Saudi Arabia to get unit of GIs to help defend refineries from missile attacks.

The U.S. will send a “moderate” number of American troops to the Middle East and additional missile defense capabilities to Saudi Arabia in response to last weekend’s attack on oil facilities that the Trump administration has blamed on Iran, top Pentagon officials said.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Friday that the decision came at the request of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and represented a “first step” in the U.S. response. He reiterated U.S. statements that evidence collected to date shows Iran was responsible for the attacks. The briefing by Esper and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, followed a meeting of national security officials at the White House.

“Iran is waging a deliberate campaign to destabilize the Middle East,” Esper told reporters at the Pentagon. He added that the U.S. has shown “great restraint” in responding so far, but called the strike on Saudi Aramco facilities on Saturday a “dramatic escalation.”

Esper and Dunford said that they are still deciding on the specific number of troops and weapons systems but said that the personnel deployment will be relatively small, not numbering in the thousands. They said more details would be forthcoming, and they signaled the U.S. thinks other nations should step up as well.

In addition to the U.S. missile defense assistance, Esper said, “we are calling on many other countries who all have these capabilities to do two things: stand up and condemn these attacks” and also contribute equipment.

U.S. and Saudi analyses of the attack have described the strike as complex, involving a mix of low-flying drones and cruise missiles coming from the north. The attack exposed glaring vulnerabilities in Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities despite having spent hundreds of billions of dollars on weaponry in recent years.

Saudi Arabia has already taken delivery of Patriot-3 hit-to-kill missiles bought years ago and designed to defend against cruise and ballistic missiles. The kingdom earlier this year finalized a long-sought contract for Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Thaad missile interceptors designed to intercept ballistic missiles at higher altitudes. It’s not known whether any Thaad batteries have been delivered.

“No single system is going to be able to defend against a threat like” the combination of systems launched against Saudi Arabia last weekend, Dunford said. “But a layered system of defensive capabilities would mitigate the risk of swarms of drones or other attacks that may come from Iran.”

During a news conference earlier on Friday, President Donald Trump signaled he’s trying to avoid a military conflict. Trump campaigned in 2016 on getting the U.S. out of Mideast conflicts, and he’s repeatedly criticized the second U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“I will say I think the sanctions work, and the military would work,” Trump told reporters. “But that’s a very severe form of winning.”

After Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed credit for last weekend’s strike, Saudi and U.S. officials said that the drones and missiles used were made by Iran, had never before been deployed by Iranian proxy groups and came from a northerly direction, ruling out Yemen as a launch site. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly said Iran was responsible for the attack.

As tensions surged this week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned that any U.S. or Saudi strike on his country in response to the attacks on the kingdom’s critical oil facilities would lead to “all-out war.”

“I cannot have any confidence that they did it because we just heard their statement,” Zarif said in an interview on CNN. “I know that we didn’t do it. I know that the Houthis made a statement that they did it.”

Pompeo returned early Friday from a two-day trip to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., saying he wanted to begin building a coalition that would organize a response to Iran.