Several U.S. bases across the Middle East — in Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait — have come under Iranian attack over the last couple of months, raising questions about the long-term safety and security of those bases given the threat landscape in the region.
The Department of War sought to protect troops before the war by removing many of them from bases they thought would be early targets for Iranian retaliation when the war was set to commence, while multiple expensive bases were vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles.
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As recently as overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, Iran retaliated against U.S. strikes by targeting American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait, though those attacks were stopped.
Defense officials have been tight-lipped about the damage Iran’s retaliatory attacks caused, but the attacks over the last several months could change the department’s long-term thinking on basing in the region, or the defensive capabilities at them.
Iran’s attacks have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment across the region, the Washington Post reported in early May, though their tally includes barracks, hangars, fuel depots, and aircraft, in addition to bases. The current tally is presumably higher given there have been Iranian attacks since the analysis was published.
A Pentagon official told the Washington Examiner, “We do not discuss battle damage assessments for operation security reasons. Our forces remain fully operational, and we continue to execute our mission with the same readiness and combat effectiveness.”
Rosemary Kelanic, an expert with Defense Priorities, told the Washington Examiner, “I think the Iran war has really demonstrated the vulnerability of large U.S.-facing installations, not just in the Middle East but anywhere, but particularly in the Persian Gulf region, where all of them are located very close to Iran and are therefore vulnerable to a whole range of threats from Iran, most importantly missiles and drones in various capacities.”
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet — whose area of responsibility includes the Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean — and U.S. Naval Forces Central Command are headquartered out of Naval Support Activity Bahrain. U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters operates out of Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar. Prior to the start of the conflict, the base, which also houses the Combined Air Operations Center, had roughly 10,000 U.S. military personnel stationed there.
Former U.S. Central Command Cmdr. Joseph Votel told the Washington Examiner, “I’m not surprised by Iran’s capabilities. We’ve known for some time that they were developing these missile and drone capabilities. It has been a known concern. We should not be pushed around by Iranian threats and capabilities, but it will be a factor in future basing considerations in the Middle East.”
“We have enduring national interests in the Gulf that will have to be protected and that may require the presence of American military forces on regional bases,” Votel said. “Clearly our partners in the region will have a say as well.”
He continued, “We should also be thinking about the resources that we have in place to protect our forces and bases. We should plan to have air defense and counter-drone capabilities in place. These could be ours, our partners or, hopefully, a combination of both. Of course, we also have to consider the necessity of stationing military forces who are fixed to a location. We have done a lot of work over the last several years to reduce and consolidate our footprint.”
The CAOC at Al Udeid was used to direct the air campaigns for the wars in Afghanistan and against the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
This time around, officials expected it would come under attack, so the military directed the air campaign from a facility at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina at the onset of the war. It proved to be a wise decision because the command center took a direct hit from multiple missiles during the start of the war, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine.
The effort to shift more operations to the CAOC at Shaw Air Force Base has been going on for years.
“The truth is that we are not as inclined to occupy these bases now that we have seen what the Iranians can throw at them,” David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and CENTCOM commander, told Bloomberg in May. “This is much more than when I was commander at Central Command.”
“I can assure you that central commander did not do what his predecessors have always done, which is be in the same time zone with all of your forces … he stayed … outside Tampa, [Florida], that’s where the war has been run from,” he added, referencing MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
Seven U.S. service members have been killed in Iranian attacks, six of whom were killed in a single Iranian drone attack in Kuwait. Some surviving troops at the Kuwaiti operational center in Port of Shuaiba have raised concerns that they were not adequately prepared for such attacks.
Six additional U.S. troops were killed in a refueling accident in Iraq that was not connected to enemy fire, and one other was killed in an attack at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
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“A massive effort was undertaken before this conflict to move as many humans off of targets to other places and maintain operational security about where they might be to minimize the space with which Iran could hit,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in April testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Pentagon’s latest budget request for fiscal 2027 did not include funds to repair U.S. bases damaged in the war, and the department’s acting comptroller, Jay Hurst, said he is unsure “what our future posture is going to be” and speculated that host countries could contribute to the cost.
