Jeff Wise
At the opening of the air war against Iran, the U.S. and Israel won a massively one-sided victory that left Iran’s defenses in tatters and much of its leadership dead. “We achieved air superiority within two days, if that,” says Mark Gunzinger, an analyst at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. But just because a war starts well doesn’t mean it will end that way. “The enemy gets a vote,” as former secretary of Defense James Mattis liked to say.
Within hours of the opening salvos, Iran responded with barrages of its own, though of a different nature. Its air force neutralized, Iran turned to waves of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Though these were cheap and lo-fi compared with U.S. weapons, the Iran counterstrike took a surprisingly painful toll with a single drone killing six American soldiers at a base in Kuwait. Amid the confusion, a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter jet reportedly shot down three U.S. F-15 fighters, the most ever lost in combat. By the second week of the conflict, Iran had also destroyed some of America’s most sophisticated radar systems, each of which costs $500 million, and taken down 11 hi-tech Reaper drones with a total cost of $330 million.
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