As large-scale hostilities between the United States and Iran resume, it’s time to ask hard questions about America’s Middle East basing footprint. Seven Americans have died on U.S. military bases during the Iran war. Not on the front lines, on installations that were supposed to deter Iranian aggression and instead became its targets.
The conflict leaves Washington with an uncomfortable contradiction: U.S. forces have demonstrated extraordinary reach and precision, but the war revealed America’s regional basing footprint is more exposed, more expensive to defend, and less able to control disruption than its defenders assume.
The service members on these bases performed their duties admirably under fire. What failed them was not their training or resolve but the choice to station them in a static, exposed posture in the first place. Such vulnerabilities demand more than tactical fixes — they require a strategic reassessment. Washington should ask hard questions about the value of maintaining a sprawling network of fixed bases in the Middle East and adopt a leaner posture better suited to the limited interests it needs to protect in the region.
Despite diverting high-end air defense systems from around the world, Washington’s fixed bases in the Gulf were still battered by missiles and drones. Gulf partners hosting U.S. assets were pulled deeper into the line of fire, and a middling power imposed enormous costs on the most capable military in the world. Such outcomes undermine the rationale Washington has long used to justify its regional military presence.
For decades, Washington has argued its Middle East presence is necessary to contain Iran, reassure Gulf partners, and secure the flow of energy to global markets. Yet the Iran war cast doubt on all three justifications. Rather than reassuring the region, U.S. bases became magnets for retaliation, placing civilian populations and critical energy infrastructure at risk for all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Many U.S. bases, including aircraft and surface vessels, had to be evacuated due to their vulnerability.
Further, the U.S. footprint has not prevented Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz and triggering an energy crisis that will linger well beyond the war itself. If America’s regional posture cannot preclude such disruptions even during direct intervention, then what does it accomplish relative to its enormous cost and risk?
America currently maintains over 50,000 troops across nearly 20 facilities in U.S. Central Command’s area of operations. A Washington Post analysis found that Iranian airstrikes damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures and pieces of equipment across 15 U.S. military installations. A separate Wall Street Journal investigation showed that Iranian strikes significantly damaged the U.S.’s most important naval base in the region, reportedly striking the main headquarters, two satellite communications terminals, and at least 12 other buildings.
Of the 13 American deaths sustained during the Iran war, seven came from strikes on these facilities, with 400 more wounded. Despite overwhelming conventional superiority, America’s poor adaptation to Iran’s asymmetric tactics offered a target-rich environment for retaliation, forcing Washington to expend scarce capabilities just to protect its forces.
Tehran knows it cannot defeat the U.S. in a conventional war, so it relies on missiles, drones, proxy escalation, economic disruption, and geography to make America’s position as politically and economically painful as possible. Forward bases made more sense when precision strike was more difficult, drone saturation was less mature, and U.S. airpower depended on nearby runways.
Today, fixed bases in the range of adversaries are increasingly vulnerable, costly to defend, and less credible deterrents than they once were. U.S. personnel directed Operation Epic Fury not from the Middle East but from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. If one of America’s most complex regional operations in decades could be run from the continental U.S., then the case for a sprawling, exposed system of command nodes inside Iran’s drone and missile envelope is weaker than ever.
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The Iran war shows the limits of a Middle East strategy overly reliant on military presence. The largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq has not achieved the principal American strategic objectives against Iran. Reducing America’s military footprint to match its limited interests would better protect those interests at lower cost. Even during the Cold War, when the region mattered far more to American energy security, the U.S. defended those interests with only two permanent bases.
Preventing a hostile power from dominating the Middle East, securing global energy markets, and protecting the homeland from terrorism simply does not require a massive permanent troop presence. Washington should rebalance its Middle East strategy, placing greater emphasis on economic and diplomatic engagement, with military force serving as a backstop rather than the foundation of U.S. policy.
Matthew F. MacKenzie is a foreign policy analyst with Americans for Prosperity.