For seven months of this war, the pattern at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has been the same. Iran fires. Patriots answer. Jordan and CENTCOM announce that the interception rate was high, the base is operational, and everyone is fine. Tehran claims devastation. Nobody produces evidence either way.

That pattern broke this week. People familiar with the matter have confirmed to Air & Space Forces Magazine that the Iranian ballistic missile barrage fired at the base on 8 September got through far enough to hurt aircraft on the ground. One A-10 Thunderbolt II came away with a severely damaged wing. Around eight F-15E Strike Eagles were lightly damaged and are still considered serviceable.

No Americans were killed. But this is the first specific, sourced account of Iranian missiles doing real damage to United States combat aircraft in this conflict, and it lands at exactly the moment when the interceptors keeping those aircraft alive are running short.

What actually happened on the night of 8 September

The barrage came hours after US forces struck five Iranian crude oil tankers in the Gulf, the second such strike in a week. Tehran answered the way it has answered all year: with ballistic missiles aimed at the American air power hub closest to it that is not in the Gulf.

Open-source accounts put the salvo at roughly twenty missiles, split between Muwaffaq Salti and the neighbouring Al-Azraq facility, with some of the warheads carrying cluster submunitions designed to spread damage across a wide area rather than punch through a single hardened target. That choice matters. A cluster warhead is a poor weapon against a reinforced shelter and an excellent one against aircraft sitting on an open ramp.

American and Jordanian crews fired dozens of Patriot interceptors into the incoming stream. Footage circulated by open-source analysts shows launchers firing in near-continuous sequence, and the accounts attached to that footage put the interceptor count above sixty. Jordanian authorities said 18 of 20 missiles were stopped and the remaining two fell short of their targets.

Both things can be true. An interception rate of ninety percent is an outstanding result by any historical standard, and it still leaves two warheads arriving at a base with dozens of aircraft parked on it. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed heavy damage within hours. Jordanian and American officials pushed back hard on the scale of it. Neither side offered pictures.

A damaged wing is not a destroyed aircraft

The distinction the sources drew is worth holding onto. Eight lightly damaged Strike Eagles that remain serviceable is an inconvenience: a maintenance surge, some panel work, some inspections, and the jets fly again. One A-10 with a severely damaged wing is a different problem, and depending on where the damage sits it can mean a wing replacement or a write-off.

The Warthog community has a long institutional memory for this. In April 2003, flying with the same 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing that is at Muwaffaq Salti today, Captain Kim Campbell brought an A-10 home from a close air support mission over Baghdad after it lost hydraulics to ground fire, flying the last stretch in manual reversion and landing without hydraulic brakes or steering. The aeroplane was built to be hit and to come back. It was not built to be hit while parked.

That is the uncomfortable part of this story. Aircraft on a ramp cannot manoeuvre, cannot use countermeasures, and cannot do anything at all except wait for somebody else's missile to arrive first. The only defence a parked jet has is the Patriot battery down the road, or a hardened shelter, and there are never enough of either.

The interceptor arithmetic is getting worse

Every one of those sixty-odd Patriot rounds came out of a stockpile that was already being watched nervously in Washington. In a late-July assessment, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put remaining Patriot inventories at under 1,000 rounds and THAAD at roughly 250, after the opening phase of the campaign.

“Diminished stockpiles may force the United States and its coalition partners to take more risks with interceptions.”

Mark F. Cancian — Senior Adviser, Defense and Security Department, CSIS, writing with Chris H. Park, 27 July 2026

Taking more risks with interceptions means, in practice, letting more missiles through. It means a battery commander choosing to engage the track heading for the fuel farm and not the one heading for the eastern ramp. On the night of 8 September, something like that arithmetic appears to have been done, and an A-10 paid for it.

CSIS also notes there is no cheap substitute waiting in the wings. For ballistic missile defence there is Patriot, there is THAAD, and there are Navy ships with Standard Missiles that are usually in the wrong ocean. A Patriot round costs a multiple of what an Iranian medium-range ballistic missile costs to build, and Iran has been happy to trade at that exchange rate all year.

Why Muwaffaq Salti keeps getting hit

The base sits east of Amman near the town of Azraq. It is the Royal Jordanian Air Force's principal fast-jet station and home to its F-16 fleet, and it also hosts the American 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing. That combination makes it the most useful piece of real estate the United States has for air operations against Iran that does not sit inside easy range of the Gulf.

It is also, for the same reason, the address Tehran keeps writing on its missiles. The base has been struck repeatedly through 2026. In July, an Iranian missile attack there killed three US Army soldiers. CENTCOM did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this week's damage.

What is different now is that the damage is specific and it is to aircraft. For months the story of this campaign has been that the defences held. This week the defences mostly held, and a Warthog still lost a wing.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; AIRLIVE; Center for Strategic and International Studies; open-source imagery via OSINTtechnical.