The Wall Street Journal identified 274 damaged structures at 24 installations with a U.S. military presence across the Middle East during the war's first six months -- the most comprehensive public accounting of that damage to date.
The Pentagon has declined to give specific assessments of base damage, and major U.S. commercial satellite companies stopped releasing high-resolution imagery of military installations in the region early in the war. So Journal reporters developed methods for analyzing lower-resolution public imagery from the European Union, inspected tens of thousands of satellite images and reviewed NASA data tracking fires, Iranian state media and other sources.
The analysis shows where damage appeared and roughly when, not what caused it, though Iran announced strikes that coincided with nearly all of it. Many of the installations are shared with, or owned by, allied nations, so not every damaged building is American or used only by U.S. forces. And because this analysis relies mainly on lower-resolution imagery, it almost certainly undercounts the damage.
To develop and validate its methodology, the Journal consulted with five independent analysts: Brady Africk of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank; Sam Lair of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a national security think tank, and Joseph Bermudez Jr., Jennifer Jun and Chris Park of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
"The restrictions on satellite imagery in the region have made it pretty hard to get a real sense of the scale and extent of the damage done by Iran," said Lair, who reviewed and confirmed the Journal's findings.
Searching for damage
Reporters started with a list of more than 40 Middle East installations with a U.S. military presence. Some came from a 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Others were named in more than 5,400 posts the Journal archived by four Iranian state-affiliated media outlets -- Iranian Students' News Agency, Islamic Republic News Agency, Defa Press and Sepah News -- since the war began.
To search those installations for damage, reporters used publicly available imagery from the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, captured by its satellites roughly every five days at a resolution of about 10 meters per pixel.
Reporters then implemented a statistical method called anomalous change detection. For each installation, the algorithm first established a baseline distribution from imagery taken one year earlier, from February through August 2025. It then flagged spots in the available imagery from the start of the war on Feb. 28 through its six-month mark on Aug. 28 that fell far outside the baseline -- more than 30,000 locations in all.
Reporters reviewed those locations in a custom-built application, comparing imagery from before and after each detected change to identify damage.
Verifying the damage
Reporters looked for telltale signs of damage, such as irregular dark spots, across several bands of light, including infrared wavelengths invisible to the human eye.
Reporters required that signs of damage persisted for at least two weeks, ruling out short-lived changes such as vehicle movements, and checked earlier available images to pin down the window in which the damage first appeared.
Reporters corroborated damage assessments with a contemporaneous fire or sudden flare in brightness detected at that spot by NASA or EU satellites; on-the-ground imagery posted publicly and verified by the Journal; or higher-resolution satellite imagery showing damage. For 26 buildings, the Journal corroborated the damage with a statement from Iranian state-affiliated media of a strike on that installation.
To determine which phase of the war the damage occurred in -- before, during or after the ceasefire -- the Journal identified the date of the first image in which each building appeared damaged and, when the date window of damage spanned across phases, narrowed the date using fire, flare and Iranian-claim data.
Some damage sites contained multiple buildings. To count them, reporters used early- and pre-war high-resolution images captured by California-based Planet Labs. Reporters also measured each damaged building's original single-story square footage, and found the average size fell from 12,000 square feet before the ceasefire to less than 5,000 after.
To identify building types, Journal reporters consulted with current and former servicemembers, analysts and Defense Department regulations.
Reporters identified 54 of the structures using only high-resolution satellite imagery or on-the-ground footage.
Iran takes credit
Iranian state-affiliated media claimed a strike that coincided with damage to more than 250 of the structures identified by the Journal. Iran-affiliated outlets also often release high-resolution images of allegedly damaged structures, which the Journal didn't use in its verification.
To analyze Iran's claims, reporters used a large language model to extract from each post which installations Iran said it had targeted, as well as any specific claims about what on each base they damaged and the date on which the attack occurred. For statements in Farsi, the Journal used machine translations. A human translator checked a 10% sample for accuracy; all were without meaningful errors. Reporters calculated the share of claims that named a specific type of building and, among those, the number that cited troop housing.
Reporters manually checked a random 20% sample of the extracted claims and found no errors that affected the analysis.