Former gen­eral: Ira­nian strikes cut off access to bases

The threat from the rel­at­ively new Ira­nian tech­no­logy helped prompt a pub­lic reck­on­ing in August when retired four-star Army Gen. Barry McCaf­frey stated on X that the United States had "prob­ably per­man­ently lost access to 15 Per­sian Gulf bases" because of Ira­nian mis­sile and drone strikes.

McCaf­frey's Aug. 22 post has drawn more than 3.8 mil­lion views, spark­ing a debate in U.S. mil­it­ary and intel­li­gence circles over whether the Trump admin­is­tra­tion had suf­fi­ciently accoun­ted for Iran's mis­sile coun­ter­punch before launch­ing an unpro­voked war.

McCaf­frey, who served in the U.S. Army for 32 years, is highly dec­or­ated for being wounded three times in com­bat. He led 26,000 troops into battle in Oper­a­tion Desert Storm, the 1991 Gulf War to lib­er­ate Kuwait from an Iraqi inva­sion. More recently, he has been a prom­in­ent mil­it­ary ana­lyst and critic of Trump's war in Iran.

McCaf­frey was respond­ing to a state­ment on X that Ira­nian coun­ter­at­tacks had all but des­troyed the Bahrain base, which is the primary anchor for U.S. naval power in the Per­sian Gulf region. It also provides logist­ical, sup­ply and oper­a­tional sup­port to U.S. and coali­tion ships, air­craft and per­son­nel throughout the Middle East.

As a res­ult of that coun­ter­at­tack and oth­ers like it, McCaf­frey wrote, "Iran [is] now poised to con­trol access [to] the Gulf States. [The] US will have to nego­ti­ate new access in west­ern Saudi Ara­bia, Israel, south­ern Europe."

In inter­views with USA TODAY, McCaf­frey said the Ira­nian mis­sile cap­ab­il­ity, espe­cially the Kheibar Shekan, is cent­ral to his con­clu­sion that U.S. bases in the Gulf are too vul­ner­able to stay where they are.

The mis­sile, he said, is par­tic­u­larly agile, well-hid­den by Iran, and something that U.S. mil­it­ary install­a­tions in the region can't com­pletely defend against. Its cap­ab­il­it­ies, he said, amount to "a sig­ni­fic­ant change in tech­no­logy."

"As it starts reentry, it can change the impact point," which, McCaf­frey said, "clearly com­plic­ates [U.S. mil­it­ary] cal­cu­la­tions on how to hit it" using advanced U.S. mis­sile defense sys­tems.

All it takes, he said, "is one, two or three of them" get­ting through, "and sud­denly there's a poten­tially cata­strophic impact."

Both McCaf­frey and Hack­ett said the Kheibar Shekan and other Ira­nian mis­siles, com­bined with Iran's aggress­ive use of soph­ist­ic­ated drones, have caused con­sid­er­able dam­age to U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force bases and smal­ler encamp­ments throughout the Middle East.

A USA TODAY review of con­gres­sional research, defense assess­ments and the pub­lic record, along with numer­ous inter­views, sup­ports that assess­ment.

USA TODAY's report­ing also shows the United States' vul­ner­ab­il­ity to Ira­nian mis­siles was not a sur­prise to U.S. offi­cials before the war, nor was it a fluke.

McCaf­frey said Iran's Kheibar strikes on Israel in 2024 were largely inef­fect­ive, but newer ver­sions of it have caused extens­ive dam­age in the cur­rent war that the Pentagon has not acknow­ledged. That includes U.S. radar and tac­tical com­mu­nic­a­tions sys­tems, mis­sile defense nodes and air-to-air refuel­ers, Air­borne Warn­ing and Con­trol Sys­tem planes "and other expens­ive air­craft that were des­troyed while parked on an air­field," he said.

Ira­nian strikes also dis­abled a U.S. Navy des­troyer that had to be towed to the Phil­ip­pines for repair, McCaf­frey said.

"The Ira­ni­ans fired 6,000 drones and bal­listic mis­siles and we inter­cep­ted 1,500," McCaf­frey said. "So a bunch of them got through, and they did immense dam­age."

-- Lebanon Daily News
-- Josh Meyer
-- September 6, 2026