Plane spotters at RAF Mildenhall pulled out their long lenses last week and got a picture nobody at Air Mobility Command was hoping to see twice. A US Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker, peppered with what aviation analysts identified as shrapnel impacts down the fuselage and along the underside of one wing, was photographed on the parallel taxiway. A few days later, another arrived. Same paint scheme. Same scars.

The tankers are flying home from Operation Epic Fury — the US Air Force’s 40-day campaign against Iranian nuclear infrastructure that ended in early May. And what their fuselages quietly show is something the Air Force has not yet wanted to say out loud: Iran’s air defences hit aircraft that the public side of the war has so far been kept silent about.

A tanker is supposed to be invulnerable

That is not strictly true. But the doctrine of operational air war has always been that high-value air assets — tankers, AEW, ISR — operate inside a friendly umbrella, hundreds of miles back from the contested airspace, where the shooter fighters can reach them and the SAMs cannot. The visible damage to these KC-135s says that umbrella was either thinner than planned, or that someone was willing to push the tankers closer than doctrine allowed.

Iranian air defences during Epic Fury included several systems the US had not seen in significant numbers in earlier engagements: Bavar-373 long-range SAMs, the upgraded Sayyad-4B interceptor, and the Khordad-15 mobile system. Several of these have advertised engagement ranges well over 200 km. A KC-135 with a refuelling boom out is, by any radar’s standards, a slow, predictable, very large target.

What the photos actually show

The first set of images, posted to X by UK-based aviation photographer Howard Altman of The War Zone, clearly show small irregular holes around the rear fuselage, consistent with fragmentation rather than direct missile impact. The flight engineers and maintainers at Mildenhall — which is home to the 100th Air Refueling Wing, the USAF’s only permanent forward-based tanker wing in Europe — have been working through the airframes since they arrived.

The Air Force has not officially commented on which sortie produced the damage, or whether either KC-135 was inside Iranian airspace when hit. Standard practice would suggest the damage came from a SAM that engaged the tanker at long range, detonated within fragmentation distance but not direct contact, and that the aircrew flew the jet home — which is, in itself, a quiet endorsement of the Stratotanker’s airframe robustness.

42 aircraft, and counting

The Congressional Research Service’s after-action report on Epic Fury — leaked to the press last week — put the total US aircraft loss at 42. Two F-15Es, one F-16, an E-3 Sentry, four MQ-9 Reapers, three Super Hornets and an estimated 31 other airframes ranging from cargo to ISR are inside that figure. Battle damage that did not result in a write-off is a separate, much larger, less-publicised number.

The KC-135 fleet is 68 years old as a type. The youngest airframe in service was delivered in 1965. The Air Force is in the middle of replacing them with the KC-46A Pegasus, but the Pegasus has its own well-documented vision-system problems, and Epic Fury was fought overwhelmingly by Stratotankers. That those tankers are now coming back to England with scars on their wings is the quiet end-of-war report nobody in the Pentagon press room has called a briefing about.

Sources: The War Zone, Congressional Research Service, US Air Force.