Intelligence had come in before the fatal strike on a US military base that an imminent attack was possible. The base soldiers responsible for tracking threats were monitoring the situation. But they say they never saw the hostile drone coming.
Business Insider obtained via the Freedom of Information Act the US Army command investigation into the January 28, 2024, attack on Tower 22, a small logistics outpost in northeastern Jordan. The explosive-packed drone launched by an Iranian-aligned militia group killed three American troops and wounded over 100 more.
After the blast, a soldier whose name and position were both redacted in the report jumped out of bed and rushed into the base defense operations center, asking its personnel why they didn't catch it.
Another soldier interviewed for the investigation said someone was screaming, asking: "How did you guys not see it?"
Everyone in the BDOC said nothing was on any of their systems, aside from a couple of tracks they dismissed as balloons or trash.
"I could've sworn I was looking at the radar 30 seconds before the attack and didn't see anything on it," a soldier said, adding that they "don't remember seeing anything that was even close."
Just before the attack, though, the BDOC's focus was on a ScanEagle recon drone that was landing at the base. That soldier acknowledged that it might have been a distraction.
Finding failures
The Army investigation report described extensive problems among the command and control soldiers handling base security.
Threat assessments were conducted regularly at Tower 22, and all of them determined there was a high risk of attack. The investigation indicated that base defenders at the time of the attack, however, were unprepared to meet the threat.
The report identified several failures, including a lack of key leadership presence, "cumulative exhaustion from an insufficient number" of base defense crew shifts, and "inadequate, poorly rehearsed, and overly centralized battle drills."
It also said there was a failure to recognize the threat of attacks from certain directions. For example, it said personnel at the base erroneously assumed the southern approach to the base was safe. There was some confusion about where the drone came from.
The investigation said all the soldiers working the night shift at the BDOC during the drone attack said they saw two tracks south of Tower 22 on the radar but didn't look into them.
The soldiers said that the tracks observed to the south of Tower 22 before the attack were "too far away," "moving too slowly," or "possibly birds or trash," the investigation said, adding that this indicated a "negligent departure from their" standard operating procedure.
The report said that "at the time of the attack, the BDOC crew also admitted they were very focused on watching the Scan Eagle recovery and did not interrogate or assess the unknown air tracks to the south of Tower 22 with the Night Hawk camera." A ScanEagle drone is a low-altitude surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft made by the US aerospace company Boeing.
Soldiers said that the ScanEagle drone returned to Tower 22 just moments before an explosion rocked the base at about 5:30 a.m.
The missteps moments before the attack that were described in the report would indicate a command failure for the BDOC crew charged with monitoring threats. Soldiers, the investigation said, were confused about the leadership roles at the time and felt they couldn't make big decisions "even when faced with imminent danger to the base."
"We do assess that the BDOC night shift crew was not properly manned with the appropriate rank and experience level required of those positions given the current threat environment at Tower 22 and the important decisions required to protect the personnel on the base," even though senior leaders were available, the report said.
US Central Command did not respond before publication to a request for comment about any accountability actions taken.
One document included in the investigation said there was no warning from any radar or other system at either Tower 22 or the nearby Al-Tanf garrison, a US military base several miles away in Syria. The bomb-laden enemy drone destroyed a six-person housing unit and damaged surrounding ones, killing three Army National Guard soldiers and wounding 104 others.
The Tower 22 blast came amid a larger campaign of Iran-backed militia attacks on American forces across the Middle East over the US stance in the Israel-Hamas war. The Biden administration responded days later with widespread airstrikes on Tehran-linked targets in Iraq and Syria.
Drone challenges
Crucially, the Tower 22 attack underscores the challenges of detecting small drones packed with explosives and the related readiness requirements. These munitions, increasingly being used in combat, are very different from traditional threats such as missiles. They're more easily acquired by threat actors, have small radar signatures that can be mistaken for other things, and demand vigilance to engage. And even then, they can be missed.
The US recognizes that drones are a significant threat to its armed forces. In December, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that adversary drones "have evolved rapidly" in recent years, adding that "cheap systems are increasingly changing the battlefield, threatening US installations, and wounding or killing our troops."
Toward the end of the Biden administration, the Department of Defense outlined its approach to the drone threat. The US is looking to build up its inventory of counterdrone capabilities. Such systems were in place at Tower 22, but something else went wrong.
In the recommendations in the Tower 22 investigation, it was suggested that US Army Central, tasked with Middle East operations, establish a "comprehensive and standardized" BDOC/counterdrone crew training plan for all units before deploying to a region where counterdrone capabilities or missions may be needed.
The report recommended that the program "include recent experiences"; tactics, techniques, and procedures; and lessons from across the CENTCOM area of responsibility.
