The costs of the war in Iran continue to rise. The U.S. death toll now stands at 21 service members, and the U.S. has lost 81 aircraft. U.S. bases throughout the region have suffered extensive damage that will require billions of dollars to repair.
This has been a wake-up call, including for prominent hawks, about the vulnerability of U.S. bases throughout the Middle East. As my colleague Ben Friedman writes in a new paper, the proliferation of precision-guided and unmanned weaponry is turning traditional power projection assets, like foreign bases, into liabilities.
However, while U.S. bases abroad are more vulnerable, the accessibility of precision weapons also makes these bases less necessary as a deterrent on behalf of allies. Just as relatively weak actors like Iran or the Houthis can use drones and missiles to punish the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, so can states across Europe and Asia hold potential aggressors like Russia and China at bay without relying on forward deployed U.S. forces.
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