On March 1, six American soldiers were working inside a makeshift operations center at Port Shuaiba, a commercial port on Kuwait's Gulf coast, roughly 10 miles from Camp Arifjan, the country's main US Army base.
They had been moved there days earlier, dispersed from the larger base out of fear that concentrated forces made an easier target.
Then an Iranian drone found them anyway.
The building was a triple-wide trailer ringed by concrete barriers built to stop a truck bomb. It had almost nothing protecting the roof. Air defenses did not intercept. No sirens sounded.
Six US Army Reserve soldiers of the 103rd Sustainment Command died, and more than 30 were wounded.
Six months later that strike is still generating consequences in Washington. Survivors have publicly disputed the Pentagon's account of how well the site was defended.
Members of Congress from both chambers have demanded the Army's investigation be released.
The war that produced it has not stopped either.
Last week Iran fired another round of missiles and drones at American positions in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq, retaliating for a fresh wave of US strikes on IRGC targets.
CENTCOM had said a day earlier that more than 50,000 American troops remain spread across the region.
On September 8 it escalated into the shipping lanes.
CENTCOM said US forces destroyed five Iranian crude tankers in the Gulf of Oman and near Kharg Island after Iranian ballistic missile attempts against a US warship.
Iran claimed it struck two American vessels and eight tankers. CENTCOM called the warship claim false and said no US Navy ship was hit.
The same day, Houthi forces hit four cities in southern Saudi Arabia with dozens of ballistic missiles and drones, striking King Khalid Air Base at Khamis Mushait along with Aramco facilities in Abha, Najran and Jazan.
Seventy-three people were wounded. Fires broke out at energy sites, and the roughly 400,000 barrel per day Jazan refinery went offline.
Brent crude has now pushed above $100, its highest level in nearly seven weeks.
That Saudi base is not American. But the lesson underneath it is the same one Port Shuaiba taught in March.
Fixed military infrastructure is getting easier to find, easier to hit and far more expensive to defend.
That is not just a military problem. It is rewriting the political bargain underneath America's alliance system in the Gulf.
The Bargain That Built the System