Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said Iranian forces “blew the hell out of Bahrain” when they repeatedly attacked Naval Support Activity Bahrain between February and June, a stark public acknowledgment that the base took serious damage. He said the hits were bad enough to leave the crew aboard USS Abraham Lincoln with “no place for them to pull in.”
Cao made the remark while awaiting Senate confirmation, giving new weight to the question of how badly the U.S. base in the Middle East was hit and what the Navy plans to do next. He also said he has a task force looking at whether U.S. forces should return to the base, a decision that matters now because the damage appears to have affected not just buildings but the base’s ability to handle a ship.
The damage was broader than the blunt language suggested. A analysis found that the attacks pummeled Naval Support Activity Bahrain, including the command headquarters, at least a dozen other buildings and two satellite communications terminals. No one was killed at the base, but the scale of the strike pattern helps explain why the Lincoln had nowhere to dock when it needed a port stop after roughly nine months at sea before last week’s stop in Thailand.
That account also sits uneasily beside what CENTCOM said in June. Tim Hawkins said the command had prioritized protecting people over buildings and argued that the strategy worked, saying Iran shot more than 8,000 missiles and drones and only two hits resulted in U.S. fatalities. He also said the U.S. inflicted more damage than it received from Iran. Cao’s account does not erase that claim, but it does show that protecting personnel did not leave the base intact.
Naval Support Activity Bahrain is a U.S. Navy base in the Middle East, and the damage now lands in the middle of a broader cycle of U.S.-Iran retaliation. Over the weekend, CENTCOM said it destroyed two Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for an attack on two U.S. Navy warships, with Brad Cooper saying the response would carry a higher economic cost and that the U.S. would not hesitate to defend American forces. For Bahrain, the unresolved issue is narrower and more immediate: whether the Navy repairs the base quickly enough to restore its role as a working stop for U.S. ships, or whether the damage forces a longer break in how that base is used.
