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The aviation losses keep mounting:
- A-10 Warthog lost (pilot ditched the plane over the Gulf in friendly waters)
- Blackhawks involved in search and rescue operations got shot up, wounding the helicopter crew members.
- And now, a Chinook was "damaged" by a shahed drone in Kuwait

https://twitter.com/x/status/2040357844428427327

Notable from the Chinook photos: it must have been stationary out in the open long enough for Iran to hit it with a one-way attack drone flying towards pre-programmed set of coordinates. But after the Chinook was hit - that's when they towed it into a hardened shelter.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
An incredible op to get the WSO out. Over 100 personnel involved. And they wrote off $300M in assets to do it:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2040767344511721974

Whatever one thinks of this war, their commitment to leave no man behind is incredible. You won't see anybody else doing this to get one crewmember back.
 
afransen said:
I suspect this is more a PR stunt to avoid a hostage situation.
Click to expand...

Of course. But how many other countries would write of $300M worth of kit to not have one of their troops paraded on enemy television?

This is an important part of morale for the US Military and rubs off on NATO. The idea that no expense will be spared and no effort restrained to get every member home.

By comparison, how many rescue operations are the Russians mounting in Ukraine where they've had dozens of aircraft shot down?

This isn't recent either. Think back to the rescue of Jessica Lynch in 2003. Or the Black Hawk Down incident and the capture there. Or getting back Capt. Scott O'Grady in the Balkans. Heck, the Americans still hunt for Vietnam and Korean era losses with DNA. And most famously the Germans were the first to discover in WWII that the Americans would routinely expend unfathomable (to the German mind) amounts of fuel and ammunition to avoid casualties in combat. It's a product of having a secure industrial base. American don't care about replacing kit. They care about replacing people. Europeans getting their factories bombed found people more disposable. You can literally see this cultural difference in comments on this rescue on social media.
 
afransen said:
I suspect this is more a PR stunt to avoid a hostage situation.
Click to expand...

You could have argued this was just a PR stunt if there wasn't a very long history of US treating their service members with such reverence and respect, as outlined by @kEiThZ

When a US service member goes into a fight, they know the entire military has got their back. It does a hell of a lot for the fighting morale no matter how dire the situation they find themselves in.

kEiThZ said:
This is an important part of morale for the US Military and rubs off on NATO.
Click to expand...
I would argue the sentiment even rubbed of on Russians at one point in the past. Must have been all the Hollywood movies the current Russian service members grew up with. When the full scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, the Russian milbloggerverse was full of "leave no man behind" posts. And in fact, in the very first weeks of the war, Russian command did attempt to live up to that standard. The problem they ran into was that they were utterly incapable of doing so. They could not establish air superiority, yet they still sent 4th gen aircraft deep inside Ukraine. Once they got shot down, in an attempt to leave no man behind, Russians would send a helicopter plus a combat air support plane on a search and rescue (SAR) mission. Since the Ukrainians were themselves hunting for downed pilots, there were usually units with MANPADs waiting for the SAR aircraft. Plenty of SAR helicopters and Su-24s downed that way.

After leaving plenty of men behind and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment on failed SAR missions, Russia just stopped promoting the idea that they will leave no man behind. And shortly after they even stopped picking up their dead from the battlefield (saves them money on KIA payouts).

So yes, no matter how you feel about US war on Iran, you have to give them credit where the credit is due - they value their service members like no one else.
 
If they really valued their service members and not just wanting to be seen valuing them, they wouldn't have started this hasty and I'll considered war of choice.
 
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Fighting potential future US war crimes with war crimes of their own: Iran assembles its civilians into human chains surrounding its powerplants and across their bridges. I.e. building literal human shields around the potential targets of tonight's US airstrikes:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2041516752115310932

https://twitter.com/x/status/2041510077123760613

A reminder for anyone cheering on the Islamic Republic: using human shields is a war crime. Arguably an even more egregious war crime than bombing civilian infrastructure. A time honored tradition to use their people as human shields by the folks that can only be described as "the good guys", right?
 
I was just telling someone. How long before the Israelis violate the ceasefire?

I am skeptical this holds. I think the regime needs times to regroup, rearm and reset. I think the Americans and Israelis have mostly run out of targets and need some activity to establish a new pattern of life and renew the dynamic targeting deck. High risk they'll be back at it in days.
 
kEiThZ said:
I was just telling someone. How long before the Israelis violate the ceasefire?

I am skeptical this holds. I think the regime needs times to regroup, rearm and reset. I think the Americans and Israelis have mostly run out of targets and need some activity to establish a new pattern of life and renew the dynamic targeting deck. High risk they'll be back at it in days.
Click to expand...
What choice do they have? The objectives have not been achieved.
 
kEiThZ said:
They could just accept the loss.
Click to expand...
Oh, but Trump, Vance, Hegseth and Co. have been doing pressers claiming how this was a complete and total victory the likes of which the world has never seen. All objectives have been overachieved bigly. And the fact that Iran now gets to set up a toll booth at the Straight of Hormuz, charging $2M per tanker of oil, that's just great for business.

They should really write a book on this great victory, title it Art of Surrender or something.

But it sounds to me like they actually intend to tuck tail and run. They just have to reign in the Israelis. Without the US refuelers, they can't reach Iran anyway, so they just have to worry about Israel's Lebanon escapades. They do be landgrabby...
 
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