Since the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran on February 28, Americans have paid an extra $40 billion in gas money, 12,000 flights were canceled in the first five days of May, and carmakers are absorbing enormous losses. Of course, the American military has been suffering more serious losses in base infrastructure, equipment, and, tragically, lives lost. That said, the Pentagon has been a bit cagey with actually laying out exactly what’s been lost. That could be due to operational security concerns around a war and its shaky ceasefire; it might also be a way to minimize the perception of their costs.
Now, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has published its own report focused on aircraft losses specifically. Pulling from a variety of sources, since the Pentagon wouldn’t just tell it, the CRS determined that a grand total of 42 U.S. military planes have been either damaged or destroyed during the conflict with Iran. That includes fixed wing, helicopters, and high-end drones. Several dozen aircraft downed in only a few weeks, particularly against a non-peer adversary, is a pretty steep price.
Several of these were strike aircraft, including one F-35A Lightning II and four F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets, plus one A-10 Thunderbolt II attacker. Others were support aircraft, including a whopping seven KC-135 Stratotankers (the military’s flying gas stations), plus one E-3 Sentry AWACS, a vitally important radar plane that doesn’t have a clear replacement after its imminent retirement. America also lost two MC-130J Commando II planes dedicated for ferrying special operations forces.
On the helicopter side, the report only notes one loss, an HH-60W Jolly Green II search-and-rescue craft. On the UAV side, the Navy lost one MQ-4C Triton reconnaissance drone. Taking the heaviest beating of all was the MQ-9 Reaper, the military’s ubiquitous bomber drone, with fully 24 losses.
What this has cost the nation
The CRS report notes that when the Pentagon revised its estimate for the total cost of the war from $25 billion up to $29 billion, the stated reason was because of repair and replacement costs. That explicitly does not include damage to bases or ground infrastructure. Assuming what’s left are the aircraft, that puts the price tag at around $4 billion.
That’s just money, though. Some of these planes can’t easily be replaced, like the AWACS mentioned above. Even for the ones that are still in production, it will take time to replace these losses. That means gaps in America’s strategic posture, even after the Iran conflict concludes. It also raises questions about the value of high-budget aircraft like these, particularly in an era where cheap off-the-shelf drones are redefining warfare.
More broadly, as the Russo-Ukrainian War has demonstrated, anti-air defenses are advancing to the point where conventional airstrikes are much riskier propositions than they used to be (and to be clear, they were always risky). Obviously, an operation this large was always going to suffer losses. The question becomes whether or not the price is worth the result.
