Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting,
The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit.
Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.
The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East. Instead, the so-called logistical tail for U.S. naval operations had to stretch
all the way to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles from the Strait of Hormuz.
Complications to resupply efforts raise costs, reduce operational efficiency, and add to the strain on military personnel. Disrupted logistics contributed to the long deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which led in turn to low morale. According to
Stars and Stripes, families of crew members on the Lincoln
feared that the many months at sea were causing serious mental-health problems.
For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. At a recent town-hall meeting,
Navy Timeshas reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”
The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as
The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. One way to spin the situation is as a “once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence” in the Persian Gulf region, as the
Post put it. But the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.
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. over 40b in Arms sales into the region.
