Mountain training ranges, military planners are testing command-and-control workflows away from the familiar terrain of the Middle East. Field exercises of this kind require combined staffs to navigate differences in communications hardware, digital classification, and language while coordinating simulated responses to asymmetric security threats. Incorporating cyber operations into the field scenarios reflects how mutual defense obligations have shifted toward protecting digital infrastructure and distributed logistics nodes from state-sponsored interdiction.

The broader strategic environment has underscored the durability of the bilateral partnership. Military records indicate that Jordanian defense facilities have operated under heightened defensive postures while supporting American deployments across the region.⁴ At the same time, naval and logistical operations overseen by Central Command have faced continuous disruption, requiring coordinated maritime tracking and commercial vessel escort missions along critical transit lanes in adjacent waters.⁵²

Integrating state National Guard units from Illinois and Colorado into the exercise addresses operational gaps identified during real-world deployments. Reserve and Guard formations frequently provide specialized civil-military capabilities, medical logistics, and network engineering assets that active-duty strike elements do not maintain at scale. Coordinating those skill sets during simulated disaster and counterterrorism scenarios allows partner formations to rehearse interoperability before responding to real crises.

The two-week exercise is scheduled to conclude after completing capstone cyber defense scenarios and bilateral tactical reviews.¹²⁴ For military planners in both capitals, running the exercise on American soil provides an institutional template for future joint deployments, ensuring that the logistical protocols refined in Colorado can be mirrored when multinational forces rotate back to operational theaters abroad.

What this rests on

15 sentences trace to 5 sources.

All 5Documents 1Records 0Reporting 4People 0

1. 1 H https://x.com/CENTCOM Document · x.com · 20 Sep 2026 Exercise Eager Lion Enters Second Week of U.S.-Jordan Training at Fort Carson See the source
2. 2 A aninews.in Third-party reporting · aninews.in US CENTCOM hosts Jordan for exercise Eager Lion 2026 in Colorado See the source
3. 3 E eciks.org Third-party reporting · eciks.org · 16 Sep 2026 U.S. Central Command hosts Jordan for Exercise Eager Lion in Colorado See the source
4. 4 II Iran International Third-party reporting · iranintl.com · 15 Sep 2026 US, Jordan launch Eager Lion military exercise in Colorado See the source
5. 5 X x.com Third-party reporting · x.com U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) on X See the source

Also consulted: 1 page across 1 site, none cited.