So, in the early days of the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, my colleagues and I started looking at a lot of these videos that were shot at U.S. military bases and foreign bases where the United States was operating in the Gulf and the Middle East. And they showed that there had been a number of Iranian drone attacks on critical infrastructure. And it wasn’t long before we started seeing Iranian satellite images from Iranian state media filtering through social media. And these images purport to show destruction on a very large scale at these US-run bases. And typically what we’ll do is we’ll compare it to U.S. satellite imagery. But the U.S. government has asked U.S. satellite companies to limit the release of these images in the Middle East and the Gulf region. Rather than restricting this, they even retroactively deleted images from early March onwards. Additionally, U.S. officials have not said much about specific attacks on these U.S. bases. “What I mean is, the best defense is a good offense.” And when they did, they said the air defenses were working as designed. “Our air defense forces are performing at their best. I couldn’t be prouder.” We wanted to cut through the doubts and arguments and understand the reality of the damage. So we couldn’t take Iran’s satellite images at face value. We had to actually verify and cross-reference it. So we collected all the images released by the Iranians. These are dozens of images from different countries. We then looked at European satellite companies that had no similar restrictions on image disclosure. For example, this is in Saudi Arabia. This is Prince Sultan Air Base, where the United States operates. And here’s an image of Iran. Here you can see there were 12 buildings “before”. And you can see 4 or 5 of them destroyed in the “after” images. We then get the exact same location as this image from our European provider. And it’s the same, right? What I mean is, what you see is the destroyed buildings, the same pattern, the same location. We’ve done this across the board. We did this with dozens of images. Not a single one of them was found to be fake. Overall, we found that Iran and Iranian-backed militias attacked 18 military bases in seven countries where the United States operates. Although other media outlets reported similar amounts of damage, we found that in addition to the large US military bases in the region, smaller or temporary US presence areas were also attacked. U.S. Central Command declined to comment on our findings. This is the most widespread attack ever on a U.S. military base in the region. Some of the Iranian attacks have killed U.S. troops. Six American soldiers were killed in the attack on a makeshift command post at a port in Kuwait. And a strike broke out in Saudi Arabia, leaving one person dead. So we took all these images that we edited. We sent this to several defense experts to put it all in context. And most experts we interviewed said these attacks on these military bases did not disrupt America’s ability to strike Iran. But our analysis reveals new vulnerabilities in the U.S. security posture in the region. And in March, our colleagues at The Times reported that many U.S. military bases in the region had been evacuated. Looking at the satellite imagery, we saw that this was a fairly accurate drone strike spanning the entire American region of the Middle East. For example, here in Bahrain we are home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the headquarters of the U.S. Navy in the Middle East. There was an attack on the communications infrastructure in the northern part of the base here. As you can see here, there’s a radome and a satellite dish, and there’s also a large warehouse down here that was damaged by an Iranian drone attack. The radome right here, slightly northeast of the ballpark, was hit by a one-way drone attack. And it’s not just this massive base that’s under attack. A little further south in Bahrain is a joint base where Bahrain and the United States work together on air defense. And there were three attacks from Iranian forces. The radar site here has two very expensive radar systems. You can see the carbonization phenomenon right here. And there is a warehouse or hangar a little west of here. Here, we were hit with a fairly accurate attack that caused the roof to collapse. And this is outside the Gulf, too. So, if you look up to the north of Syria, there is an airfield in northeast Syria where the United States has been conducting recent operations. They had been operating here for several months, although they withdrew in mid-April. And Iran-backed militias attacked the base repeatedly in March and April. However, Iran claimed that the attack destroyed a U.S. barracks. In fact, this is actually a grain storage structure. So it shows that even if the satellite images are accurate, the claims need to be verified. And at Camp Victory outside Baghdad, Iraq, Iranian-backed militias carried out a drone attack, destroying about six or seven buildings. This is a damaged warehouse. Drone footage of an attack carried out by an Iran-backed militia has actually been released. This drone footage is obviously used as a propaganda video, but it helps us understand the nature of the attack. They flew around Camp Victory for several minutes and eventually crashed into a warehouse. They attacked shelters, fuel tanks, radar systems, and at one point even took out a Black Hawk helicopter. The total cost of these attacks is difficult to estimate, but the loss of aircraft at these bases is likely to be around $1 billion, according to analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research center. They also said it would cost about $500 million to repair or replace a single damaged radar system in Jordan. Experts we interviewed said that ideally the intercept rate of U.S. air defense systems deployed at bases across the Gulf would be around 90 percent. But even at 90%, only 10% of Iran’s drones and missiles can get through air defenses. And that could be a problem for the United States. The large physical space in the Middle East allows Iran to send inexpensive drones to these bases. What was once an asset for the United States may now become a liability.
