Pentagon Watchdog Details Missile Shortages, Damage to U.S. Bases in First Iran War Review
Washington — The Pentagon’s official watchdog on Monday released a special report on the Iran war, offering the Defense Department’s first formal accounting of U.S. equipment and facility losses in the conflict.
The inspector general, citing communications with U.S. Central Command, said Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan” during the war’s opening months. The report covers Feb. 28 through June 30 and also acknowledges depletion of key U.S. munition stockpiles.
The findings are the most detailed public assessment to date of the war’s toll on American infrastructure and suggest that battlefield losses and logistical strain are already recasting the U.S. posture in the Middle East. CNN previously reported the destruction of critical U.S. assets, including missile-defense radar installations, in the war’s early days.
Those Iranian strikes contributed to significant changes in how U.S. troops have traditionally operated in the region, the report said. CENTCOM “shifted personnel, assets and storage facilities” as they came under attack from Iran and its proxy forces.
Some of those moves included the withdrawal of Army medical evacuation helicopters from Iraq and Kuwait, according to the report, meaning “most medical evacuations have been carried out by ground … to local treatment facilities.”
The destruction of the Navy’s regional hub in Bahrain — which acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recently said Iran “blew the hell out of” — added to “significant challenges” in establishing “adequate naval bases and support ports,” the watchdog said. That led to the distant Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia becoming a sea logistics hub, stretching resupply cycles to 14 to 18 days.
The resulting intermittent shortages of supplies and interruption to the military’s regional mail system compounded the difficulties U.S. sailors faced during record-long deployments to the Persian Gulf to support airstrikes on Iran and, in recent months, blockade its ports.
The changes to the military’s Middle East footprint may become permanent. Military and intelligence community officials have quietly discussed the prospect of lasting cuts to U.S. personnel and facilities in the region when the war eventually concludes, six sources previously told CNN.
The report, produced in collaboration with the State Department’s and U.S. Agency for International Development’s inspector general offices, also covered U.S. diplomatic activities in the region.
Iranian damage to U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Middle East totaled roughly $184 million, the report said. Cost estimates for damage to U.S. military sites were not provided.
As CNN reported throughout the months of heavy fighting, those facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates came under assault by Iran and its proxies.
In early March, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was hit by two Iranian drones, causing extensive damage, including to the CIA station on the compound.
Also in early March, a drone targeted the U.S. consulate in Dubai, damaging a utility building, according to the report. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time the drone had hit a “parking lot adjacent to the chancellery building.”
The U.S. Embassy in Kuwait suspended operations entirely in March after being struck and damaged by Iranian drones. It resumed emergency operations for Americans in late June.
There were more than 600 attacks against U.S. facilities in Iraq, a senior State Department official said in May. Those attacks caused the most costly damage — roughly $157 million.
Between Feb. 23 and June 30, according to the report, up to 3,500 diplomatic personnel were out of the region as the majority of U.S. posts were on authorized or ordered departure.
Within weeks of the start of the war in February, as U.S. diplomatic facilities across the region came under attack, the department put Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on ordered departure, meaning that non-emergency personnel and all family members had to leave. Authorized departure means non-emergency personnel could choose to leave.
Most posts remain on “restricted operations,” which is not a return to normal staffing and instead is put in place after six months of ordered departure. Some diplomats have begun returning to the region, as have some family members.
Davis Winkie’s work at CNN is supported by a partnership between Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners (JFP). CNN retains full editorial control of the reporting.
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