AP says Port Shuaiba warnings were set aside before six US soldiers died

An Associated Press investigation published this week says US officers warned, before the war with Iran widened, that a logistics detachment at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait was exposed to drones. On 1 March an Iranian drone hit the site, killed six American soldiers and wounded dozens. AP calls it the deadliest known strike on US troops in the conflict.

The reporting rests on interviews with 13 soldiers, most of them officers who held staff jobs or sat in the briefings. Several told AP that threat assessments had already marked the port as a plausible Iranian target. Senior leadership kept a core logistics crew there anyway. Some officers said the computer work could have been done from outside Kuwait. The command view, as those officers described it, was that a group had to stay in the country for communications and logistics.

The crew that remained was not large. AP puts it at roughly 75 logistics soldiers, plus dozens from other units. The three main US bases in Kuwait had thickened their air defences before the war. Port Shuaiba did not have its own battery. It sat under Patriot coverage tied to Camp Arifjan. Patriot can see small aircraft. It is a poor answer to a swarm of cheap drones, because each interceptor costs far more than the aircraft it is fired at, and a magazine emptied on drones is a magazine not available for a missile. The logistics officers did not control that magazine. They could not move the battery.

The sharpest name in the file is Capt. Cody Khork, the unit safety officer. He had argued against moving the detachment to the port. On the morning of the strike, an officer who was with him told AP, Khork was still uneasy about troops leaving bunkers while the drone picture was unclear. Minutes after a final all-clear, a drone came through the roof and killed him. He was promoted to major after his death.

The medical aftermath is a second finding, separate from the decision to stay. Seven soldiers, including senior officers, told AP the port went into the war without a worked mass-casualty plan. Phones that survived the blast were used to search for nearby clinics. Wounded troops later described delays in diagnosing traumatic brain injury and in reaching specialist care. The Pentagon's public line is that arrivals at military hospitals are sorted by severity under ordinary practice. That does not answer the question of how the wounded left the port.

The Army finished its own investigation in June. An official familiar with the file told AP the report is still being stripped of sensitive material and has not been released. The Army and the Pentagon declined to answer AP's detailed questions before the families of the dead are briefed. Gold Star families quoted in the investigation are asking why troops stayed at a site soldiers say was known to be thin on drone defence.

The gap between a finished inquiry and a public text is now four months. Families of the six dead have the casualty notifications. They do not have the command timeline: who received the threat assessment, who decided the computer work had to stay in Kuwait, and who issued the all-clear that Khork questioned. Those are the lines an investigation is supposed to draw.

Port Shuaiba is a commercial harbour south of Kuwait City, used for logistics rather than as a fighting base. That is why the exposure mattered. A port is a fixed address, with warehouses, a roof line and a routine. A drone unit that has mapped it does not need a new aimpoint. The officers AP interviewed said that point had been made before 1 March. The command answer, as they recount it, was that presence itself was the requirement.

What the investigation does not settle is the rule that will apply to the next logistics site. The war is still running. Carrier rotations and bomber movements this month show Washington treating Iranian reach as a live problem, including at RAF Fairford. A port in a partner country, covered by someone else's Patriot battery, is a different problem from a base the US owns. The June report, once the families have it, will show whether the Army treats Shuaiba as a one-off failure or as a template it does not intend to repeat.

Until that text is out, the public record is the AP file: 13 soldiers, a safety officer who objected and died, a port under borrowed air defence, and a mass-casualty plan that seven of them say was never in place.