Even creative new defense companies have yet to show they can build them at scale to meet the threat.
“Maybe you harden certain bases, and you’re going to put fewer forces on them, or are you going to create a fortress base,” with extra air defenses and buried facilities, said Stacie Pettyjohn, who leads the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan think tank. “There are some hard questions that need to be answered: Where do you need to be? Why? With what types of forces? How often?”
Military leaders are still weighing whether to rebuild the base in Bahrain — and how to strengthen it if they do. Weeks of ballistic missile and drone attacks damaged the command center, satellite terminals, and logistics warehouses. Some troops had to relocate to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and can’t return due to the continuing Iranian threat. Other troops from a Qatar base have been working from Shaw Air Base in South Carolina since the start of the strikes.
“You’ve got to ask, ‘Do we invest a lot to rebuild this, or do we do something else?” the U.S. official said. “I don’t know that we know enough right now to be able to answer that.”
The U.S. military — with its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, long-range bombers and aerial refueling aircraft — can still operate anywhere on the globe that it chooses. But those powerful ships are all but shut out of the Persian Gulf without the ability to refuel at the Bahrain base. They must get supplies and fuel 2,000 miles away from the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. And other areas, including an Army logistics hub in Kuwait and the command center in Al Udeid in Qatar are increasingly vulnerable amid dwindling air defense stockpiles and the lack of hardened structures.
Even the Trump White House has felt the pressure. The administration engineered a cloak-and-dagger maneuver to sneak Trump off of a new Air Force One onto another U.S. aircraft — via an airline catering truck — in an effort to avoid any Iranian threats to the presidential plane.
The threat of small, commercially made drones is keenly felt in Europe. The German government recently blamed Russia for an explosives-leaden drone on a runway in Leipzig, and other alliance members have reported incursions of Russian weapons in their airspace.
Bulgaria’s prime minister said Wednesday that two commercial vessels were struck by drones in the Black Sea, in what marked the first attack on shipping in the NATO member’s exclusive economic zone. It is not clear where the drones came from, but up to 10 crew members form one of the ships that sank remain missing.
“If the threat was indeed credible,” said a second European defense official, “and assets are so highly valued, it is not an overreaction.”