Iran War update #50: America's Mid East bases are in dumb places

Earlier this week I was talking to a journalist from the French paper Libération for an article they were writing about why U.S. military bases are proving so vulnerable to Iranian attack, and it got me thinking about a topic I hadn’t given much thought to before: the fact that U.S. bases in the Middle East are in really dumb places.

If you look at a map of U.S. bases in the Middle East, then you notice that a lot of them are really close to Iran. The largest U.S. base in the Middle East is the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The forward headquarters of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East (CENTCOM) is also in Qatar. The headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the main naval component in the region, is in Bahrain. The headquarters of U.S. air operations in the Middle East is, once again, in Qatar. There are a lot of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, Oman and in Kuwait.

This distribution of bases is driven by a range of factors. For instance, the Gulf states are diplomatically close to the U.S., they have relatively stable politics, and they have a skilled labor force. That made them a pretty good place to host bases in a lot of respects.

The placement of bases was also influenced by the kinds of wars that the U.S. was fighting when these bases were first developed or grew into their modern form. Partly it’s a matter of where: there’s a cluster of stuff near Iraq because the U.S. spent the best part of two decades fighting in, or bombing, Iraq.

But perhaps more importantly, it was a matter of against who. Put simply, the U.S. was able to place its bases where they currently are because the enemies it has gotten used to fighting in the Middle East had no means of hitting them. The Taliban and Iraqi insurgents didn’t have missiles or drones. This was partly because they were fairly low-tech forces, and partly just because many of the weapons that Iran is shooting at U.S. bases hadn’t been invented in the early 2000s.

But now that the U.S. is fighting a war with a heavily-armed Iran that can shoot dozens of drones and missiles across the region every day, the placement of U.S. bases in the region is downright insane. Pretty much all of the major U.S. headquarters in the Middle East are under 150 miles from Iran. Iran can fire missiles and drones at them extremely quickly, putting them at risk of being hit and requiring a lot of very expensive interceptors to be expended in order to defend them.