The HH-60W Jolly Green II flew into Iran on April 2 to rescue the crew of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle. It found the pilot, pulled him aboard, and took hits from small arms fire on the way out — wounding crew members but staying airborne. The helicopter did everything it was designed to do. Except defend itself against the missiles it knew were coming. Now the Air Force is rushing to fix that. On April 7, just three days after the rescue, the service issued a request for information seeking vendors who can equip the entire HH-60W fleet with advanced infrared countermeasures — the one system conspicuously absent from the aircraft when it flew into the most dangerous airspace American helicopters have entered since Mogadishu.

A Warning System That Can Only Watch

The Air Force fielded the HH-60W with the AAR-57 Common Missile Warning System — a sensor suite that detects the ultraviolet bloom of an incoming missile’s rocket motor and alerts the crew. What it does not do is stop the missile. The crew gets a warning tone and a direction indicator. After that, they are on their own. In practical terms, this means the pilot must manoeuvre — hard turns, terrain masking, flare dispensing — to break a missile’s lock. Against older, less agile MANPADS, that can work. Against modern infrared seekers with counter-countermeasure logic, it is a bet with deteriorating odds. The Air Force acknowledged the vulnerability in blunt language. Its RFI stated that the lack of infrared countermeasures “significantly increases the risk of infrared guided missile engagement, jeopardizing mission success, aircraft survivability, and crew safety.” That is about as close to an admission of failure as Pentagon procurement documents get.

CIRCM and DAIRCM: Blinding the Seeker

The fix involves a category of system that already exists and already works on other helicopters. The Common Infrared Countermeasure (CIRCM) and the Distributed Aperture Infrared Countermeasure (DAIRCM) both use low-energy lasers to jam an incoming missile’s infrared seeker. When a heat-seeking missile locks onto a helicopter’s engine exhaust, the countermeasure system detects the launch, identifies the incoming threat, and fires a precisely aimed laser beam into the missile’s guidance optics. The laser overwhelms the seeker with false signals, causing the missile to lose its track and veer off course. The entire sequence — detection, identification, engagement — takes seconds. The Army has fielded CIRCM on its Apache and Black Hawk fleets for years. The Air Force’s decision not to include a similar system on the HH-60W from the start was a cost and schedule trade-off that looked reasonable on paper and nearly proved fatal in Iran.

The Rescue That Exposed the Gap

The April 2–4 rescue operation was the most complex combat search and rescue mission since the Balkan wars. Two F-15E crew members went down over Iranian territory after their Strike Eagle was hit, triggering an extraction that eventually involved 155 aircraft — four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, and 13 dedicated rescue platforms. The HH-60Ws penetrated deep into Iranian airspace, collected the downed aircrew, and fought their way out under fire. Both helicopters took small-arms hits. Crew members were wounded. The aircraft remained flyable — a testament to the Jolly Green II’s combat resilience — but the absence of an active missile defence system hung over the entire operation like unfinished business.

A Fix That Should Have Come First

The HH-60W was supposed to be a generational leap over the HH-60G Pave Hawk it replaced. And in many ways it is: double the internal fuel capacity, a fully digital glass cockpit, greater range, and better payload. The Air Force spent years and billions developing an aircraft specifically for the mission of flying into hostile territory to retrieve downed aircrew. The DAIRCM upgrade was originally projected for fiscal year 2029 or beyond — a timeline that assumed the helicopter would not see high-intensity combat for several more years. Iran changed that calculation overnight. The Air Force plans to provide either CIRCM or DAIRCM as government-furnished equipment, which a contractor will integrate onto the aircraft. How fast that happens will depend on funding, testing, and the usual procurement friction. But the urgency is real. The next rescue mission could come tomorrow, and the Jolly Green will fly whether the laser is installed or not. The crews proved in Iran that they will go anywhere, under any fire, to bring a pilot home. The least the Air Force can do is give them a way to shoot back at the missiles. Sources: Breaking Defense, Aviation Week, Defence Security Asia, Air & Space Forces Magazine