Thirty-nine aircraft. More than 13,000 sorties. Five weeks of sustained air combat over and around Iran. The War Zone has published a comprehensive, open-source tracking of every US aircraft confirmed lost or damaged during Operation Epic Fury — and the numbers tell a story that goes far beyond individual incidents. This is the most significant US air campaign since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it has come with a cost that the Pentagon has not experienced in a generation. The last time American forces lost this many aircraft in combat was Vietnam.

The Drone Toll

The single largest category of losses is unmanned. Up to 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones were destroyed during the campaign, according to CBS reporting — roughly 60 percent of total attrition. The Reaper, a workhorse of American ISR and strike operations for two decades, was designed for permissive environments where the enemy has no serious air defences. Iran’s integrated air defence network, built around Russian-supplied S-300 systems and domestically produced Bavar-373 batteries, is not a permissive environment. Each MQ-9 costs approximately $32 million. Losing 24 of them represents nearly $770 million in hardware — before counting the intelligence-gathering capability that went down with them.

Manned Losses: The Hardest Numbers

Five manned combat aircraft were shot down in flight. Four were F-15E Strike Eagles — the Air Force’s primary long-range strike fighter. One was an A-10 Warthog, the close air support aircraft that had been surged to the region to support ground-oriented missions. The most high-profile incident came on April 3, when an F-15E with the callsign Dude 44 was hit by a shoulder-fired missile over Iran’s Zagros Mountains, triggering a massive 155-aircraft combat search and rescue operation. Perhaps the most symbolically significant loss was an F-35A Lightning II that was hit over Iranian airspace. The pilot ejected safely, but the incident marked the first confirmed combat damage to a fifth-generation stealth fighter — a milestone that air forces around the world will study for years.

Beyond the fighters, the campaign also cost the Air Force an E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft, destroyed on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia during an Iranian missile and drone attack in late March. The E-3G is one of the most valuable aircraft in the US inventory — a flying command post that coordinates the entire air battle. Losing one is not just a financial blow; it is an operational one. At least two KC-135R tankers were also lost in the same attack, along with damage to six other aircraft.

Friendly Fire and Operational Losses

Not all losses came from enemy action. Three F-15E Strike Eagles were shot down on March 1 in a friendly fire incident involving Kuwaiti Air Force F/A-18 aircraft — a tragedy that accounts for a significant portion of the manned fighter losses. Additional aircraft were deliberately destroyed during combat search and rescue operations in Iranian territory, when recovering the airframe was deemed too dangerous or impossible. Operational losses like these are an inevitable feature of sustained, high-intensity air campaigns. They happened in Desert Storm, in Allied Force over Serbia, and in the opening weeks of Iraqi Freedom. What distinguishes Epic Fury is the scale: 39 aircraft in 39 days, against an adversary with genuine air defence capability.

What the Numbers Mean

The loss rate — roughly one aircraft per day — is sustainable for a military the size of America’s, at least in the short term. The US Air Force alone operates thousands of aircraft. But the composition of the losses matters as much as the quantity. Each F-15E, each Reaper, each AWACS represents years of training, maintenance, and institutional knowledge. Replacing the hardware is expensive. Replacing the crews, when they are lost, is impossible. For military planners worldwide, Operation Epic Fury is now a case study in what a modern air campaign against a near-peer air defence network actually looks like. The age of consequence-free precision bombing is over. Air power still works — but it bleeds.

Sources: The War Zone, CBS News, Breaking Defense, Air & Space Forces Magazine