Speaking at a televised Cabinet meeting on March 26, the US secretary of defense boasted of US military successes against Iran in the ongoing war. “Never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and so effectively neutralised,” he said, seated next to US President Donald Trump.The very next day, Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, wounding several US soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700m.It was no one-off hit. Iran’s missiles and drones, and one devastating instance of so-called friendly fire, have destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3bn and $2.8bn, the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has calculated.The CSIS estimate is the first detailed tabulation by a major international research group of US military losses in the war that began on February 28, and Al Jazeera is the first to report it.This estimated costing does not include losses incurred at US bases in the region, or any of the specialised equipment or naval assets.Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS, carried out the calculations. He said that he was also looking at damages to bases used by the US in the Gulf. But that exercise has …
