• Qatar's air defenses shot down Iranian missiles targeting the US military base there on Monday.

• The retaliatory attacks came after the US bombing of Iran's nuclear sites on Saturday.

• Qatar's Patriot air defenses, along with US-operated ones, defeated the Iranian attack.

Qatar confirmed its air defenses shot down Iranian missiles targeting the US' largest base in the Middle East, a spectacular and high stakes light show seen in the darkened skies above the US ally.

Qatar boasts a number of capabilities, including the superlative US-made Patriot system. Qatari and US-operated Patriot batteries destroyed incoming ballistic missiles fired by Iran on Monday, US Central Command said in a statement, noting there were no casualties to American or Qatari personnel.

Iran launched a missile strike against the US's Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The retaliatory attack came two days after the American military bombed Iran's three nuclear facilities.

The Foreign Ministry of Qatar said in a statement that the country's air defenses "successfully thwarted the attack and intercepted the Iranian missiles," condemning the strikes and noting that further details would be released by the Ministry of Defense.

A US defense official also confirmed to Business Insider that Iran attacked with ballistic missiles. Iranian state media said Tehran launched the same number of missiles as the number of bunker-busting bombs the US used against its nuclear facilities in a strike on Saturday, and called the strikes "a mighty and successful response by the armed forces of Iran to America's aggression."

Qatar, a US ally, hosts a number of American-made M1M-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile systems, which are manufactured by Raytheon, a segment of RTX, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. Patriots and their interceptors and radars are designed to destroy aircraft at ranges beyond 70 miles, with a shorter range for fast-moving ballistic missiles. Qatar first bought 10 Patriots in 2014, at the time becoming the 13th country to operate the system.

Open-source accounts online shared footage of air defenses firing against targets on Monday, the flames of their rocket motors seen as moving lights in the sky. Some commented that Patriots were likely used to shoot down the missiles.

Qatar also hosts National Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems and missiles, which are designed for targets up to 20 miles away. NASAMS are designed by the Norwegian defense company Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace and also manufactured by Raytheon. In 2018, Qatar bought more missiles for its NASAMS, as well as support and logistics equipment and services. NASAMS can protect from missiles as well as uncrewed aerial vehicles and drones.

Other surface-to-air missile defense systems operated by Qatar include Rapier, a British short-range capability, and the Roland, a joint French- and German-made short-range missile.

Qatar is also acquiring Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, systems, which were part of a larger $42 billion deal with the US. THAAD, made by Lockheed, is designed to intercept ballistic missiles at ranges beyond 100 miles. THAAD targets the missiles during their terminal phase of flight.

Prior to Monday's attack, US President Donald Trump had warned Iran against retaliation towards the US, saying it would be met with more force than the initial strikes. After Monday's attack, Trump called this a "very weak response, which we expected and have effectively countered," on his Truth Social site. "I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice."

US forces in the area have been on high alert over the weekend, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday, adding they "are fully postured to respond to any Iranian retaliation or proxy attacks, which would be an incredibly poor choice."

Al Udeid is the US' largest military base in the region and is routinely used by all kinds of aircraft including B-52 strategic bombers, C-17 Globemaster transports, and B-1 supersonic bombers. Satellite imagery from last week showed the aircraft missing from the base after around 40 were spotted there earlier this month.

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Iran's strategic blunders paved the way for humiliating defeats, experts say

Less than two years ago, Iran’s government sounded triumphant.

It was November 2023, just weeks after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and a senior Iranian general was predicting that the regime and its proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon were poised to vanquish Israel, the United States and other enemies.

“We are fighting America, Zionism and all those who are targeting the greatness and honor of the Islamic Revolution of Iran,” Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said in a speech in the city of Kazvin.

“We are on the verge of conquering great heights. ... We are completely overcoming the enemies.”

Now Iran is in its most precarious position since the early 1980s.

Its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon have been devastated, Hamas has been eviscerated in Gaza, Tehran’s nuclear sites have been heavily bombed, and Israel’s military now owns the skies over Iran.

As for Salami, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike this month.

How Iran got here can be traced to a series of miscalculations and strategic blunders, experts and former officials say, a result of decisions made both decades and only months ago.

Tehran’s often obstinate diplomacy, overreliance on regional militants and shoddy security left it vulnerable to adversaries with much more powerful militaries. And at a crucial moment, the regime’s leaders failed to grasp the intentions and capabilities of its arch foes in Jerusalem and Washington, with no foreign partner ready to come to its aid.

“Iran was too inflexible when it had to be less stubborn,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group think tank. “It never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Among its more recent missteps, Iran failed to learn from how other countries managed their relations with President Donald Trump or how the ground had shifted after Israel devastated Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, Vaez said.

But perhaps Iran’s biggest mistake was counting on those Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon in the first place to serve as a “forward defense” against any possible attack by Israel. That approach worked for years, and it dealt Israel a blow when it sent ground troops into Lebanon.

But everything changed when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Iran had armed, trained and financed Hamas, and the group’s onslaught set off a chain of events that has left the regime in Tehran severely weakened and its regional power diminished.

“I think there is a direct line from Oct. 7 to today,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior intelligence official.

While Israel hammered away at Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza after Oct. 7, Iran and its Hezbollah allies prepared for an eventual ground attack from Israel into Lebanon. Instead, Israel took a different tack, targeting Hezbollah’s commanders and its top leader through airstrikes and booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah’s members. Israeli forces staged only a small incursion into southern Lebanon.

Alex Plitsas, a former Defense Department official with the Atlantic Council think tank, said, “The dominoes that fell after Oct. 7th left Iran’s proxy network in shambles, eroded deterrence and reduced its counterstrike capabilities.”

But he said Iran failed to adapt and refused diplomatic overtures from Washington despite its increasingly vulnerable position.

Seth Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that after the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Tehran invested heavily in arming and training militias in the region through its Revolutionary Guard Corps, with Hezbollah as the anchor of an “axis of resistance.”

The scheme worked for decades, Jones said, but it neglected the country’s armed forces, which have fallen far behind.

“What it means is that your conventional forces don’t get the same level of focus,” Jones said.

During Israel’s air campaign, “the Iranians were fighting an enemy that’s got fifth-generation F-35 stealth aircraft.”

“They just don’t have an answer to that,” Jones added.

Iran has also faltered on the diplomatic front.

In talks over its nuclear program, Iran’s leaders stuck to an uncompromising stance mistakenly believing they could buy more time and secure more concessions from Trump, as well as his predecessor, Joe Biden, experts said.

Over four years, Iran dragged its feet and delayed talks with the Biden administration, which had expressed a willingness to revive and revise the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump had abandoned in 2018, Western officials say.

When Trump returned to the White House, his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, offered Iran a way to continue to enrich uranium for a period of years, while other countries in the region would help it develop a civilian nuclear energy program. The Israeli government and Republican hawks were worried that Trump’s offer was too generous. But Iran appeared to misread Trump, calculating that it could extend the talks over a longer period, experts and Western officials say.

In the end, the billions of dollars and decades of effort Iran devoted to its nuclear program “provided the nation neither nuclear energy nor deterrence,” Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on social media.

Relying on Russia

Apart from its regional network of proxy forces stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, Iran had long relied on the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as its only genuine ally. But Sunni rebels ousted Assad in December, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers are no longer welcome in Damascus.

Iran also had portrayed its increasing cooperation with Russia as a “strategic” partnership, with Tehran providing thousands of Shahed drones for its war on Ukraine, as well as technical advice to help Moscow build the unnamed aircraft on Russian territory. In return, Iran acquired some Russian air defense systems, but promised fighter jets and other hardware never materialized.

Over the past two weeks, Israel’s air force destroyed Iran’s radars and Russian anti-aircraft weaponry, with Tehran losing control over its airspace.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made no mention of providing military assistance to Iran when he met Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Moscow on Monday.

Despite Iran’s hard-line rhetoric about conquering its enemies and its extensive intelligence and security apparatus, Israel has repeatedly carried out sabotage and assassinations of top military officers, nuclear scientists, the leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the leaders of Hamas in Gaza. The operations have humiliated Iran’s regime and shown that the country’s intelligence services are unable to protect top-ranking officers or other key figures.

“Iran’s entire investments in its forward defense, missiles program and nuclear capabilities evaporated in the course of 12 months of regional war and 12 days of war on its own territory,” said Vaez, of the International Crisis Group. “Judging by that outcome, there is no question that Iran miscalculated at every turn.”