American commanders have known for decades that they have an air base problem. Too many expensive warplanes parked on the aprons at too few big, unprotected airfields within range of enemy missiles amounts to “significantly increased risk” for US air power, the US Air Force explained in a 2022 doctrine reflecting more than 15 years of thought on the subject.
So why were more than a dozen USAF Boeing KC-135 tankers and other big, expensive aircraft — including several increasingly rare Boeing E-3 radar early warning planes — parked out in the open at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, barely 500 km (about 300 miles) from Iran, as US and Israeli forces bombarded Iran in mid-March?
The tankers and radar planes were easy targets for Iran’s thousands of ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones. Readily available commercial satellite imagery allowed any country and even civilians to keep close tabs on parked aircraft.
The Americans’ folly was evident as Iranian munitions rained down, overwhelming US and allied air defenses. Five KC-135s sitting in orderly rows on Prince Sultan air base’s apron were damaged on March 13. And on March 27, an Iranian raid blew up an E-3 on a taxiway.
The Iranian attacks weren’t as destructive as Ukraine’s June 2025 drone raids on Russia’s bomber bases. The Ukrainian Operation Spider Web, which smuggled hundreds of tiny drones deep inside Russia inside trucks, destroyed more than a dozen irreplaceable Russian air force bombers. But the Iranian and Ukrainian raids made the same point: warplanes are vulnerable on the ground.
Incredibly, no one died in the Iranian raids. But while the KC-135s are fairly abundant, with more than 300 in USAF service and scores of replacements on the way, the E-3 fleet stood at just 16 aircraft prior to the March loss. An effort to replace the aging surveillance planes with newer models, costing $700 million apiece, has been mired in politics.
The Americans knew they needed to disperse their most valuable aircraft across more airfields or, at the very least, tuck them into hardened shelters when dispersing wasn’t an option. But when war loomed this spring, they acted like it was still 1991 and their planes were safe on the ground.
“The United States is woefully unprepared for this new era, in which sanctuaries are gone, attrition can exhaust defenses, and persistent surveillance makes concealing high-value assets increasingly difficult,” Maximilian Bremer and Kelly Grieco, analysts at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in War on the Rocks.
It will get worse. Iran is a middleweight foe, all things considered. And the geography of the Middle East, where the United States has many basing options, is fairly forgiving for US strategy. In a war with China, however, US forces would fly from a mere handful of big air bases that are within fighter range of the likeliest battle zones over and around Taiwan. And China has more and better missiles than Iran ever had.
European powers are even less prepared. Every air base in Europe is within range of at least some of Russia’s air- and ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles and ground-launched one-way attack drones. There are hundreds of Cold War-vintage hardened aircraft shelters at European air bases, but these shelters are well-known targets — and vulnerable to precision strikes.
The key to survival, for a land-based air force confronting a missile- and drone-armed foe, is unpredictability. Every single Ukrainian air base is within range of all of Russia’s main deep strike munitions, and yet successful strikes on parked Ukrainian warplanes are rare.
And for one main reason. Ukrainian air defense forces carefully track incoming Russian missiles and drones, and alert fighter brigades to get their planes off the ground. Primed for action after more than a decade of war, the Ukrainians swiftly scatter warplanes across small airstrips and even lengths of highway, sometimes dodging Russian bombardment by mere minutes.
“There were situations where, even after we launched the plane, a [Russian munition] was flying over us and we literally had time to run into cover, and there was already an explosion 100 meters away,” one Ukrainian air force ground crewman said.
In theory, the Americans understood this. In the 2010s, the US Air Force began experimenting with a method for breaking up squadrons and wings into small groups of planes and crews and quickly spreading them out across many smaller bases while still maintaining overall command and control. By 2022, this so-called “Agile Combat Employment” was standard USAF doctrine.
But what good is doctrine that commanders don’t actually follow? And if the Americans aren’t adhering to their own doctrine for aircraft dispersal, what hope do the Europeans have? Some European air forces, Nordic ones in particular, have long practiced roadway flight operations.
Many others are still tethered to their big bases. Big bases where their precious air power is little more than an expensive target.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. His current focus is on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
