The picture the Trump administration painted of its war with Iran was one of total American dominance. Donald Trump told the country Iran had “no anti-aircraft equipment” left and that its radar was “100 percent annihilated.” He assured the public that Iranian forces could do nothing to stop U.S. aircraft.
A new NBC News report published Saturday tells a very different story.
According to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides, and another person familiar with internal damage assessments, Iranian retaliatory strikes during Operation Epic Fury caused extensive damage to American military bases across seven Middle Eastern countries. Repairs are expected to cost billions of dollars. The Pentagon has refused to share the full picture publicly, and even members of Congress say they cannot get straight answers.
What Iran Actually Hit
The reporting from NBC’s Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Mosheh Gains, and Natasha Lebedeva lays out a detailed list of damage that contradicts months of administration messaging. Iran struck dozens of targets at U.S. bases across the region, hitting warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems, and dozens of aircraft.
Among the most striking details: in the early days of the war that began February 28, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet got past American air defenses and bombed Camp Buehring in Kuwait.
According to the officials cited, this is the first time in years that an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has successfully struck an American military base. For weeks, U.S. officials had claimed Iran’s air force had failed to use fighter jets against American targets at all.
Just before the ceasefire, Iranian forces also shot down a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle over southern Iran. Both crew members ejected safely, but the rescue of the second airman, a colonel, required an extensive and dangerous search-and-rescue operation deep inside Iranian territory. That alone undercut Trump’s public claims that Iran’s defense capabilities had been wiped out.
Earlier reporting indicated Iran also destroyed a billion-dollar radar system at Al-Udeid in Qatar and damaged or destroyed dozens of fighter jets, military planes, and drones. More than a dozen U.S. service members were officially confirmed killed, a figure many believe is undercounted.
A Pentagon That Won’t Talk
What makes this story land harder is the silence from the Defense Department. U.S. Central Command declined to comment on battle damage assessments. The Pentagon has not detailed the extent of the damage publicly at all.
Some Republican lawmakers have privately expressed frustration that senior Pentagon officials will not provide basic information about the damage or what repairs will cost. One congressional aide put it bluntly to NBC: no one knows anything, and it isn’t for lack of asking. Weeks of requests have gone unanswered, even as the Pentagon pushes for a record-high budget.
That pattern matters. The administration has spent months attacking the press for accurate reporting on the war while withholding the information lawmakers need to do oversight. The result is a public that was told one story while the bills, the casualty figures, and the actual battlefield reality were quietly buried.
The Bigger Question
Beyond the cover-up itself, the report raises a question Washington has avoided for years: does it still make sense to keep tens of thousands of American troops, their families, and billions of dollars in equipment stationed within easy missile range of an adversary?
Forward bases like Al-Udeid, Camp Buehring, and Al-Asad were designed for an era of American military supremacy in which the prospect of a peer or near-peer attack on those installations was treated as nearly impossible. Iran demonstrated, with off-the-shelf drones, decades-old missile technology, and even a half-century-old F-5 fighter, that the assumption is no longer safe. The bases were largely cleared of personnel in the hours and days before the war began, an evacuation that itself acknowledges the vulnerability.
Yet the policy reflex in Washington remains expansion: more bases, bigger budgets, deeper entanglement in conflicts the American public never voted to enter. Operation Epic Fury was launched without a congressional declaration of war. The damage assessments are being hidden from the very lawmakers who hold the constitutional power to authorize the use of force.
The people who pay for this, in lives and tax dollars, deserve to know what was lost. The families of the service members killed deserve honesty. So do the Iranian civilians whose homes, schools, and neighborhoods were destroyed by U.S. and Israeli strikes that triggered this retaliation in the first place.
A war sold as a clean victory turns out to have been neither clean nor a victory. The administration knew. Congress is being stonewalled. And ordinary Americans are being asked to fund a record Pentagon budget while being kept in the dark about what their last war actually cost.
Honesty is not optional in a democracy. The Pentagon owes the country the truth.