Iranian Strikes Hit 26 U.S. Bases and Sites—and Exposed the Pentagon’s Fixed Fortress
The U.S. military built its Middle East posture around fixed bases, layered air defenses and the assumption that superior firepower could keep those installations working through a war. Iran attacked that assumption first.
A new Associated Press analysis published Saturday found that more than 115 Iranian or Iran-backed drone and missile strikes damaged or destroyed structures at 26 bases and other sites holding U.S. equipment through August. The strikes did not simply scatter explosives across the Gulf. They followed a sequence: hit early-warning radars, degrade air defenses, then attack the aircraft, fuel, communications, hangars and troop facilities that make a base usable.
The evidence turns the Pentagon’s public language about resilience into a much harder material question. U.S. Central Command declined to detail the damage. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told the AP that American “forces and bases are well protected.” Yet the same investigation found that Washington has moved aircraft, communications systems and air defenses out of the Persian Gulf after the attacks.
That retreat matters more than the public-relations line. A military base is not just a runway or a flag. It is a concentrated system of radars, fuel, maintenance, housing, weapons and command equipment. Destroy enough links and the surviving runway becomes a liability rather than a platform for power.
The heaviest damage fell in Kuwait. The AP counted at least 30 strikes on Ali Al Salem Air Base, where attacks damaged or destroyed at least 15 aircraft hangars, warehouses and buildings near a residential area. Camp Buehring suffered even broader destruction. More than 30 structures there were damaged or destroyed between March and August, while most aircraft hangars became unusable.
Independent evidence had already punctured the official silence. A Defense Department inspector-general report said Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. A Washington Post satellite review in May documented at least 228 damaged or destroyed structures or pieces of equipment, while warning that its count remained partial.
The new analysis shows the strategy more clearly. Iran struck protective enclosures around radar systems at Camp Arifjan and the U.S. naval headquarters in Bahrain during the war’s opening days. It then hit portable radars in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. One radar reportedly destroyed in Jordan was among only 13 of its type in the U.S. Army and cost roughly half a billion dollars, according to budget records cited by the AP.
That is the economic asymmetry Washington cannot bomb away. Relatively cheap drones and missiles can force defenders to fire costly interceptors, relocate aircraft or abandon exposed infrastructure. Even a failed attack consumes attention, ammunition and time. A successful one can disable a system that took years and billions of dollars to build.
The human cost sits inside that machinery. Six U.S. service members died in a March drone attack at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait. Barracks, dining facilities, a gym and other gathering places also took damage. Troops do not operate from an abstract “footprint”; they live inside the targets that planners once treated as secure rear areas.
The Pentagon still possesses overwhelming destructive power, and the U.S.-Israeli campaign inflicted far greater damage on Iran. But the lesson from the base attacks is not that Tehran achieved parity. It is that a weaker state found a way to impose strategic costs on the infrastructure of a stronger one.
Raphael Cohen of the RAND School of Public Policy called the damage a “wake-up call for the United States.” His sharper conclusion cuts through decades of occupation-era thinking: “The idea that we can rely on fixed infrastructure in the way that we have during the global war on terrorism is over.”
Washington is again considering renewed strikes after the U.S. midterm elections. Any new offensive will therefore begin under a changed balance of risk. The question is no longer whether American bases can be hit. The evidence says they already were—systematically, repeatedly and at scale.
Hero photograph: U.S. Army training at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, February 2025. Archive photo: Capt. Andrew Lightsey IV / U.S. Army / DVIDS, public domain. The V9 cover uses a crop of this photograph. The image does not depict the 2026 strikes.
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