abysmal

During the Vietnam War, American commanders discovered that some of their most protected bases they could be hit unexpectedly due to coordinated attacks low costforcing to reinforce defenses that until then were considered sufficient and making it clear that, in war, the feeling of security is usually more fragile than it seems. The blow that no one expected. For decades, the US military architecture in the Middle East relied on in a network of bases designed to surround and contain Iran, a direct heir to the Cold War doctrine and designed to project power quickly. However, a report that came to light this weekend on NBC News has revealed a radical inversion of that logic in the war of 2026: what was supposed to be a shield has become a set of exposed objectives, hit in a coordinated manner by Iranian attacks that hit more than a hundred targets in several countries. We are talking about critical infrastructures such as runways, radars, hangars, command centers or defense systems were damaged or destroyed, and the impact was neither marginal nor symbolic, but structuralaffecting the very functioning of the US deployment in the region. The fence that ended up surrounded. The system of bases in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the Emirates or Saudi Arabia was designed to suffocate Iran, but its ability to attack key logistics nodes turned the equation around. How much? It appears that critical facilities were left disabled or evacuatedincluding the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrainwhile multiple bases in Iraq and Kuwait had to be abandoned or rendered inoperative. The pressure was such that even the resupply became problematicleaving the American forces themselves in a position close to the siege they intended to impose. The encirclement strategy, which seemed unquestionable for decades, suddenly showed its fragility in the face of an adversary with saturation capacity through missiles, drones and aviation. The hole that changes war. What is most revealing is not only the extent of the damage, but what they represent for Washington: for the first time in years, a rival has managed to systematically drill US military infrastructure at multiple points at once. Iran not only hit bases, but achieved something that until now seemed beyond the reach of other recent conflicts: opening a deep and sustained hole in the defensive framework of the United States, affecting radarsair defenses and strategic assets. That ability to simultaneously degrade multiple layers of the system is reminiscent of what other actors have tried unsuccessfully in wars like the one in Ukraine, but here it translated in real effects on the ground, altering the operational balance and forcing us to rethink the assumed superiority. From control to operational chaos. The middle counted American that the intensity of the attacks and the speed with which they occurred generated a scenario of disorganization that overwhelmed the usual command and control mechanisms. Bases evacuatedemergency relocated personnel and even improvised situations what do we countsuch as the use of civil infrastructure, reflect the extent to which operational pressure broke the planned patterns. Plus: the inability to anticipate and managing the real scope of the attacks, added to the lack of clear communication about the damage, fueled the perception of an overwhelmed response to a type of more distributed warfaster and harder to contain. A cost beyond money. Although initial estimates speak of billions dollars in repairs (not counting advanced systems or unrecoverable equipment), the true impact possibly transcends the economic. What has been affected is the military deployment model itself: the idea that a network of advanced bases guarantees regional control. In other words, the war has shown that, faced with an adversary capable of to attack in depth with means relatively accessiblethis hitherto untouchable network may become a rather critical vulnerability. The result in the pavement American is not only a balance sheet of damages, but a strategic warning that forces us to give more than one turn to its scheme of how military power is projected in a world where distance is already does not protect the same. Image | x In Xataka | If the war resumes again, the US runs a risk unprecedented in the history of war: that the only one with missiles will be Iran. In Xataka | If the question is why the US attacked an Iranian ship with a weapon unprecedented in 40 years, we already know the answer: a “gift from China”