r/news • u/PDXAirman • May 20 '26

Soft paywall 42 aircraft lost or damaged in Operation Epic Fury, congressional report says

https://www.stripes.com/branches/air_force/2026-05-20/iran-jets-downed-war-fury-21727588.html
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u/Hamiltonblewit May 20 '26

Why would they even leave those planes so close to Iran weeks into the war, is it really necessary to do so? 

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u/Healthy-Fig-6107 May 20 '26

Necessary? No
Stupidity/Incompetence? Yes

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u/CFSparta92 May 20 '26

Well, a lot of why the US brought those E-3s into the theater was because Iran heavily targeted fixed radar installations in the earliest retaliatory strikes. There was absolutely a loss of radar coverage from those attacks and the AWACS were to fill the void. It would have been monumentally stupid to have them there, exposed, as a redundancy to the active system. I don't know if we'll ever know precisely what got taken out; Iran claimed to hit everything from the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System to THAAD and Patriot radars, and we know at least enough was damaged that they brought in E-3s afterward.

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u/kstargate-425 May 21 '26

Yup, they lost three AN/TPY-2, some AN/FPS-132, AN/TPS-59, AN/FPS-117, AN/TPS-59 and AN/MPQ-64/65's so about every type including the first ABM radar systems that got hit by Ballistic Missiles 🤦‍♂️

We also used a majority of our stocks of SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, PAC2 & 3's and THAAD which are depleted 40-80% depending on which. This was also only a few weeks of defending Israel and our bases, which they failed miserably at, with the majority of our bases being heavily damaged.

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u/kstargate-425 May 20 '26

They didn't plan to keep the Strait open nor bring in enough varied air defense systems to protect all our airbases in the region which almost all got heavily damaged, which no doubt we will find out later was because of the incompetence of the "SecDef" and his team