Trump's War

When you start a fight by kicking a hornet's nest, the deciding vote on when the fight is over belongs to the hornets.

(search: us military bases hit in middle east)

As of late March 2026, Iranian missile and drone strikes have severely damaged multiple U.S. military bases across the Middle East, rendering 13 locations "all but uninhabitable". Major, confirmed strikes occurred in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, forcing personnel to relocate to temporary sites. 

Key Details of Strikes (March 2026):

• Destruction Level: Reports indicate nearly 13 bases have been heavily impacted, with satellite imagery showing massive craters and destroyed buildings at several locations.

Impacted Bases:

• Kuwait: Port Shuaiba (destroyed tactical center), Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Buehring suffered significant damage, with India Today reporting six U.S. service members killed at Port Shuaiba.

• Qatar: Al Udeid Air Base (largest in the region) had critical early-warning radar systems damaged.

• Bahrain: BBC reports the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters saw a drone strike damage communication radomes.

• Saudi Arabia: Prince Sultan Air Base sustained damage to aircraft-related facilities and equipment.

• Jordan: A critical BBC reports the AN/TPY-2 radar system was targeted.

Operational Impact:

The strikes, estimated at $800 million in damage, have forced a shift to "remote" operations, with personnel relocating to hotels and non-traditional facilities. 

These attacks are part of a direct, intense retaliation from Iran following U.S.-Israeli strikes in late February 2026

Iranian strikes on bases used by US caused $800m in damage, new analysis shows
7 days ago

Iranian strikes on military bases used by the US in the Middle East caused about $800m (£600m) in damage in the first two weeks of the war, a new analysis shows.

Much of the damage was caused in initial retaliatory strikes by Iran in the week after the US and Israel launched the war, according to a report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) and an analysis by the BBC.

The full extent of the damage caused by Iranian strikes on US assets in the region is not clear.

But the $800m in estimated damage to US military infrastructure - a figure that's higher than has been previously reported - offers a picture of the steep costs to the US as the conflict drags on.

"The damage to US bases in the region has been underreported," said Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the think tank study. "Although that appears to be extensive, the full amount won't be known until more information is available."

In response to a request for comment, the US Department of Defense referred the BBC to US Central Command, which is leading the war. Officials there declined to comment.

Iran's retaliatory strikes targeted US air-defence and satellite-communication systems, among other assets, in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and other countries across the Middle East.

A significant portion of damage was caused by a strike on a US radar for a Thaad missile defence system at an air base in Jordan.

The AN/TPY-2 radar system costs approximately $485m according to a CSIS review of defence department budget documents. The air-defence systems are used for the long-range interception of ballistic missiles.

Strikes by Iran caused an additional $310m in estimated damage to buildings, facilities and other infrastructure on US bases and military bases used by American forces in the region.

Iran also has struck at least three air bases more than once, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by BBC Verify. The repeat strikes underscore Iran's efforts to target specific US assets. Russia has reportedly shared intelligence with Tehran on American military forces in the region.

Satellite imagery shows the three air bases - Ali Al-Salim base in Kuwait, Al-Udeid in Qatar and Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia - with fresh damage appearing during different phases of the conflict.

The US has also lost 13 military service members since President Donald Trump joined Israel in launching the attacks on Iran on 28 February.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) estimates the overall death toll has reached nearly 3,200, including 1,400 civilians.

Trump has said the US is on track to achieve his goals of destroying Iran's nuclear program, degrading its conventional military power, and ending the regime's support for proxy groups in the region.

"We're doing extremely well in Iran," Trump said at a White House event on Friday.

But the war has rattled the global economy with the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and uncertainty over the duration of the conflict and whether Trump will deploy ground troops.

Analysis of satellite imagery has been hampered by restrictions imposed by major US-based providers on the release of the imagery.

But it is possible to discern certain patterns in Iran's retaliatory action against US military interests in the region.

Radar and satellite systems have been a focus from the start, when Iranian strikes hit a US naval base in Bahrain. They function as the eyes and ears of modern military operations.

Satellite imagery most notably showed the destruction of two radomes - protective enclosures for such sensitive equipment. It is highly probable the systems themselves were damaged, although it is not possible to gauge the extent.

Radar sites were hit at Camp Arifjan, a US military facility in Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia's Prince Sultan Air Base, where US aircraft are located. Imagery of the latter shows smoke rising from a radar component for a Thaad air-defence system.

More extensive damage to Thaad systems is evident at US bases in the UAE and Jordan. It's unclear what the cost of that damage was. The degradation of these systems reportedly led the US to redeploy Thaad components from South Korea to the Middle East.

The damage from Iran's retaliatory strikes account for a fraction of the overall costs to the US for the war.

Defense department officials reportedly briefed members of Congress that the first six days of the war had cost $11.3bn. The first 12 days cost 16.5bn, according to CSIS.

The Pentagon is asking for another $200bn in funding for the war. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday that the figure "could move."

"It takes money to kill bad guys," Hegseth said.

Overheard

We were given the perfect planet, abundant with fresh clean water, clear air, forests of tall trees and plains of grass - filled with sunshine, wildlife, berries and beauty - but we decided what the place really needs is plastic, predatory capitalism, and wars of conquest.

We are the stupid animal.

WTF Was That?

White House posts cryptic videos, deletes one, fueling speculation online

• White House posted two unexplained videos; one was later deleted.
• The short clips sparked hacking and teaser speculation online.

Two mysterious videos posted to the White House’s official X and Instagram accounts on Wednesday night generated buzz online, with the purpose of the short, vertically shot clips unclear. One video was later deleted.

The first video, posted around 9:15 p.m. EST, appeared to be filmed on a smartphone, with the camera pointed at someone’s feet. In the four-second-long video, a female voice can be heard asking, “It’s launching soon, right?”

A line of text on the screen says “sound on.” The video was later removed from the White House’s accounts on X and Instagram roughly 90 minutes after it was posted.

The second short video, posted at 10 p.m. EST, showed a black, staticky screen with a phone notification sound playing. An American flag was visible in one frame. The post included emojis of a smartphone and sound.

There was no indication of the context of the posts, which racked up millions of views, with many online commenters theorizing the accounts could have been hacked or that an official was cryptically teasing something.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

It was not immediately clear whether the videos were posted intentionally. The posts follow earlier instances of the Trump administration White House social media accounts sharing meme-style content.

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Today's Quote

Victor Cousin

If ignorance is bliss,

there should be

more happy people.

The Diss Track

RogueGeneral1293

Heather Delaney Reese

Der Doppelstaat

Dual State

The dual state is a model in which the functioning of a state is divided into a normative state, which operates according to a set rules and regulations, and a prerogative state, "which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees". The term was coined by Ernst Fraenkel to describe the functioning of the Nazi state, and especially law in Nazi Germany, which he described in his 1941 book The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship.

Although it was originally intended as an analysis of authoritarian states, some elements of the prerogative state are present in democracies.

The model has also been applied to other states, including Israel, the United States, South Africa, Fascist Italy, 21st-century China, Russia, Lebanon, and post-2015 Turkey.

United States

In 2025, amid changes in the way the U.S. government operated during the first year of Donald Trump's second term, some began to argue that the United States was beginning to resemble a dual state. The idea received increased attention after Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited The Dual State in a dissenting opinion on the Trump v. CASA case.

David French:

Lighten Up, Stephen

If Trump decides he needs to soften the approach, which is unlikely, or least it's not likely that he'll allow the perception that he's "going soft" on anything, then the question (as always with politicians) will be how many MAGA rubes will flip-flop with him on this one too, versus how many will break with him.

Normal people would just come out and say, "OK, so that didn't work quite the way we wanted it to work, so we're going to try something a little different."

Normal people would do that, because that's just good business. But Trump is not normal, and he's not good at business, so I'm not going to start expecting him to behave like a good business guy - or as a normal guy either for that matter.

In the meantime -

REMEMBER THE EPSTEIN FILES

Trump Throws Stephen Miller Under the Bus in Surprise Show of Panic

On the surface, Trump wants less attention paid to mass deportations. Meanwhile, Miller is taking new and hidden steps to wreak havoc in the lives of undocumented children and their families.

Has Donald Trump finally figured out that Stephen Miller’s fascist cruelties have become a niggling political liability for him? Well, maybe. A striking report in The Wall Street Journal suggests Trump may be moving to marginalize Miller’s influence. But Trump appears to think the difficulty can be cured by a few optical tweaks, when the real culprit is a deeper ideological one.

Trump wants to “lower the profile of his mass deportation effort,” the Journal reveals. He wants voters to think the targets of these deportations are “bad guys,” not noncriminal undocumented residents. He wants less visibility for ICE raids in cities, fewer public confrontations with local officials, and less public talk about “mass deportations,” which, he now grasps, are hideously unpopular.

Tellingly, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles now sees deportations as a liability for the midterms, per the report. That Trump is siding with her on the politics here is a sign of political panic and a rebuke to Miller, who apparently delights in flaunting the administration’s vicious sadism and overt white nationalism—and seems certain that latent majorities are quietly cheering along.

To be clear, this report deserves serious skepticism. It very much bears watching whether ICE will actually end up deprioritizing the removal of noncriminal immigrants. Trump mostly wants the appearance of a pivot: According to the Journal, he wants a focus on “criminals” in GOP “messaging.”

But recalibrating the “messaging” won’t address the public’s broad rejection of Trumpism’s deeper anti-immigrant project. And all signs are that this project is fully forging ahead.

Case in point: Miller just met with Texas state legislators and floated a truly extreme proposal. The New York Times reports that Miller discussed the idea of ending state public funding for the education of undocumented children, and asked the lawmakers why they hadn’t passed a bill limiting funding for education so it only goes to kids who are citizens or are lawfully present in the United States.

This idea—denying public school to undocumented children—has mostly passed under the radar, but it’s a long-held dream of the anti-immigrant right. The basic aim is to destabilize the lives of undocumented families as another way to encourage them to self-deport. But there’s an even more pernicious ideological aim at work here.

Getting a red state to attempt this would run afoul of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, which blocked states from denying public education to young people based on immigration status. Plyler v. Doe is not as well known as the other big civil rights rulings, but it’s momentous: It held that restricting public education this way would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s enshrinement of equal protection before the law.

Miller and his allies are gunning for Plyler. If a state did restrict education to migrant kids, it would likely provoke another court battle—possibly providing an opening for the right-wing court to overturn Plyler.

That would be seismic. The basic principle at issue is whether these kids are to be regarded as equal persons despite being undocumented. The Burger court found that denying them education would relegate them to an unacceptable subclass status. As immigration law scholar Hiroshi Motomura explains, the ruling embodied the idea that “the emergence of a permanent subcaste is intolerable within a national constitutional culture based on equality.”

Miller really wants to end that “constitutional culture based on equality.” It’s hard to know whether Texas lawmakers will do his bidding—or how the high court would rule if they did. But if it worked, other red states with many immigrant families in them could follow.

This would immeasurably impoverish our nation, but the effort advances Miller’s ideological project in still another sense. Trump wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of his 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship. That of course also involves the Fourteenth Amendment—its guarantee that all persons born in the United States are automatic citizens.

Here again, Trump and Miller are aiming at something very profound, if maliciously so. As legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes, the “big idea” animating the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, its “moral north star,” is that birthright citizenship enshrines a guarantee that all persons are born free and equal—their status is not dictated by blood. The goal of undoing this, Amar notes, is to make the constitutional order more “hereditary” and “caste-like.”

That’s precisely what Trump and Miller want. You can hear echoes of this in JD Vance’s now-infamous suggestions that heritage, not adherence to creedal ideals, makes one American. As Jamelle Bouie explains, Vance’s vision is of “tiered citizenship” based not on equality of birth but on one’s “connection to the soil and to the dead.” Ned Resnikoff hears hints of this in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Western-civilizational-supremacist rhetoric, as well.

Miller’s apparent push to end the guarantee of public education involves undocumented kids, not American-born citizens. But it, too, would create a permanent subclass by denying those kids equality before the law. “Miller’s true goal is to use immigration as a tool to chisel away at the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chris Newman, counsel at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. “Until he’s ejected from the White House, all our rights are in danger.”

The true essence of Miller’s project resides here. It is to treat immigrants—not just undocumented ones but lawfully present ones, and even their American-born children—as fundamentally unfit to become American, as a civilizational threat of existential proportions. That threat must be arrested via mass forced removals—hence the Department of Homeland Security’s rhapsodizing about 100 million deportations—and via an end to treating immigrants and their kids as equals.

Overturning Plyler and ending birthright citizenship are aimed at that goal—and both initiatives are alive and well. So are Miller’s efforts to snuff out every legal pathway for migrants to come here for humanitarian reasons. So too is his construction of massive prison camps to facilitate all those expulsions. So is his effort to deport as many people as possible regardless of their deep ties to communities here: In 2025, only 14 percent of those arrested by ICE had violent criminal records.

Trump can dress this up with spin about targeting “criminals” all he likes. But until all the ethnonationalist, civilizational-emergency-mongering nonsense is exorcised, the deeper problem will fester. Trump believes all those ideas himself, but the depth of his commitment to them has never been all that clear. One doubts he’ll be so inclined, but should he ever want to stop this madness, only one move on his part—a big personnel move—can truly put an end to it.

Overheard

Too much talent

is trapped in poverty

while too much mediocrity

is very well-funded.

Holy Fuck

Where do we find these fuckin' people?

Sorry, What Did You Say RFK Jr. Did to a Dead Raccoon’s Penis?

The only thing the guy in charge of our country's health and well-being loves more than spreading measles is mutilating dead animals.

It’s impossible to imagine a world without Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—not just for launching the U.S. back to 1905, where everyone died of measles, but because every third headline about him is the most twisted jumble of fever-dream reporting.

Over the weekend, the New York Post published an excerpt from its investigative reporter Isabel Vincent’s upcoming book RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, out April 14. The angle being that Vincent got access to three of his secret journals in 2013, and has since been digging through 1,200 pages of RFK’s life and his “deepest thoughts.”

Among these journal entries, he apparently wrote about chopping off a raccoon’s penis. Yeah. We’re not really sure what to say either. The excerpt reads:

It would foreshadow Bobby’s later life — such as when he scooped up a road-killed bear on a New York State highway in 2014, dumping it in Central Park when he realized he needed to catch a plane. In his diary, he writes about cutting off the penis of a road-killed raccoon in 2001, while his “kids waited patiently in the car,” so that he could examine it later.
Unfortunately, it’s not made clear what exactly Kennedy did with the fur bandit’s penis, but Google says raccoon penile bones are also known as “mountain man toothpicks,” so do with that what you will. Who knew a raccoon and a Fox News host could have so much in common?

The rest of the excerpt focuses on RFK’s three “father figures,” or the “trio of surrogate fathers” that helped him become who he is after his own was assassinated in 1968. They were Lem Billings (his dad’s childhood best friend); Skip Lazell (his high school, right-wing, biology teacher); and Harvard professor Robert Trivers (who has alleged ties to Epstein).

The poor road-killed raccoon also marks the umpteenth known instance of RFK Jr. needlessly mutilating an animal: There’s the bear he dumped in Central Park, the whale whose head he chopped off and strapped to the roof of his car, and the countless baby chickens and mice he allegedly ground up in a blender to feed his hawks. At this rate, it feels like we’re going to get a new RFK Jr. Did Weird Shit to Another Animal story every six months.

I guess I don’t know what I expected from a never nude who wears jeans in a hot tub.