Why the US will have to withdraw its bases from the Middle East (travel on, Sam)

[C C]

On the plus side, it would help undermine starting any more idiot wars that go on there for years.
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PETER ZEIHAN
https://youtu.be/O_DGXKr8Bok

VIDEO EXCERPTS: And most of the damage that we have seen to US military facilities in places like Kuwait and the UAE and Saudi Arabia were by these drones. And it's not just that hey hit the United States, they hit with extreme precision, whether it was a barracks or a radar dome. Anyway, bottom line is that the United States lacks a good defense for these systems.

The Patriots are absolutely the preeminent system that the Americans have for shooting down those drones, and they'll definitely do that. But the United States can only build about a dozen of those things a week, whereas the Iranians can assemble sseveral thousand drones per week. The math was always going to be against the US's favor. So, the discussion now is to where to move these facilities.

[...] Iran has already demonstrated it has robust capability of hitting anything in the region all the way to Israel, all the way to the Red Sea, all the way to Yemen. Moving the bases isn't going to achieve anything except for maybe just a few months while the Iranians tick up their drone range just a little bit. So, no, this isn't a good solution.

We're probably going to be seeing a broad-scale American withdrawal from the region unless and until the interceptor problem can be solved, and it will not be solved with Patriots.

Relocate or move on from the Middle East ... https://youtu.be/O_DGXKr8Bok

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/O_DGXKr8Bok

[Zinjanthropos]

Don’t know if true but have heard that American soldiers have refused en masse to fight Iran on the ground. Could something like this cause the withdrawal.

Propaganda???
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-don...nt-surges/

[C C]

Don’t know if true but have heard that American soldiers have refused en masse to fight Iran on the ground. Could something like this cause the withdrawal.

Propaganda???
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-don...nt-surges/

Few are going to be enthusiastic about dying for other countries (Israel, oil-producing ME states, and Europe second-handedly in terms of energy). Especially hot on the heels of the War in Afghanistan having been a total 20-year waste of lives, resources, and money.

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If anything positive can be gleaned from this sorry mess, it's that the US military got a wake-up call to how outdated its approach to war is in an era where even "lesser" countries can have the equalizer of drone warfare.
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Pentagon weighs moving U.S. forces away from vulnerable Gulf bases after Iran strikes
https://yournews.com/2026/08/18/7168366/...ulf-bases/

EXCERPTS: The Pentagon is considering a potentially significant reshaping of the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East, including moving personnel away from some Persian Gulf bases that have proven vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks during the nearly six-month war. The review is being conducted by the Pentagon’s policy office with participation from the Joint Staff and U.S. Central Command, according to The Washington Post.

No formal force-posture review has been ordered by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, but one senior Pentagon official described the effort as “prudent planning” intended to inform future decisions about which damaged facilities should be rebuilt and where American forces should be stationed. “Decisions are going to have to be made on some of this stuff,” the official told the Post.

The question has become more urgent after months of Iranian attacks damaged or destroyed more than 200 U.S. facilities throughout the region. [...] Some of those temporary movements may ultimately become permanent. “Iran thinks we are in the traditional places,” one person familiar with the changes told the Post. “And we are not.”

The emerging debate reflects one of the central strategic problems Washington has encountered during the conflict: U.S. forces have demonstrated the ability to inflict enormous damage on Iran’s military infrastructure, but that battlefield advantage has not yet produced a lasting political settlement.

The White House announced in April that Operation Epic Fury had accomplished its principal military objectives after American forces struck more than 13,000 targets and severely degraded Iran’s missile forces, navy and defense-industrial capacity. The administration said those military successes had given President Donald Trump “maximum leverage” in negotiations.

Iran nevertheless retained enough missile and drone capability to continue targeting American forces and U.S. partners. Tehran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz has also become a major obstacle to turning military superiority into a broader strategic resolution.

[...] The administration’s objectives have also shifted during the course of the war, making the definition of a final victory more complicated even after the Pentagon achieved many of the military objectives originally assigned to it.

The conflict has simultaneously demonstrated the financial and logistical burden of maintaining a large American military presence within range of Iranian weapons. [...] “The war really did highlight the vulnerability of U.S. forces in the region,” former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Michael Ratney told the Post.

One option under consideration would shift more U.S. forces westward, potentially toward Jordan, Israel or locations along Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. Ratney said greater distance from Iran could reduce some of the danger to U.S. forces, although repositioning troops would not provide a “perfect solution to this problem.”
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What is the future of US military bases in the Gulf?
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/what-fu...bases-gulf

EXCERPT: The war with Iran has exposed limits to the deterrent value of the US Gulf basing network. Its presence did not guarantee Gulf states protection from Iranian attacks; rather, hosting US forces made Gulf states a target of Iranian retaliation.

At the same time, however, the integrated air-defence system developed with US support likely prevented more serious casualties and damage.

Kristian Alexander, senior fellow at the Rabdan Security and Defence Institute, told The New Arab that Iranian retaliation exposed the limits of the traditional deterrence model, but “forward presence” still provides enormous military value.

“Deterrence now has to be complemented by dispersion, hardened infrastructure, layered missile and drone defences, redundancy, as well as much clearer political understandings over when and how US forces will defend host states,” he added.

A potential farther-reaching US military presence away from the Gulf would represent a major shift in US Gulf policy. Since the end of World War II, US military presence in the Gulf expanded gradually over the years before becoming more institutionalised after the 1990-91 Gulf War.