I have written a series of posts about the things that prevent(ed) us from seeing what was going on in Iran clearly.
In recent days, there has been a slew of new visibility.
I catalog these not because they reveal anything we didn’t already know. We’ve known Iran destroyed the Navy base in Bahrain. We’ve known that Russia has been helping Iran kill Americans and attack military resources with pinpoint accuracy. We’ve known that Whiskey Pete Hegseth shot his wad and as a result left the US without missiles to face other threats.
This is not new knowledge; it is new visibility.
I catalog this to call attention to the things that have contributed to this flood of visibility now: the kinds of reporting Congress has demanded and the limitations on what they got (though Senate Democrats just demanded better information), CNN’s ability to get similar satellite data to that which Volodymyr Zelenskyy had when he pointed out Russia’s role in targeting the US, the frustration of service members in the field that “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” which led them to defy Whiskey Pete’s censorship to share what they’re seeing.
Some of this visibility may be driven by the election season. Part of it may have been forced by that meeting in San Diego where USS Lincoln family members revealed their husbands or brothers or sons were trying to jump overboard, which process of making visible I laid out here. Part of it may reflect Trump and Hegseth bleeding power.
We are not learning more. We are seeing differently.
A week ago Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao did a long interview with Epoch Times.
In an exclusive interview, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told me that Iranian forces “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”
While open-source analyses have long indicated that the U.S. Fifth Fleet Headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain sustained extensive damage in the early days of the Iran conflict, Cao’s comment represents a direct and high-level acknowledgment of the matter.
[snip]
As I asked about the USS Abraham Lincoln’s recent deployment, overall fleet operational tempo, and the logistical support it takes to sustain high-intensity operations, Cao acknowledged damage to NSA Bahrain left the Lincoln’s crew “no place for them to pull in.”
A DOD Inspector General Report that provides a global perspective on the impact of the Iran War, including the damage done to facilities and the services (like Diplomatic Services) that have had to be withdrawn as a result. While the comprehensive view is useful, it’s worth reading with the footnotes open just to appreciate how much of the information is sourced to outside public comments — from Mark Rutte, from congressional hearings and, as with this table that a number of people have pointed to, from very dated Congressional Research Service reports.
And, as Task and Purpose noted of the report, according to the report, the full mission statement behind the Iran invasion is classified.
Secretary Hegseth said that through OEF, the United States seeks to destroy Iran’s offensive missiles, missile production, navy, and other security infrastructure, and ensure that Iran never has nuclear weapons.5 General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more broadly, the OEF mission is to defend the United States and “disrupt, degrade, deny, and destroy Iran’s ability to conduct and sustain combat operations.”6 The full OEF mission statement is classified.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office offered its own accounting in a report released Tuesday. It comes to a similar number as the IG Report: $33.4 billion through June 29 in the IG Report and $38.1 billion through August 1 in the CBO Report. But it notes that DOD refuses to provide it with information and DOD’s appropriation requests are much bigger.
To estimate DoD’s costs, CBO relied on government databases and public reports because DoD did not respond to CBO’s requests for information. As a result, CBO’s estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty. This past June, the Administration requested $87.6 billion in supplemental appropriations, of which $67.1 billion was for DoD to pay for the conflict. The portion of that request that appears to be directly related to the conflict, $42.3 billion, is about 10 percent larger than CBO’s estimate of DoD’s costs.
A long section describes the opportunity cost of Whiskey Pete Hegseth shooting his wad, in terms of missiles.
So far, the main opportunity cost of Operation Epic Fury for DoD has been the high expenditures of missile defense interceptors. To thwart the large number of ballistic missiles fired at U.S. and allied targets, DoD used a significant portion of its inventory of Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors. Significant quantities of some of those munitions were used to defend Israel against Iranian ballistic missile attacks during the Twelve-Day War in June 2025; Operation Epic Fury has reduced those inventories further.
Missile defense interceptors are expensive, ranging from roughly $4 million for Patriot and SM-6 interceptors to $12 million for THAAD interceptors and $28 million for the most sophisticated SM-3 interceptors. Moreover, missile defense interceptors are in short supply because they have been produced at relatively low rates; thus, DoD’s inventory of such missiles was limited before Operation Epic Fury and the Twelve-Day War that preceded it. Both of those operations have demonstrated that the United States can rapidly expend large quantities of missile defense interceptors in a conflict with an opponent that relies heavily on ballistic missile attacks. Although DoD does not reveal the number of munitions it has on hand, a comparison of the reported expenditures of missile defense interceptors with the total numbers that DoD has purchased to date indicates that the United States has probably used between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of those munitions since June 2025.
That reduction in the inventory of missile defense interceptors would be relevant in a conflict with the PRC. The PRC has many more ballistic and cruise missiles than Iran had at the onset of Operation Epic Fury. The PRC also has a significantly larger economic base than Iran and can produce such missiles more rapidly. An armed conflict with the PRC could therefore place greater stress on U.S. missile defense capabilities. Having used a large portion of its missile defense inventory in combat operations against Iran, DoD now has fewer interceptors on hand to use in a potential conflict with the PRC.
Given the number of missile defense interceptors that DoD has recently used, their currently low production rates, and the historical difficulty of scaling up their production, rebuilding DoD’s inventory of interceptors would probably take at least five years—even if production was increased. Boosting missile production has historically been a slow process with lags of three to five years between the placement and delivery of new orders. After production was increased, several more years would be required to replace the missiles that have been used in the conflict with Iran.
Mark Hertling describes the budgeting reason why “the most important number in the new CBO report may not be $38 billion but five years—the time it will take to replace the munitions we’ve expended just in the last seven months.”
A great CNN video correlating how Russian satellites have given Iran pinpoint targeting information
A CBS story posting pictures that service members have sent it, showing some of the damage that was briefly available by satellite before the US government forced private satellite companies to withhold such images.
“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
One photo, taken at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia, shows a direct hit on the back half of a Boeing E-3 Sentry four-engine aircraft, its tail severed from the charred fuselage that also supported a rotating radar that is essential for collecting midair intelligence.
Reuters and noted Amazon’s public disclosure that it has not yet been able to get its data centers in Bahrain and UAE up and running.
Amazon Web Services cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates following damage during the Iran war, according to a status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
Amazon’s (AMZN.O), opens new tab cloud computing unit AWS said the damage in Bahrain spanned multiple so-called availability zones, which are clusters of one or more data centres in the same geographic region.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS said in the status update, which Reuters was first to report. AWS said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to re-establish operations in other regions.
In the UAE, AWS said it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2. It is continuing to work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and in the other two affected zones.
The disruptions began in March following U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, which prompted Tehran to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. AWS said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly struck, while a drone strike close to one of its facilities in
Bahrain had physically damaged its infrastructure. The AWS outages affected some banking operations at the time, Reuters has reported, citing a person familiar with the situation.
ArsTecnica followed up on the report, explaining the import of AWS’ failure to restore data.
Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.
The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS update described ongoing work to replace “affected infrastructure” and promised to update customers on a restoration of services in the coming months.
But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there.
It’s very sad that the direct report attributed to senior DoD leadership came from the Epoch Times. That’s almost insane that they’re more informed than mainline media.
I would think that the Iranians would not have to destroy NSA Bahrain to impact its usefulness to the US Navy operating in the Gulf of Oman/Arabian Sea, as they would have to transit the Strait of Hormuz under fire, and an aircraft carrier is such a tempting target moving through that area. And the supply ships trying to run that gauntlet the other way wouldn’t fair well either. I do know that our carriers are not operating in an area that is covered by Iranian drones, and since they move, are very hard targets for most ballistic missiles. Regardless, the loss of the base and the expenditure of the SAMs is a massive loss.
On the economics of using very expensive SAMs against cheap incoming ordinance, it is not just the difference in cost of missiles/drones that needs to be considered. The cost of letting an incoming missile/drone through and striking its target should also be considered. A $4M Patriot taking out an $100k missile seems a bad trade, but if it saves a $300M air craft from destruction, that calculus changes. But again, shooting all those missiles without a thought of how to replace them is horrible planning.
Hegseth, for all his bluster on having lethal armed forces never understood what makes the US military so different and effective from other militaries over the last 120 years. It is the boring and low testosterone logistics that back up the shooters that has allowed the US military to be so dominant. And Pete doesn’t get that.