Congress Counts Eighty-One American Aircraft Lost in the Iran War
A Congressional Research Service report released this week puts the number of American aircraft destroyed or damaged at eighty-one, against forty-two in the same service’s count six months ago. Replacing them would cost between $1.9bn and $3.3bn on Congressional Budget Office figures. More than half are MQ-9 Reaper drones.
The losses are not confined to drones. The list includes an F-35A and an E-3 Sentry, the airborne early warning aircraft that are few in number, old, and in demand everywhere at once. Eight F-15E Strike Eagles lightly damaged in an Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan in September may be back in service. Sources put the total cost of the war to the United States at at least $45bn, before counting damage to base infrastructure. The report’s sharpest observation is about its own subject: Pentagon reporting on aircraft losses “has, to date, been vague”, to the point that the Department of Defence’s own inspector general was citing earlier figures from this same congressional service in September rather than departmental ones. The question it puts to Congress is whether losses in “high-demand platforms that are aging and limited in number, such as the E-3 Sentry, create capability gaps or increase risk in other theaters” — which is the polite form of asking what is left for a crisis somewhere else. For a British reader the relevance is direct: these are the capabilities the United Kingdom assumes will be available to an ally, and the doubling of the count in six months is the clearest public measure yet of what this war is consuming.