Iran Struck America’s Regional Air Operations Hub in Qatar, Rendering It Inoperable

Multiple Iranian missiles struck the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, during the early weeks of the war, rendering the facility inoperable. The extent of the damage had not been previously reported publicly. The disclosure, first published by Air & Space Forces Magazine, confirms that one of the United States military's most consequential command-and-control nodes in the Middle East sustained direct hits during Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran that began on Feb. 28.

The CAOC falls under Air Forces Central, the air component of U.S. Central Command. The facility directed the air campaigns for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, and recent operations against the Houthis in Yemen. Al Udeid is the forward headquarters of CENTCOM and AFCENT, with living quarters for more than 10,000 service members. The CAOC is responsible for planning and executing air operations across a theater that spans from the Red Sea to the Turkish border, and it includes representatives from 17 nations.

The strike did not disrupt the air campaign. Anticipating that Iran would target the facility, the U.S. military directed the campaign from Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., from the start of the operation, with personnel transferred away from Al Udeid before hostilities began. No U.S. casualties resulted from the strike on the CAOC. AFCENT's 609th Air Operations Center directs both the CAOC at Shaw and the one at Al Udeid. The redundancy was not improvised. The effort to shift more operations to Shaw expanded under Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., CENTCOM commander from 2019 to 2022, and AFCENT gradually moved more personnel, including foreign liaison officers, to South Carolina, while maintaining the Qatar CAOC as a parallel operation, even completing a $3 million upgrade there in 2020. By 2024, U.S. personnel staffing the CAOC were split roughly 50-50 between the two locations, with between 300 and 400 personnel assigned to each, and the Shaw CAOC had continued to expand with an eye toward assuming all responsibilities if necessary.

The attack on the CAOC was not Iran's first strike on Al Udeid during the current conflict cycle. Following the June 2025 Midnight Hammer operation that struck three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran fired 14 missiles at Al Udeid, one for each GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb dropped by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, with only one missile getting through, damaging a radome. A New York Times analysis of satellite imagery found that satellite dishes, radomes, communications buildings, and radar systems were among the assets damaged in the various attacks that struck bases across Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The scale of Iran's response during Epic Fury proved substantially greater. This time, Iran showed little restraint, attacking military bases throughout the Gulf. Iranian aerial barrages have killed 7 U.S. service members on the ground and destroyed radars, aircraft, and other infrastructure, with 13 service members killed in action during the conflict overall.

Air Forces Central commander and Combined Forces Air Component Commander Lt. Gen. Derek C. France, along with his CENTCOM predecessors, had anticipated for years that Al Udeid would be targeted during any conflict and had regularly operated from a command center at AFCENT's U.S. headquarters at Shaw. In a proof-of-concept exercise as far back as 2019, airmen geographically separated from the CAOC at Al Udeid executed all aspects of command and control of AFCENT's air power from the United States, marking a historic first. That institutional preparation proved decisive. A former official who served in the CAOC at both locations said, "AFCENT was definitely very prepared. There's not too much that has happened that we have not gone through. We exercised it, we talked about it, we wargamed it."

The disclosure now forces a strategic question about the future of the Qatar facility. The CAOC's proximity to Iran and the damage to it have raised questions over whether it should be rebuilt. Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who directed the CAOC during the opening months of Operation Enduring Freedom and played a key role in the air war command center during Operation Desert Storm, said, "Any facility that's above ground is vulnerable today, and so any critical nodes we build in the future need to be built underground, and be hardened." Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, also noted that "the acceleration of the reliability and bandwidth increase in modern telecommunications allows you to disperse your facilities," adding that "Epic Fury was run from the United States to a large degree." The episode closes a chapter on a command architecture that assumed forward-positioned, fixed facilities could survive a peer-capable adversary's missile inventory, and opens a debate, now backed by combat evidence, over whether CENTCOM's command posture requires structural reorganization.