US base in Kuwait where six troops were killed lacked fortifications – media

The military facility reportedly did not have any adequate protection from air attacks despite the Pentagon claiming otherwise

Six US servicemen were killed in an Iranian strike on a military installation in Kuwait on Sunday, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has confirmed. While the Pentagon chief claimed the base’s defenses were penetrated by a single munition, media reports suggested it lacked any proper fortifications or anti-air capabilities.

The US military originally said three soldiers were killed at the tactical operations center at the Shuaiba port, yet Hegseth on Tuesday admitted that the death toll has doubled.

“Every once in a while, you might have [a munition], unfortunately, we call it a squirter, that makes its way through. And in that particular case, it happened to hit a tactical operations center that was fortified, but these are powerful weapons,” Hegseth told a news conference at the Pentagon.

Three anonymous US military officials with direct knowledge of the incident, however, told CBS News the operations center was a makeshift office comprised of a triple-wide trailer – a commonplace setup for US military bases abroad.

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The only fortifications at the site were the so-called T-walls, prefab steel-reinforced concrete barriers up to 3.6 meters (12 feet) tall, according to the sources. Such barriers have been widely used by the US military to construct perimeter walls of their installations. While they provide protection from shrapnel, small arms fire, and rockets, the barriers do not help against aerial attacks.

The facility is believed to have been struck by a kamikaze drone, which apparently scored a direct hit on the operations center, sparking a major fire at the site, the sources suggested. Some of them also claimed that the installation at the port did not have the means to intercept drones or other munitions. 

“We basically had no drone defeat capability,” one of the sources said.

Two of the sources additionally told the broadcaster they did not recall hearing the warning sirens associated with systems designed to detect incoming projectiles. The alarms went off repeatedly in the days before the deadly strike, and in some incidents the drones were already inside the base when the siren sounded, the sources claimed.