Pentagon Iran War Report admits to Worst Drubbing since Vietnam

The Department of Defense report on the Israeli-US war on Iran admits that it has been costly, has seen extensive destruction of US facilities in the Middle East, and has run down Pentagon munitions. Since it is being issued by a department headed by notorious liar and braggart Pete Hegseth, it is hard to take the report too seriously on the positive side. But to the extent that it admits any downsides to the war on Iran at all, that admission is especially interesting coming from this administration.

The report acknowledges a cost of $33.4 billion by the end of June. But it admits that this figure does not include the cost of repairing the some 20 US military bases that have been damaged or destroyed, or other damaged facilities. The number is laughably low, with independent analysts putting it at $113 billion already by late June. Another analysis suggests that just the interest payment this year on the billions borrowed by the US government to pursue this debt-financed war could range up to $26 billion.

And all those calculations don’t include the cost of the war to taxpayers in higher gasoline and diesel prices, and the general price inflation they entail. Extra energy costs for American consumers since Feb. 28 alone come to $100 billion.

The DoD admitted that 14 US service personnel are dead in this war, 7 of them of enemy fire, and 417 servicemen have been wounded. Again, this is Hegseth’s department and the likelihood is that the real numbers are higher, since his office has been accused of lowballing us with doctored casualty figures.

The War Costs website puts US deaths at 18 and wounded at 820 as of September 7, with a cost to that point of $120 billion.

US embassies and consulates have been damaged by Iran, at a cost of over $180 million, and 3,500 US diplomatic personnel were either deployed elsewhere or given permission to flee for their lives. Other sources put diplomatic evacuees at up to 4,000. The State Department helped another 9,000 American civilians flee the region. This statistic shows an incredible exodus of American diplomats, businessmen and others from a region dominated and sometimes occupied by the US in recent decades. One State Department observer called it “unprecedented.” Even in the last days of the US presence in South Vietnam as the latter was falling, less than a thousand US diplomats were spirited out of the country.

A member of the CIA helps evacuees up a ladder onto an Air America helicopter on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street April 29, 1975, shortly before Saigon fell to advancing North Vietnamese troops. Public Domain photo by Herbert van Es.

And you know that kerfuffle about whether the attack on Iran depleted key US munitions? The report is remarkably frank: “The Office of the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSW[A&S]) said that the munitions expenditure in OEF has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that half of certain kinds of anti-missile and -drone interceptors have been depleted from the US arsenal, including Patriot, THAAD and PrSm. Of offensive precision missiles, a third have been used up, including Tomahawks and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles. A third of ship to air anti-missile missiles (SM-2, SM-3, SM-6) are also used up.

Here is another moment of frankness: “USCENTCOM reported that Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.”

In fact, all the 20 or so US military bases in the Middle East have been damaged or rendered inoperable, including the HQ of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain, with billions of dollars of damage to sophisticated radar and signals intelligence installations that had tracked incoming Iranian drones and missiles. This loss of US capability is the real reason Washington and Tel Aviv have taken a breather from assaulting Iran. I say “20 or so bases” because a “base” is an ambiguous term and some sources speak of more than 20. Sometimes small installations are termed “bases.”

Aerial view of US naval ships moored at Manama, Bahrain, 2013. US Department of Defense. Public Domain. Via Picryl.

It is impossible to know the exact status of most of these bases today, though the Manama base has been admitted by the Pentagon to be inoperable. Iranian and Middle East outlets say that al-Udeid base in Qatar, which had over 10,000 personnel, has been emptied out, but there is no USG or Western press corroboration. Al-Udeid took substantial damage from a missile strike that got through this past summer. It also isn’t clear how many of the 3,500 to 5,000 US troops that were in the UAE are still there. One of the reasons the Iranians began targeting hotels in Dubai was that they had intelligence that US government personnel had been moved off base and into commercial buildings. Most US troops appear to have left Iraq, and all will be gone by the end of the month according to the Baghdad government.

Whatever the exact numbers, Iran damaging or destroying “hundreds of buildings and structures” and rendering some bases inoperable, and hitting aircraft like AWACS on the ground are all signs of a US military debacle bigger than any we have seen since Vietnam. That’s what you have to conclude from the Pentagon report if you read between the lines just a bit and ignore the Hegsethian beer muscles and besotted bravado.