On March 27, an Iranian missile scored a high-value hit on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, reducing an Air Force E-3 (AWACS) command center aircraft worth up to $500 million to splinters and shards.

The strike underscored not only Iran’s reach but also a long-running debate about how to protect American air power with underground bunkers and hardened shelters.

Because adversaries have invested heavily in protection, analysts say the United States must move faster to shield its assets on the ground.

“People are asking the valid question: What on earth was this half-billion dollar airplane doing sitting right out in the open, where commercial satellite imagery can see exactly where it was and target a weapon onto that, which apparently they did,” said Tom Shugart, a retired Navy submarine officer and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security’s Defense Program.

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“I think there’s really good questions being asked about, what are we doing here? And the bigger question is, why wasn’t it already done?”

Missiles continue to strike U.S. bases in the Middle East, and the Pentagon is moving to ramp up investment in base hardening.

The drive includes near-term and long-term solutions, with a Space Force call for “prefabricated transportable bunkers” and a seven-year task order for infrastructure work at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has called for “more and more bunkers,” saying during a trip to the Middle East that their rapid fielding was a “theater priority.”

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The emphasis thus far has been on bunkers, but Shugart notes the protection gap shows up most clearly in hardened aircraft shelters, which are visible and countable via commercial imagery.

A paper Shugart coauthored last year with Timothy Walton of the Hudson Institute, “Concrete Sky,” found that in the Indo-Pacific, China had more than doubled its number of hardened aircraft shelters between 2010 and 2020, reaching about 800, while the United States and its allies had built just two in the same period.

The study calls attention to what many see as a policy miss, especially given the coming fleet of high-value platforms. In particular, it highlights as “foolish” the decision not to build hardened aircraft shelters for the coming fleet of B-21 bombers—describing the shelters as a $30 million investment to protect aircraft worth $600 million apiece.

In recent years, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked to make modest improvements to existing bunkers. Military readers will recall reinforcement work including better blast doors intended to protect troops inside from traumatic brain injuries caused by overpressure.

Yet many leaders have questioned whether those measures go far enough to protect aircraft on the tarmac.

You saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters, Shugart said, referring to Gulf War strikes. “They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”

If that assessment was true then, it may be different now. Shugart notes that one missile could destroy a single hardened shelter, and the cost calculus matters.

“At that point, you’re at least on the right side of the cost curve,” he added, underscoring that protection buys strategic advantage.

The Air Force has a five-year contract for new Expedient Small Asset Protection shelters as part of its Agile Combat Employment strategy—hangars in a box for small aircraft or vehicles.

It remains unclear how many have been purchased and deployed since the first one was unveiled at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, in 2023.

Walton argues that assumptions about shelter space constraints may be outdated. He points to large shelters at Andersen that have been constructed for typhoon protection as a starting point design for sheltering the biggest and most costly warfighting assets.

“These would give you an ability to put it in the large aircraft shelter, close the doors and have it not be vulnerable to drones or submission or weapons that are coming up top,” Walton said. “It could still be probably penetrated by certain classes of unitary warheads, but it helps.”

Both Walton and Shugart emphasize that the threat to U.S. aircraft on the tarmac isn’t limited to the Indo-Pacific or the Middle East.

Domestic drone incursions add urgency as well. Walton noted, “There’s been a slate over the past years of incursions of U.S. airfields and other critical infrastructure, even within the contiguous United States; incursions by drones.”

A Hudson Institute analysis also calls for 12 small hardened aircraft shelters and three large ones per airfield in the Pacific, estimating between $9 billion and $10.5 billion to shore up resilient structures and passive defenses.

The push for hardened shelters and resilient basing remains a central theme as America seeks to deter near-peer threats and maintain credible air power in all theaters.

The question remains whether Washington will commit to a robust, long-term program that matches the scale of the threat, and whether Congress and the War Department will sustain this crucial effort.

The urgency is clear because protecting what costs hundreds of millions of dollars on the ground translates into maintaining dominance where it counts most in modern warfare.

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