How Iran Battered U.S. Bases and Caused Billions in Damage

Three American servicemembers were killed in a July 17 Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the Jordanian desert. Satellite imagery shows the nighttime attack damaged at least 19 buildings where troops sleep. The July strikes marked an alarming shift in Iran’s tactics and revealed an improvement in the regime’s ability to sequence attacks and hit targets with precision.It was one of the deadliest nights of the war for U.S.

forces. But it wasn’t the only attack targeting American troops where they live and sleep. That same week, Iran hit multiple housing units at other U.S. military installations across the region. The July strikes marked an alarming shift in Iran’s tactics and revealed an improvement in the regime’s ability to sequence attacks and hit targets with precision.

Iran was taking more direct aim at the buildings that house American troops, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite data, Iranian military statements and interviews with U.S. officials. The Journal’s analysis offers the most comprehensive public accounting of the war’s damage to American facilities to date.

Iran has hit America’s installations hard. Now, with President Trump considering a new wave of attacks on Iran, the U.S. military pulled some personnel off several of those locations ahead of possible retaliation, the Journal has reported.

This comes as Pentagon officials worry that the regime has conserved some of its most sophisticated missiles and could improve its attacks in the next round of fighting. More than 20 U.S. servicemembers have died in activity related to the Iran war since it began on Feb.

28, according to Defense Department data. More than 400 were wounded before the temporary ceasefire fell apart in July, after which the government stopped publishing casualty figures specific to the war. The latest cost estimate of the Iran war stands at $47.1 billion as of Oct.

16, according to a document viewed by the Journal. That doesn’t include damage to bases, which the Pentagon separately priced at a minimum of $5 billion, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. That number could potentially be as high as $15 billion, according to a separate person briefed on the cost.

The Journal shared its findings on damaged buildings with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which estimated that the cost of reconstruction alone—without replacing the equipment and systems inside those buildings—would be more than $4 billion.

The U.S. is in talks with allied nations to pay for some repairs, which could help keep costs to the U.S. down, officials have said. Many of the installations are shared with, or owned by, allies, so the damaged buildings aren’t necessarily American or used only by U.S.

forces. Still, some infrastructure may never be rebuilt. The Pentagon has weighed moving bases farther from Iran’s reach and pulling back from its installations in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the Journal has reported. Pulling out could leave its allies more exposed.

The Defense Department and U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, declined to comment. The Journal’s analysis of public satellite images from the European Space Agency—one of the few consistent public sources of imagery throughout the war—shows how the strikes unfolded.

(Read more about how the Journal conducted its investigation.) After the war began on Feb. 28, Iranian missiles and drones pounded bases across the Persian Gulf. In the first two weeks, at least 119 buildings at 13 installations, mostly in nearby Kuwait, showed damage—more than in any other stretch of the war.

Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, took heavy fire in those two weeks. Central Command evacuated most personnel from the base. On March 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Iran’s missile program all but finished.

“Iran’s entire ballistic missile production capacity, every company that builds every component of those missiles, has been functionally defeated, destroyed,” he said at a Pentagon press briefing. But Iran kept striking.

Over the rest of the month, damage appeared at six more installations, the Journal’s analysis found. On April 1, Trump told the nation that Iran’s military was nearly spent. “Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten,” he said during a prime-time address.

By then, more than 15 components of the infrastructure that protect the bases—radar, missile-defense and communications systems—appeared damaged, the Journal’s analysis found.