The United States, for the first time in decades, is fighting a fully functioning nation state, a state capable of imposing real costs on the U.S. military in ways not seen in other wars in which the United States has engaged over the past three-and-a-half decades. That’s the theme of an April 1 article in The Times of London which reports that the effect has been dramatic. “Rather than a slow bleed to roadside mines and suicide bombs, the might of the American military has suffered the sort of losses to be expected of more conventional wars,” it says.
The Times particularly zeros in on Iran’s Shahed-136 drones, the mass use of which the Pentagon seems not to have prepared for. “The failure of the Department of Defense adequately to incorporate the lessons of the war in Ukraine, as opposed to just studying them, particularly counter-drone warfare, is a bipartisan failing across two administrations,” one former top US defense official said. Iran has caused tremendous damage to 13 US bases using such drones, sometimes alone, sometimes in combination with ballistic missiles. To add to the American military’s challenges, the article asserts that Russia has been supplying the IRGC with US base location co-ordinates, and more specifically, the daily position of aircraft out in the open, as opposed to in hardened shelters. The Times concludes with an accounting of missile defense radars, communications installations and aircraft destroyed by Iranian missiles and drones.
A similar report in Defense News notes, “Since Feb. 28, Iran has struck radar systems, satellite communications and mission-critical aircraft at at least seven U.S. bases across Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The attacks have focused on infrastructure that U.S. forces depend on to detect threats, refuel aircraft and direct air operations in the region.”
