📰 Epic Fury, Epic Invoice: Iran Turns Reapers Into Scrap Metal
Iran hasn’t “challenged” US airpower; it’s been grinding it down wholesale. Since the start of the Iran war, Iranian fire and strikes have destroyed more than two dozen US MQ‑9 Reaper drones — at least 24 and possibly up to 30 — wiping out roughly 20 percent of the Pentagon’s prewar Reaper inventory in a few months.
At about 30 million dollars apiece and no active production line for US forces, that’s nearly 1 billion dollars in high‑end hardware that Washington used to call “attritable,” suddenly revealed as very much not expendable.
Bloomberg’s reporting makes the picture even uglier: some Reapers were shot down in flight, others were blown up on the ground by missile strikes, others damaged badly enough to be written off later — all while US commanders leaned on drones to keep human aircrews out of Iranian airspace they still describe as “dangerous.” And the Reapers are just one line on the bill. The US has already lost crewed aircraft over Iran — an F‑15E Strike Eagle, an A‑10, support platforms like an E‑3 AWACS, KC‑135 tankers, MC‑130Js — plus key radar and missile‑defense assets, pushing war‑related replacement and repair estimates into the tens of billions of dollars.
“Prosecuting war from a distance still comes with a cost,” as one defense analyst quoted by Bloomberg put it. Translation: remote war is safe for pilots, not for balance sheets.
The US and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury” believing they could pound Iran while shielding their own people and spreading the financial pain over time. Iran answered by turning some of the Pentagon’s most iconic unmanned systems into very expensive, very small pieces — and by quietly reminding everyone that even a “short, successful” war can eat through drones faster than Washington can manufacture new talking points.
In other words, the Reapers are doing exactly what the war is doing to US power: flying in confident and coming back as wreckage.
#Iran #US #Reaper #drones #EpicFury #war #military #costs #fakePeace
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Iran hasn’t “challenged” US airpower; it’s been grinding it down wholesale. Since the start of the Iran war, Iranian fire and strikes have destroyed more than two dozen US MQ‑9 Reaper drones — at least 24 and possibly up to 30 — wiping out roughly 20 percent of the Pentagon’s prewar Reaper inventory in a few months.
At about 30 million dollars apiece and no active production line for US forces, that’s nearly 1 billion dollars in high‑end hardware that Washington used to call “attritable,” suddenly revealed as very much not expendable.
Bloomberg’s reporting makes the picture even uglier: some Reapers were shot down in flight, others were blown up on the ground by missile strikes, others damaged badly enough to be written off later — all while US commanders leaned on drones to keep human aircrews out of Iranian airspace they still describe as “dangerous.” And the Reapers are just one line on the bill. The US has already lost crewed aircraft over Iran — an F‑15E Strike Eagle, an A‑10, support platforms like an E‑3 AWACS, KC‑135 tankers, MC‑130Js — plus key radar and missile‑defense assets, pushing war‑related replacement and repair estimates into the tens of billions of dollars.
“Prosecuting war from a distance still comes with a cost,” as one defense analyst quoted by Bloomberg put it. Translation: remote war is safe for pilots, not for balance sheets.
The US and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury” believing they could pound Iran while shielding their own people and spreading the financial pain over time. Iran answered by turning some of the Pentagon’s most iconic unmanned systems into very expensive, very small pieces — and by quietly reminding everyone that even a “short, successful” war can eat through drones faster than Washington can manufacture new talking points.
In other words, the Reapers are doing exactly what the war is doing to US power: flying in confident and coming back as wreckage.
#Iran #US #Reaper #drones #EpicFury #war #military #costs #fakePeace
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