A Congressional Research Service report dated May 13 tallied 42 American aircraft lost or damaged during Operation Epic Fury, the 40-day military campaign against Iran that began February 28. The count includes manned fighters shot down by friendly fire, tankers destroyed on the ground by Iranian missiles, special operations planes deliberately blown up by their own crews, and two dozen drones that never came home.
Six American aircrew are dead. The price tag has already climbed to $29 billion, and rising. And the nonpartisan research arm of the Library of Congress compiled this inventory not from classified Pentagon damage assessments, but from news accounts and open statements by the Defense Department and U.S. Central Command, because CRS has no access to classified records.
That alone should trouble every taxpayer and every member of Congress reading the report. If the open-source tally runs this high, what does the classified ledger look like?
Friendly fire, Iranian strikes, and a deadly refueling sortie
The losses began almost immediately. On the night of March 1, 2, a Kuwaiti Air Force F/A-18 Hornet mistakenly shot down three F-15E Strike Eagles over Kuwait. All six aircrew ejected and were recovered. U.S. Central Command said the shoot-down occurred during active combat that included attacks from Iranian aircraft, ballistic missiles, and drones, a chaotic environment, but one that still produced a catastrophic blue-on-blue incident with a coalition partner.
Ten days later, on March 12, a KC-135 Stratotanker went down over western Iraq during a refueling sortie. All six crew members were killed, the only fatalities on the CRS list. A second KC-135 involved in the same incident landed safely at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. CENTCOM said the KC-135 loss was not the result of hostile or friendly fire, its press release stated.
Two days after the tanker crash, Iranian missiles and drones struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, damaging five more KC-135s on the ground. Total tanker losses hit seven.
Strikes kept coming, and so did the bill
On March 19, an F-35A Lightning II took Iranian ground fire over Iran and returned to base. Eight days later, Iran hit Prince Sultan again, this time damaging an E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft. The Air Force operated only 16 E-3s before the war began, with six deployed to Prince Sultan. A May 7 Washington Post report cited by CRS said the E-3 had been parked on an unprotected taxiway. Both the Jerusalem Post and Air & Space Forces Magazine called the airframe a write-off.
Parking a scarce, high-value surveillance plane on an unprotected taxiway during an active conflict with an adversary that had already struck the same base, that is not a classified detail. It is a planning failure visible from open sources.
April 3 brought more losses. A fourth F-15E was shot down over Iran. Both crew members were recovered in separate search-and-rescue operations. During one of those rescue missions, an A-10 Thunderbolt II went down after taking enemy fire. The A-10 pilot ejected and was recovered.
Aircraft destroyed by their own crews
The rescue operations triggered some of the war's most dramatic losses, and some of its hardest questions. Two days after the April 3 shoot-down, U.S. forces blew up two MC-130J Commando II special operations aircraft on the ground at a forward airstrip in Iran. The transports could not fly out during the broader effort to recover the downed F-15E weapon systems officer.
During the same mission, an HH-60W Jolly Green II combat search-and-rescue helicopter took small-arms fire. Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, at an April 6 news conference, described two helicopters in the rescue flight taking fire, with a crew member on the trailing aircraft suffering a minor injury. The Aviationist noted that Caine's account suggests both helicopter airframes were hit, not just one.
The War Zone reported in early April that between two and four AH/MH-6 Little Birds operated by the U.S. Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were intentionally destroyed at the same Iranian airstrip where the MC-130Js were demolished in place. The CRS report did not list those Little Birds, an omission that raises its own questions about the completeness of the 42-aircraft tally.
Drones: 25 of 42 losses
Drones accounted for 25 of the 42 aircraft on the CRS list, 24 MQ-9 Reapers and one MQ-4C Triton lost in a mishap reported April 14. The Reaper losses are significant in volume but carry no aircrew risk, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach framed them as a cost worth paying. He told the House Armed Services Committee on May 20 that the Reaper had been the campaign's standout platform despite the losses, as Military Times reported.
"Perhaps maybe the most valuable player was unmanned. No other platform is even close to the MQ-9."
That is a defensible argument, unmanned platforms absorb risk that would otherwise fall on pilots. But 24 Reapers is not a rounding error. Each MQ-9 costs roughly in the tens of millions, and the fleet is not infinite.
A $29 billion bill that keeps growing
Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee on May 12 that the cost of operations in Iran had risen sharply. Speaking to Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., Hurst laid out the trajectory plainly:
"So, at the time of testimony from the ask, it was $25 billion, but the joint staff team and the comptroller team are constantly looking at that estimate, and so now we think it's closer to $29 [billion]."
Hurst attributed the increase to "updated repair and replacement of equipment costs and also just general operational costs keep people in theater." And that $29 billion figure does not include the cost of repairing damaged air bases and other U.S. installations in the region.
Four billion dollars in cost growth in less than two weeks, from April 29 to May 12, is a pace that should alarm appropriators on both sides of the aisle. The CRS authors themselves acknowledged that their tally "may remain subject to revision due to multiple factors, which may include classification, ongoing combat activity, and attribution."
What Congress still doesn't know
The CRS report works entirely from open sources. It draws on news accounts and official statements, not classified damage assessments. That means Congress's own research service cannot tell lawmakers whether the real number is 42 or something considerably higher.
Several open questions stand out. Did the Pentagon complete its own comprehensive assessment of aircraft losses and damage? Were one or two HH-60W helicopters actually hit during the rescue flight Gen. Caine described? Why did the CRS report omit the Little Birds that The War Zone reported destroyed at the same Iranian airstrip? And what were the names of the six KC-135 crew members who gave their lives over western Iraq on March 12?
The families know. The public should, too.
The real cost of a 40-day war
Operation Epic Fury lasted 40 days. In that span, the United States lost or sustained damage to 42 aircraft across at least six locations, Kuwait, Iran, western Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and an unnamed forward airstrip inside Iranian territory. The campaign produced friendly-fire shoot-downs, base strikes against parked aircraft, deliberate demolition of special operations planes that could not be extracted, and a tanker crash that killed every soul aboard.
The dollar cost climbed from $25 billion to $29 billion in under two weeks, with base-repair expenses still excluded. The aircraft inventory, particularly the tanker fleet and the already-thin E-3 fleet, took hits that will take years and billions more to replace.
None of this means the campaign was wrong. Serious military operations carry serious costs. But serious costs demand serious accounting, and right now, Congress is working from a tally compiled from newspaper clippings because its own researchers cannot see the classified files.
When the government spends $29 billion and loses 42 aircraft in 40 days, the people who pay the bills and bear the grief deserve more than an open-source estimate and a comptroller who rounds to the nearest four billion.
