The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, asserted that with respect to “cyber, space, naval, ground, special operations, working through surrogates, there’s lots of activity [by Iran]… we keep our forces on high states of alert and we are ready for whatever happens in the Middle East”. Secretary of State Mark Esper added that amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and Iran’s “failure to act on COVID in a timely manner with proper policies”, “the Iranian government continues to export terrorism, continues to export this malign behaviour from the Huthis, up into Iraq across into Syria, you name it. We continue to see them exporting trouble and all we ask them is to be a normal country”.