Smoke rises after Iran carried out a missile strike on the main headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. (Anadolu via Getty Images)
“”The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged.
“Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus.”
What did we loose when the six patrol boats left 5th Fleet and the squadron became “expeditionary?”
PATFORSWA was the largest Coast Guard unit outside the US. It included a training facility to train boarding parties and the patrol craft made a number of seizures including drugs (here and here) and arms being smuggling to Yemen (here and here). The cutters could be maintained in their homeport.
PATFORSWA had a long term continuing relationship with 5th fleet including Unmanned system experiments over many years.
Two MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessels operate alongside a U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat during exercise New Horizon in the Arabian Gulf. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Dawson Roth)
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 
The more I learn, the more I go ‘we should never have had a base there to begin with’. To me, this is illustrative of why the USN shouldn’t buy diesel submarines. You’d have to base them at a facility in the potential conflict zone, and that is clearly not a great idea.