The Pentagon’s Worst-Kept Secret

CNN has done something the Pentagon would rather it hadn’t: sent journalists with satellite imagery to look at what Iran has actually done to American military bases across the Middle East.

The results are not flattering.

Sixteen American military installations, spread across eight countries, have been confirmed damaged in Iranian and Iranian-backed strikes since the war began on February 28. According to a congressional staffer with access to damage assessments, those sixteen sites represent the majority of all US military positions in the region. Some are described as “practically unusable.” Others are repairable, which is the kind of optimism you cling to when the alternative is explaining to Congress why you parked the world’s most expensive military hardware within range of Iranian missiles and then seemed surprised when they used them.

The targeting was not random. Iran went after the things that are hardest and most expensive to replace: THAAD radar systems, MQ-9 Reaper drones, communications infrastructure, an E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft. A congressional source described these as America’s “most costly and most scarce assets in the region.” Iran apparently read the same procurement reports.

The real cost of the war, per internal American estimates, is running somewhere between 40 and 50 billion dollars. The Pentagon told Congress 25 billion. That gap, like the craters in those satellite images, is getting harder to explain away.

Gulf nations hosting US forces are said to be quietly furious. They were not consulted before the war started, and they are now learning that the American security umbrella they have built their foreign policy around is neither unique nor, as it turns out, invincible.

One source told CNN they had never seen anything like it.

Neither, apparently, had anyone at the Pentagon. They just hadn’t mentioned it.

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