Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe
Washington/Virginia: Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defence equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery.
The amount of destruction is far larger than has been publicly acknowledged by the US government or previously reported. The threat of air attacks rendered some of the US bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.
Since the start of the war on February 28, seven service members had died in strikes on US facilities in the region – six in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia – and more than 400 troops had suffered injuries as of late April, the US military said.
While most of the wounded returned to duty within days, at least 12 suffered injuries that military officials classified as serious, according to US officials who, among others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the US government – their biggest customer – to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. Those restrictions began less than two weeks into the war.
Iranian state-affiliated news agencies, however, have from the start regularly published high-resolution satellite imagery on their social media accounts that claimed to document damage to US sites.
For this examination – one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to US facilities in the region – The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available. The Post excluded 19 Iranian images from the damage analysis because comparisons with the Copernicus imagery were inconclusive. No Iranian imagery was found to have been manipulated.
In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran. In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 US military sites in the region.
Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the US military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.
“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target US forces.
Some of the damage may have occurred after US troops already left the bases, making protection of the structures less vital. Cancian and other experts said they did not believe the attacks had significantly limited the US military’s ability to conduct its bombing campaign in Iran.
US Central Command, which has responsibility for the Middle East, declined to address a detailed summary of findings from The Post. A military spokesperson disputed the characterisation of base damage by experts as extensive or evidence of failures, saying assessments of destruction were complex and could be misleading in some cases, but declined to provide specifics. Military leaders would be able to provide fuller context for the Iranian attacks once the conflict ended, the spokesperson said.
The damage
In the first weeks of the war, several news outlets published reviews of damage, including The New York Times, which found strikes at 14 US military sites or air-defence installations. In late April, NBC News reported that an Iranian jet bombed a US base in Kuwait, the first time in years that an enemy fighter plane had hit a US base, and cited research it said showed 100 targets had been struck by Iran across 11 bases. CNN reported last week that 16 US installations had been damaged.
But the review by The Post – based on images dating from the war’s start through April 14 – reveals that scores of additional targets were struck at the sites, which are predominantly used by the US military but shared with the host nations’ military forces and allies.
The images show that airstrikes damaged or destroyed what appear to be numerous barracks, hangars or warehouses at more than half the US bases that The Post reviewed.
“The Iranians have deliberately targeted accommodation buildings across multiple sites with the intent to inflict mass casualties,” said William Goodhind, an investigator with the open-access research project Contested Ground who reviewed the imagery. “It is not just equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure under fire, but also soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”
The Post also found that the attacks hit a satellite communications site at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Patriot missile defence equipment at Riffa and Isa air bases in Bahrain and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, a satellite dish at the Naval Support Activity Bahrain – which serves as the headquarters of the US 5th Fleet – a power plant at Camp Buehring in Kuwait and five fuel storage bladder sites across three bases.
The Iranian imagery also documented previously reported damage or destruction of radomes at Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and at the 5th Fleet headquarters; Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence radars and equipment at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and two sites in the United Arab Emirates; a second satellite communications site at al-Udeid Air Base, and an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft and a refuelling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
More than half of the damage reviewed by The Post occurred at the 5th Fleet headquarters, and the three bases in Kuwait – Ali al-Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan and Camp Buehring. Camp Arifjan is the US Army’s regional headquarters.
Some Persian Gulf nations have refused to allow the US military to conduct offensive operations out of their bases. A US official said bases in Bahrain and Kuwait were two of the hardest hit, possibly because they permitted attacks from their territory, including the use of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) that can fire missiles at ranges exceeding 500 kilometres.
The Post’s review represents only a partial count of the damage based on available satellite imagery.
Some of the damage could have been the result of US choices or deception, Cancian said. To help preserve valuable interceptors, US forces could choose to allow an incoming missile to strike if it seemed likely to hit an unimportant target, he said, and it was also possible commanders sought to deceive Iranian forces by making emptied base locations appear occupied.
A changed battlefield
Experts said the vulnerability of the military sites to Iran’s attacks was probably the consequence of numerous factors.
Chief among them, experts said, was that Iranian forces had been more resilient than the Trump administration might have anticipated. Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, a think tank, said plans to destroy Iran’s missile and drone forces fast enough to prevent them from inflicting serious damage underestimated “the depth of Iran’s pre-positioned targeting intelligence on fixed US infrastructure”.
Grieco said the strategy also failed to account for the degree to which US and Israeli air defences had been used up during the 12-day conflict in June between Iran, Israel and the US.
According to an estimate from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the military used at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1060 Patriot interceptors between February 28 and April 8, representing 53 per cent and 43 per cent of their pre-war inventories, respectively.
Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for airpower and technology at the Royal United Services Institute based in London, said US and allied air defences had done an impressive job intercepting attacks, but “at an enormous cost in terms of surface-to-air missile interceptors and air-to-air missiles”.
In addition, experts said the US military had not adequately adapted to the use of one-way attack drones, something they said planners should have learned from observing the war in Ukraine.
“While [drones] have small payloads – some of these did not do that much damage – they are more difficult to intercept and much more accurate, making them a much bigger threat to US forces,” said Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at the Centre for Naval Analyses.
They also pointed to structural challenges, including a shortfall of fortified shelters that could protect troops and equipment at key positions and likely targets.
For example, the tactical operation centre in Kuwait, where six US service members were killed by an Iranian drone attack in early March, offered little overhead protection or concealment, one of several issues being examined by Democratic lawmakers probing the fatalities.
In one case, it appeared that the E-3 Sentry command-and-control aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was destroyed after being repeatedly parked in the same location on an unprotected taxiway, satellite imagery shows.
US Central Command declined to address questions on experts’ analysis of the damage.
The strikes on US bases in the region had left military planners considering new trade-offs, said Maximilian Bremer, a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Centre and a retired Air Force officer: pull troops back to safer locations and limit their ability to fight or maintain the bases as they were and accept the potential of future casualties.
A US official said damage at the Naval Support Activity was “extensive” and that the headquarters there relocated to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida – the home of US Central Command. It was unlikely that troops, contractors or civilian employees would return to the base “anytime soon”, the official said.
Two other officials said US forces might never return to regional bases in large numbers, though no final decision had been made.
“We have moved from an age of stealth to one where the entire battlespace is translucent and increasingly transparent,” said Bremer.
“It feels like we should be on offence, but we are definitely playing defence around these bases.”
Methodology: To report this story, Washington Post reporters geolocated 128 satellite images published by Iranian state-affiliated news media purporting to show damage caused by Iranian strikes to confirm that they depicted the locations claimed in the captions. They then verified the damage by comparing the imagery with medium-resolution imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite, part of the EU satellite system Copernicus, examining various spectral bands to see damage as clearly as possible, and to high-resolution optical imagery from Planet. In response to a request from the US government, Planet has instituted a policy of withholding imagery captured after March 8 from its online platform, meaning high-resolution imagery was generally not available for comparisons after that date.
In cases where we lacked high-resolution imagery, we tallied only a single structure hit, even if the Iranian imagery appeared to show multiple structures hit. The analysis excluded purported Iranian strikes on non-military targets, such as oil refineries, and on military sites that are not operated by US forces, such as radar installations owned and operated by US allies.
Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, examined the images gathered by The Post and verified our analysis, as did Goodhind of Contested Ground, which conducts satellite imagery analysis on war and armed conflict.
Washington Post
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
