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The coffins of three American soldiers killed in Jordan this week in a drone strike attributed to militant groups backed by Iran are transported after arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on Friday, April 2 February 2024, loaded into a transfer vehicle.
© Bonnie Cash/Imago
At the end of January, three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan.
The investigations continue in the USA.
Washington, DC - US forces likely did not notice the approach of the Iranian drone that killed three American soldiers at a remote base in Jordan in late January.
There was also no air defense system on site capable of shooting down the drone.
This is the result of an initial assessment of the attack by the military.
The initial findings, which have not yet been reported, suggest the drone may have missed "due to its low trajectory," a U.S. defense official with direct knowledge of the assessment told The
Washington Post
.
In addition, the base known as Tower 22 is not equipped with weapons that can eliminate threats from the air.
Instead, the base relies on electronic warfare systems designed to disable threats such as drones or disrupt their path to a target.
US military apparently does not detect enemy drone in Jordan
A common strategy used by drone operators and other pilots trying to minimize or avoid radar detection is to fly low to the ground.
Another US official confirmed the military's view that the drone was flying too low to be detected.
Both officials, as well as several others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive and ongoing investigation.
Defense Department officials have stressed that assessments may change as investigators learn more.
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Overall, the preliminary findings appear to refute previous claims that U.S. air defenses mistook the attacking aircraft for an American drone that returned to base around the same time.
They also raise new questions about the Pentagon's ability to keep pace with the threats facing U.S. personnel deployed across the Middle East since the war in Israel sparked an acceleration of violence.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activity across the region, would not discuss whether officials believe the militias responsible were aware of the base's limited defensive measures.
In a statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Central Command was continuing to review the attack.
“For reasons of security of operations, we will not discuss specific force protection measures or possible changes in posture,” she said.
“However, as always, we are committed to taking the necessary actions to protect our forces who are at risk.”
Tower 22 is located at the intersection of Jordan's shared border with Syria and Iraq.
It serves as a base for another US outpost, the isolated Tanf garrison in Syria, which lies on a key route between Tehran and Damascus.
From Tanf, U.S. forces have sought to disrupt Iran's efforts to deliver weapons and materials to partners and proxies in Syria and beyond.
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Three US soldiers are killed in a drone strike in Jordan
The Jan. 28 attack in Jordan that killed three Georgian army reservists was the first case of U.S. soldiers dying from enemy fire since the start of the Gaza war.
The war in Israel has sparked repeated attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria by Iran-linked groups.
According to the Pentagon, there have been at least 168 such incidents since mid-October.
Dozens of soldiers were injured in the explosion in Tower 22.
The explosion hit a housing unit early in the morning, when many of the 350 soldiers stationed there were still sleeping.
In response to the deadly violence, U.S. warplanes struck more than 85 targets in Iraq and Syria.
According to military officials, these are linked to the Quds Force, a unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the local militias it supports.
Although Tower 22 was equipped with “multiple” electronic warfare systems capable of taking out drones, it had limited means of protecting itself.
The defense official, who was directly familiar with the military's initial assessment, said the outpost was classified as a relatively low-threat environment.
“This was based on the fact that the vast majority of threats and 99 percent of [Iranian proxy] attacks were directed against facilities in Iraq and Syria,” the official told
The Post.
The base's defensive posture changed after the attack, the official said, but declined to elaborate.
“We are not waiting for the investigation to conclude to make changes based on the lessons learned from the tragic attack on Tower 22.”
The USA is drawing its first conclusions from the drone attack in Jordan
The US military has long used systems such as Patriot and C-RAM (short for Counter Rocket Artillery Mortar) to defend American positions against enemy attacks.
But the supply of these weapons is limited, and officials have had to prioritize their use in specific locations based on the perceived threat.
At the same time, the Pentagon has worked diligently in recent years to develop new means of protecting facilities from rapidly evolving drone attacks that can evade traditional air defenses.
An immediate consequence of the deadly attack in Jordan, the second U.S. official said, is the need for better drone detection systems that will give American personnel more time to identify and destroy such threats before they can endanger lives.
Experts point out that there are also other solutions, so-called passive defense measures, that can be used to hide or repel attacks from the air.
For example, drone protection nets and other barriers such as chain fences have been installed over vulnerable areas in Ukraine to block or detonate drones before they can hit their target.
According to experts, ideal air defense strategies include a mix of systems, sensors and passive solutions.
The container buildings at Tower 22 appear to be the standard units typically found at U.S. facilities overseas.
They are made of relatively thin metal that is not designed to withstand even an explosion and can be easily identified on commercial satellite images and services such as Google Maps.
Officials did not say whether protection was installed over the facilities before the attack.
Concrete barriers positioned on the ground between housing units helped defuse the explosion, authorities said.
“You have to constantly adapt your defenses to the threat,” the second official said, adding that analysis of the attack is likely to produce further recommendations.
The base in Jordan was apparently not equipped with enough active countermeasures
Iran has proliferated drones of various types and sizes, including Shahed disposable attack drones used by Russia's military in Ukraine.
Tehran has also supplied unmanned aerial vehicles to its allied militias in the Middle East.
An official described the drone used in the attack in Jordan as a Shahed-101, a weapon used by militants in Iraq.
The Pentagon has not publicly disclosed what type of system was used.
Previous threat assessments concluded that Tower 22 was at a lower risk of attack.
That means "the base did not appear to be equipped with other active countermeasures, as were other sites in the region," said Paul Lushenko, an assistant professor and director of special operations at the U.S. Army War College who studies drone warfare and wrote about it.
"What we're seeing here in real time is the emergence of this aerial vulnerability that we need to think about more consciously, and that these types of outposts may not be as well protected in the future," he said.
The military should consider a broader range of passive measures to combat drones, including ways to physically block them even if they evade missile defenses.
“We should consider something like this, especially over some of these vulnerable sites where our most valuable asset, our soldiers, are located,” Lushenko said.
To the authors
Alex Horton
is a national security reporter at The Washington Post focusing on the U.S. military.
He served in Iraq as an Army infantryman.
Ellen Nakashima
is a national security reporter for The Washington Post.
She was a member of three Pulitzer Prize teams: in 2022 for investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and in 2014 for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance .
Samuel Oakford
is a video reporter for The Washington Post's Visual Forensics team.
Before joining the Post, he worked as a senior journalist at Storyful and as a reporter for Vice News at the United Nations.
He was also a reporter for civilian damage monitor Airwars and conducted open source research for Bellingcat's Yemen project.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 6, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.