Pentagon prices base damage at $5 billion minimum; estimates reach $15 billion
A Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery has documented 274 damaged structures at 24 installations with a U.S. military presence across seven countries during the war’s first six months — what the Journal calls the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the damage American facilities have taken in the conflict. The Journal examined tens of thousands of low-resolution images from the European Space Agency, one of the few consistent public sources of imagery throughout the war, and obtained and verified higher-resolution and on-the-ground imagery of additional damaged structures where available.
Many of the installations are shared with, or owned by, allies, so the damaged buildings are not necessarily American or used only by U.S. forces. The Defense Department and U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, declined to comment.
Three American servicemembers were killed in the July 17 nighttime Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the Jordanian desert — one of the deadliest nights of the war for U.S. forces. Satellite imagery showed the attack damaged at least 19 buildings where troops sleep, and the Journal counted 25 damaged buildings at the base during the war’s first six months. Iran hit multiple housing units at other U.S. installations across the region that same week, and U.S. officials privately expressed worry about Iran targeting troops where they sleep.
The July strikes marked a shift in Iran’s tactics and revealed an improvement in its ability to sequence attacks and hit targets with precision, according to the Journal’s analysis of satellite data, Iranian military statements and interviews with U.S. officials. The analysis found Iran was taking more direct aim at the buildings that house American troops. President Trump is considering a new wave of attacks on Iran, and the U.S. military has pulled some personnel off several of the locations ahead of possible retaliation, the Journal has reported. Pentagon officials worry that Iran 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 war since it began on Feb. 28, according to Defense Department data. More than 400 were wounded before a temporary ceasefire fell apart in July, after which the government stopped publishing casualty figures specific to the war. The latest cost estimate for the war stands at $47.1 billion as of Oct. 16, according to a document viewed by the Journal. That figure does not include damage to bases, which the Pentagon has priced at a minimum of $5 billion, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter; the total could reach $15 billion, according to a separate person briefed on the cost.
The Journal shared its findings with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which estimated that reconstruction alone — without replacing the equipment and systems inside the buildings — would cost 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. 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, a pullout that could leave allies more exposed.
The damage began in the war’s opening days. After the war started 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 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, and 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. Iran kept striking: over the rest of the month, damage appeared at six more installations, the 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 protects the bases — radar, missile-defense and communications systems — appeared damaged, according to the analysis.
After an uneasy ceasefire took hold in early April, satellite imagery showed little new damage to bases, and administration officials touted the damage the U.S. had inflicted on Iran. “You can dig out for now, but you can’t reconstitute,” Hegseth said, addressing Iran’s leaders at an April 16 press briefing. In early June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators, “Well, the war is over now.” Days after the Muwaffaq Salti strike, Hegseth continued to call the war a success, saying on July 21 that Iran had been “completely overmatched and crushed” and was “combat ineffective.” “They still have some capabilities, but it’s nowhere near what it was at all,” he said on Aug. 24.
Behind the public confidence, the military was moving troops off bases. The Pentagon had shifted troops out of harm’s way even before the campaign started, and Hegseth told Congress on April 29 that the U.S. had moved 7,500 troops “off of the X” — away from known bases — at the start of the campaign. Iranian attacks forced the U.S. to move even more troops out of the danger zone, U.S. officials said, including largely evacuating Camp Buehring and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.
When the ceasefire collapsed on July 7, Iran focused its fire west, toward bases hundreds of miles farther from its borders. Through the war’s six-month mark, the Journal found damage from at least 11 separate attacks, five of them in Jordan, while the Gulf installations that had borne the brunt of earlier strikes saw only sporadic damage. Within days of the Muwaffaq Salti strike, the analysis found damage at three other installations to buildings that current and former U.S. servicemembers said resembled base housing — often converted shipping containers or tents. Structures damaged after the ceasefire collapsed were less than half the size of those hit earlier in the war, one sign of the precision that has increasingly alarmed U.S. officials. One week after Hegseth’s Aug. 24 remarks, just over six months into the war, Iran hit Camp Titin in Jordan for the first time, the Journal found.
Iran’s own public statements tracked the shift. From July 7 to Aug. 28, Iran claimed more than 40 strikes on U.S. installations, according to a Journal analysis of four Iranian state-affiliated media outlets. More than three-quarters of those claims described specific types of buildings at named installations, compared with less than half earlier in the war, and claims of strikes targeting housing doubled. “There’s definitely been an effort by the Iranians to inflict casualties on U.S. forces,” said Brian Carter, an Iran-focused defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The Pentagon has disclosed little about the damage publicly. Earlier this month, five Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee urged the Defense Department to publicly disclose the estimated cost of damage to U.S. facilities, which was shared in a classified briefing. On a trip to the Middle East this month, Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, was barred from visiting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where the Journal’s analysis found at least a dozen buildings with signs of damage. U.S. military leaders in the region also refused to brief him, Murphy said. The Defense Department has said Murphy was told before the trip that he would not have access to the base due to travel restrictions in the region. The administration is “withholding information about damages” in order to “mask the true cost of the war,” Murphy told the Journal.
Elaine McCusker, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former acting Pentagon comptroller in the first Trump administration, said the strike patterns could help the Pentagon decide what to keep in the region and where, because they reveal how many missiles and drones Iran has left and how quickly it can make more. “The type and number of strikes over time also contains signals about magazine depth,” she said. Iran has been quickly rebuilding its damaged infrastructure, including missile bases and production facilities, and digging out its buried missile arsenal, while the U.S. has drained its supply of interceptor missiles.