On April 3, Iranian forces shot down a US Air Force Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle fighter over mountainous Isfahan Province in central Iran. Rescuers quickly found the pilot of the two-seat warplane, but the backseat crewman proved harder to reach.
After a few hours and a lot of little vehicular mayhem, commandos fetched the crewman and escaped with no loss of life on the American side.
But the rescue op very nearly failed, and it resulted in the destruction of seven additional US manned aircraft, together worth about $350m. Rather than proving US dominance, the rescue underscores a critical vulnerability for the United States and European powers at a time when unmanned aircraft are poised to supplant manned aircraft in strike missions deep inside defended airspace.
Ground-based air defenses, even when degraded and suppressed like Iran’s, are still a serious problem for Western warplanes that must penetrate enemy airspace to deliver their ordnance. And every single shoot-down is a potential diplomatic disaster if the crew is lucky enough to survive. Beaten and bloodied prisoners of war reading enemy scripts to the camera is a favored tactic of dictatorships, since they shock the home audience.
Iran very nearly captured an American pilot on April 3. He would’ve been a powerful bargaining chip for the Iranian regime in President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again efforts to negotiate an end to the US-Israeli war. How long should the world’s leading powers accept that kind of risk when all the same powers are also actively developing fast, long-range armed drones?
The rescue op isn’t an argument for more manned air power. It’s an argument against it.
To be fair, the April rescue could’ve been even costlier. When commandos tried to rescue hostages in Iran in 1979, a collision on the ground inside Iran destroyed a C-130 airlifter and an RH-53 helicopter and killed eight Americans. The survivors abandoned six more helicopters, which the Iranians then used for decades. No hostages were rescued.
The comparison to the 1979 operation only slightly lessens the sting of a nearly disastrous 2026 op. Iranian commanders were surely disappointed that they didn’t succeed in taking an American pilot hostage, but they were surely pleased that shooting down one F-15E helped them bag another seven US aircraft.
The narrow rescue and its high cost should alarm American planners; it should inspire genuine panic among Europeans. No European power can match the scale and sophistication of the US military rescue and special operations forces. None have dedicated attack aircraft for covering rescue forces, nor attack pilots who are specifically trained for the mission.
It’s not even clear any European country could mount a rescue like the April op; the risk would be even greater if any tried, perhaps by pressing regular forces into rescue duty despite the unique demands of the mission.
Western air forces are already transitioning to long-range missiles and armed drones for aerial deep strikes. But it’s a slow transition. All Western air forces are still planning for a long-term manned component to their deep strike capability; indeed, the US Air Force is just beginning a $200bn effort to acquire at least 100 new B-21 manned stealth bombers from Northrop Grumman. Those aircraft could fly for decades even as more drones join them on the tarmac.
At least the B-21s are stealthy. The US Air Force recently announced it’s more than doubling, from 129 to 267, the number of non-stealthy F-15EXs it plans to buy for nearly $100m apiece. As its designation implies, the F-15EX is a modernized version of the same manned fighter that went down in Isfahan.
Standoff weaponry such as cruise missiles could keep manned planes outside the range of enemy air defenses, but the Iran campaign revealed just how quickly cruise missiles could run out during a major war. In little more than a month of strikes, the Americans depleted 20% of their best Joint Air-to-Surface Strike Missile (JASSM) cruise missiles, CNN reported. The Pentagon is investing in a sharp ramp-up in missile acquisition, but it could take years just to get back to pre-Iran inventories. A single JASSM takes four years to build and deliver.
European air forces are in even worse shape, with fewer standoff munitions and an equally leisurely transition to an unmanned strike force. The US Air Force could field its first robotic “collaborative combat aircraft” in five years or so, around the same time as the French and German air forces. The Royal Air Force is also working on fast armed drones that could fly ahead of manned planes, but its own effort might be a few years slower.
Deep strike drones and additional cruise missiles can’t come fast enough. As long as pilots sit in cockpits on missions inside enemy territory, they’re at risk of being shot down over the same enemy territory.
The worst outcome, which US forces narrowly avoided at the cost of $350m in hardware blown up in Isfahan, is a hostage crisis. That nightmare scenario should inform decision-making in Western capitals as they weigh current manned strike capabilities against future unmanned ones.
The nightmare should frighten leaders into moving faster.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. His current focus is on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War
Either Europe will continue allowing Russia’s shadow war to set the terms of escalation, or it will act now to prevent a larger war.
