Video: Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases

So in the early days of the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran, my colleagues and I started seeing a lot of these videos that were filmed on U.S. military bases and also foreign bases, where the U.S. operates in the Gulf and the Middle East. And they showed a number of Iranian, usually drone strikes, on key infrastructure. And then not too long after that, we started seeing a stream of Iranian satellite imagery that came out of Iranian state media that were then filtering down through social media. And these images claim to show very massive swaths of destruction at these bases that the U.S. operates out of. And normally, what we would do is we would hit these up against American satellite imagery. But the U.S. government requested for American satellite companies to restrict the release of this imagery in the Middle East and the Gulf — not even restrict it, but even to retroactively remove images going back to early March. And also, U.S. officials weren’t talking a whole lot about specific attacks on these U.S. bases. “I mean, the best defense is a good offense.” And when they did speak, they said the air defenses were working as designed. “Our air defenders are operating at the very top of their game. I couldn’t be prouder.” We wanted to cut through the allegations and the talking points and understand the reality of the damage. And so we couldn’t just take this Iranian satellite imagery on face value. We had to actually verify it, cross-reference it and all that. So what we did was we collected all these images that the Iranians released. These are dozens and dozens of images from quite a few different countries. And then we looked at European satellite companies, which did not have similar restrictions on the release of imagery. So this, for example, is in Saudi Arabia. This is the Prince Sultan Air Base where the U.S. operates out of. And here’s the Iranian image, right here, where you see there’s 12 buildings right here in the “before.” And then you see about four or five of them have been destroyed in the “after” image. And then we take the exact same location in this imagery from a European provider. And it’s identical, right? I mean, you look at it’s the exact same buildings destroyed, the same pattern, same location. We did this across the board. We did this with dozens of images. We didn’t find even one of them that was fake. Overall, we found that Iran and Iranian-backed militias had attacked 18 different military sites in seven different countries that the U.S. operates out of. Other news organizations have reported similar amounts of damage, but we found that in addition to large U.S. bases in the region, even sites where the U.S. had small or temporary presence were struck. U.S. Central Command declined to comment on our findings. This is the widest-ranging attack on U.S. military sites in the region ever. Some of these Iranian strikes killed American service members. A strike on a makeshift command post in Kuwait at a port killed six American service members. And a strike in Saudi Arabia, killed one. So we took all this imagery we compiled. We sent them to a number of defense experts to put all this into context. And most experts that we spoke to said that these attacks on these military sites did not hamper the U.S.’s offensive capabilities in Iran. But our analysis does show that there are new vulnerabilities in America’s security posture in the region. And back in March, my colleagues at The Times reported that many American bases in the region were evacuated. As we looked at the satellite imagery, we saw that these were fairly precise drone attacks across the entire U.S. footprint in the Middle East. So, for example, here in Bahrain, this is the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s base and also the U.S. Navy’s headquarters in the Middle East. There were attacks on the communications infrastructure here in the northern part of the base. So you see over here there are some radomes, satellite dishes and also down here, also some larger warehouses too, that were hit by Iranian drone strikes. This radome right here, a little bit northeast of this baseball field, was hit in a one-way drone attack. And it’s not just these giant bases that are being attacked. Down a little bit further south in Bahrain, there’s a joint base for the Bahrainis and the Americans where they work together to combine air defense. And there were three attacks here from the Iranian forces. There are two here on a radar site — very, very expensive radar system. You see the charring right here. And one a little bit west of here, either a warehouse or a hangar. It was hit by a pretty precise attack here that took out the roof. And this is out of the Gulf as well, too. So if you look up north in Syria, there’s an airfield up in the northeast of the country where the U.S. has been operating lately. They pulled out in mid-April, but they were operating here for a few months. And Iranian-backed militias targeted this base repeatedly in March and April. But Iran claimed this attack took out U.S. barracks. In fact, these are actually just grain storage structures. So this shows that even when the satellite image is accurate, the claim needs to be checked. And at Camp Victory outside of Baghdad in Iraq, there were Iranian-backed militias that launched drone attacks and took out about six or seven different buildings. This is a warehouse that was hit. There was drone footage actually released by the Iranian-backed militia that carried out the attacks. This drone video is obviously used as propaganda footage, but it helps you understand the nature of their attacks. They flew around Camp Victory for a few minutes and they eventually hit a warehouse. They hit shelters, they hit fuel tanks, radar system, and they even took out a Black Hawk helicopter at one point. The total cost of these attacks is difficult to estimate, but the loss of the aircraft of these bases likely ranges around $1 billion, according to analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research center. They also said that a single radar system damaged in Jordan costs about $500 million to repair or to replace. Experts that we spoke to said that the American air defense systems in place at their bases across the Gulf had around a 90 percent interception rate, ideally. But even at 90 percent, this still leaves 10 percent of Iranian drones and missiles that can get through the air defense shield. And this may pose a problem for the United States. With its large physical footprint in the Middle East, Iran is able to send cheap drones towards these bases. What used to be an asset for the United States may also now be a liability.