By Rich Lowry
Friday, October 09, 2026
The Iranian missile and drone threat to our Persian Gulf
bases was foreseeable, and yet we didn’t do enough to protect them.
Churchill said that “wars are not won by evacuations,”
and sometimes, he might have added, they are simply embarrassing.
The U.S. hastily flew its B-1 bombers out of Fairford air
base in the U.K. for fear of a potential Iranian
drone attack, the latest in a series of successful Iranian operations to crimp
U.S. bases, this time more than 2,000 miles away.
The Trump administration has found — by opening a channel
to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and blockading Iran — a strategy to
pressure Iran that may yet produce a favorable outcome to the war. Still, the
conflict has exposed glaring U.S. military deficiencies, with our inability to
protect our bases in the region high on the list.
Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao has said the Iranians
“blew the hell out of Bahrain,” referring to the headquarters of the Fifth
Fleet in the tiny Gulf kingdom. They have also hit U.S. facilities in Qatar,
Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. The vast majority of U.S. casualties have
resulted from attacks on our bases.
Whereas it once seemed that having so many bases in
proximity to Iran was useful to containing the Islamic Republic, when Tehran
began firing on these facilities, it became clear that the short distances made
them vulnerable targets.
Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, where buildings and radar domes
got hit, is just over 60 miles away.
A number of bases have been fully or partly evacuated,
and the effects have been felt on U.S. operations. One reason that there was so
much strain on the USS Abraham Lincoln during its lengthy deployment is
that Bahrain was no longer available as a supply hub. We had to rely on
facilities in Diego Garcia and Singapore, creating a supply chain thousands of
miles long.
The Iranian missile and drone threat to our bases was
foreseeable, and yet we didn’t do enough to protect them.
One option now is a broad pullback of our presence in the
region, but so long as hydrocarbons power the modern economy, this is a
nonstarter. The Gulf states would have an incentive to look elsewhere for
strategic partners, most worryingly to Russia or China, and might conclude that
they should do more to accommodate an Iran that would have effectively chased
us from the Persian Gulf.
The answer to the threat to the bases is the same thing
that created the threat in the first place — innovation.
We’ve long had bases in the Gulf, including a naval
command headquarters in Bahrain since 1948, but the purpose and nature of the
presence has changed over time. As Kristian Alexander writes in an analysis for the Stimson Center, during the Cold War
we didn’t have a large land presence at the bases. After Saddam Hussein’s 1990
invasion of Kuwait, that changed.
Today, the question is how to reconfigure our presence
again to make it more defensible and sustainable. “U.S. bases,” Alexander
writes, “remain indispensable for intelligence collection, command and control,
maritime security, air and missile defense, logistics, and long-range power
projection.”
One option is to locate more facilities in Israel.
Elliott Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations points out that the Jewish
state is much farther away — more than 1,000 miles from Iran — and would impose
fewer restrictions on our access and overflight rights.
But we still require bases in the Gulf. We’re going to
need to disperse them, harden them (including with more underground elements),
and build in more redundancy. The air defense needs to be more robust and
layered, and less dependent on expensive missiles that are in short supply.
The Iran war was supposed to represent a short, sharp
defanging of the Iranian regime. Instead, it has dragged on and served as a
lesson in key shortcomings of U.S. military power that must be addressed, lest
they bite us again in a conflict with a much more powerful adversary.
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