For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem.

On 27 August 2026, an F-15EX Eagle II wearing Oregon tail markings rolled down a runway at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, with a live 500-pound bomb bolted to its belly. The Air National Guard released the photographs on 9 September. It was the first time an operational F-15EX unit had employed live air-to-ground ordnance.

Read that sentence carefully, because the internet has already mangled it once. This is not the first time an operational F-15EX dropped a bomb. That happened in May and was announced in July. This is the first time the bombs were real.

What Actually Happened at Nellis

The 142nd Wing took its F-15EXs to Nellis for about three weeks spanning late August and early September, supporting the Air Force’s Weapons Instructor Course. Nellis is where the Air Force builds its weapons officers, the people who write the tactics everyone else flies. Showing up there with a brand-new capability is a statement of intent.

Official Air National Guard photographs show the jets carrying a single 500-pound Mk 82 freefall bomb on the fuselage centreline, loaded on the ramp and then departing with it still attached. Aircraft spotters outside the fence also caught F-15EXs hauling a 2,000-pound Mk 84 in the same station. TWZ, which broke the story on 10 September, noted both loadouts.

The weapons are about as unglamorous as modern ordnance gets. Mk 82 and Mk 84 are dumb iron bombs, the same basic shapes the Air Force has been dropping since Vietnam. That is precisely the point. You do not start a new air-to-ground pipeline with a networked glide weapon. You start with something that falls.

The July First Was a Different First

Here is where a lot of coverage goes sideways, so let us be precise about it.

In early May 2026, pilots, maintainers and munitions Airmen from the 142nd Wing went to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho and dropped bombs from F-15EXs into the Mountain Home range complex. The wing announced it on 17 July. Every outlet correctly called it the first air-to-ground weapons employment by an operational Eagle II unit.

But those bombs were inert. Crews loaded 500-pound BDU-50s and 2,000-pound BDU-56s, which are built to the exact size and weight of Mk 82 and Mk 84 bombs and filled with concrete instead of explosive. Over 10 missions the wing dropped 24 BDU-50s and 12 BDU-56s, 36 shapes in total, with satisfactory scores and zero safety incidents. Impressive, genuinely historic, and entirely non-explosive.

The wing said at the time that the next step was live weapons at Nellis at the end of August. That is exactly what happened. So there are two firsts here, three months apart: first bombs, then first live bombs. Anyone reporting a single bare first has collapsed two separate milestones into one.

A Fighter Wing That Had to Teach Itself to Bomb

None of this was plug-and-play. The 142nd had never operated an aircraft with an operational bombing mission. The F-15C carries missiles and a gun and nothing else. When the Eagle IIs arrived, the wing had jets that could drop bombs and a workforce that had never done it.

So they built the pipeline from scratch. Three of the wing’s pilots went through a nine-month course covering the science, tactics and procedures of air-to-ground weapons employment, then came home and wrote a compressed syllabus to bring everyone else up to speed. Weapons loaders travelled to Nellis earlier in 2026 to work alongside F-15E Strike Eagle crews from the 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron and get certified on bomb loading, then went back to Portland and trained the rest of the shop.

Maj. Jesse Loya, one of the three pilots with prior air-to-ground experience, was blunt about how compressed the timeline was. The wing did in weeks what the formal course takes nine months to do, and he credited the pilots rather than the syllabus.

Worth noting: the F-15EX had already been tested in the air-to-ground role by the Air Force’s test community, notably the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The test world had done it. The operational world had not. That is the distinction the wing has been steadily erasing all year.

The Empty Back Seat Nobody Is Using Yet

The Eagle II keeps the two-seat cockpit it inherited from the Strike Eagle, but the Air Force has generally flown it with one pilot. That leaves a fully equipped rear station sitting empty on every sortie, which becomes a lot more interesting once you start loading bombs.

A back-seater would take the sensor, weapons, communications and electronic-warfare workload off a single pilot on a complex strike, and the same logic applies to the drone-controller role the Air Force keeps circling. The Weapons School has reportedly been involved in developing two-seat F-15EX operations, which suggests somebody is already thinking about it seriously.

One capability the Oregon jets have not shown is conformal fuel tanks. The F-15EX can carry the same CFTs as the F-15E, which add fuel and weapons stations, but the 142nd’s aircraft have so far been photographed without them. The plan for fitting them remains unclear, and it matters: heavy, long-range strike is exactly where CFTs earn their keep.

Why This Reaches Well Beyond Portland

The Air Force has been careful to say the Eagle II’s primary mission is still counter-air, particularly homeland defence. It has been equally clear that it wants the jet able to hand combatant commanders a strike package. Those two statements are not in tension. They just mean the aircraft is being grown into its full shape, deliberately and slowly.

And the fleet is about to get much bigger. Beyond Oregon, Guard units in California, Louisiana and Michigan are slated for the type. Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina is due to receive F-15EXs replacing its F-15Es, which are pencilled in to move to Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. Two active-duty squadrons are set to re-establish the Eagle presence at Kadena. The first Kadena-bound jet recently left Boeing’s St. Louis plant for Portland, where it gets its final preparation before heading to Okinawa.

The test fleet is also pushing into smarter weapons. Earlier this year, an 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron F-15EX took part in a munitions-load event at Kadena where crews practised loading live GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb IIs. Iron bombs in Nevada, networked glide weapons in Japan: the two halves of the same programme.

None of this makes the Eagle II a replacement for the Strike Eagle in the air-to-ground mission, and nobody serious is claiming it does. What it makes the Eagle II is a fighter that no longer has to pick a lane. The 142nd spent three decades doing one thing extremely well. It now does two, and the second one leaves craters.

The video below shows 142nd Wing weapons crews at work on the Eagle II at Portland earlier this year, which is the unglamorous half of every milestone in this story.

Sources: U.S. Air National Guard / DVIDS imagery and the 142nd Wing release; TWZ; Air Force Times; Forbes; The Aviationist.