Iran just overwhelmed a major American base and the Pentagon still won't talk about it
1 hour ago · 8 October 2026Share
Entrance to Camp Buehring, Kuwait in 2010. File photo. Mudangel · CC BY-SA 3.0
CBS News just got video nobody has seen before.
It shows Iran hitting a major US base in Kuwait. Camp Buehring. And it happened seven months ago.
A soldier on the ground filmed it himself, as the war was starting.
So why is this news now, not back in February? Because CBS only just got the footage. And CBS checked it was real.
How? They looked at the metadata buried in the video files. Then they matched the scenes to other photos of the damage. Jonah Kaplan and James LaPorta ran the investigation.
Here's the setup. Camp Buehring sits about 25 miles from the Iraqi border. It's been one of America's main bases in the region for more than two decades.
The strikes hit on 28 February 2026. That's the exact day the war started, when the US and Israel bombed Iran together.
About 7,000 US troops were at Camp Buehring before that. Most got pulled out under a Pentagon plan with the codename "get off the X".
But more than 100 soldiers stayed behind.
Those are the soldiers in this video.
One of them told CBS News quote "we had to abandon the base".
That's a soldier saying American forces got overwhelmed badly enough that they had to leave.
And there's more. Three unnamed service members say Iranian F-5 fighter jets flew low over them during the attacks.
One soldier says quote "they ran so close to us I could see their helmets".
But here's the catch. NBC News first reported that F-5 detail back in April. No one from CENTCOM or the Pentagon has ever confirmed it. It's three soldiers' word, nothing more.
Now the ammunition problem. Soldiers who stayed ran critically low on fifty calibre rounds.
A senior US Army logistics official elsewhere in Kuwait confirmed it to CBS. He said there were real concerns about ammunition, and about bigger systems too, like Patriot missile batteries.
The rest of this story is for members.
Aerial shot of a weapons storage area near Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base, Kuwait. File photo. Department of Defense. American Forces Information Service. Defense Visual Information Center. 1994 · Public domain
So this wasn't one base running short. A military official is saying the shortage went wider than that.
Now the wounded. Nobody was killed by enemy fire, not at Camp Buehring, not at the forward bases nearby.
But people did get hurt. Two soldiers were struck by lightning in a desert sandstorm in late April. One got burns. The other had a ruptured eardrum.
The soldiers who stayed eventually left Camp Buehring at night. They moved to improvised positions out in the Kuwaiti desert. Then to Camp Arifjan in May. Then scattered around the Middle East after that.
So what does the Pentagon say about all this?
Nothing, really. US Central Command declined to comment on the video or on the soldiers' accounts.
The Pentagon didn't answer directly either. It just pointed back to something Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, said on 4 March. He said more than 90% of US troops had already been moved off regional bases by the time the attacks happened.
And this isn't an isolated story. A Pentagon inspector general report came out last month. It found equipment losses worth up to $3.7 billion between 28 February and 30 June, including nearly 60 aircraft.
The Congressional Research Service reported this week that Iran has damaged or destroyed 81 aircraft since the war began, including drones.
Camp Buehring wasn't even the deadliest attack on US troops in this war. That was an Iranian drone strike on the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait, three days after the war started. Six American service members were killed there.
And the war hasn't slowed down since. The US put a naval blockade on Iran on 13 April, after talks in Islamabad to end the war fell apart.
One more thing, reported by RT: Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, warned troops in July not to film strike sites. That came after an attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed three US service members. That warning hasn't been confirmed anywhere else checked for this story.
So what's still unknown? The exact number of people hurt at Camp Buehring. And whether that F-5 sighting is anything more than what three soldiers believe they saw.
CENTCOM and the Pentagon haven't confirmed the video. They haven't confirmed the soldiers' accounts either.
Seven months on, the only new thing here is the footage. The attack happened in February. The shortage happened in February. The evacuation happened in February.
What's left is the Pentagon staying quiet about all three.
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