Credit where credit is due. Iranian airforce did play it's role.
️ Iranian F-5 jet breached US air defenses in first such strike since Korean War, as wider attacks caused major damage to US bases
A 25 April report by NBC News reveals that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet successfully carried out a bombing run on Camp Buehring in Kuwait early on in the US–Israeli war on Iran, penetrating layered US air defenses that included Patriot missile systems, short-range interceptors, radar coverage, and regional surveillance networks.
The strike is considered exceptionally rare, marking what analysts say is the first time since the Korean War that an "enemy fixed-wing aircraft" has successfully hit a major US military base, a benchmark often traced back to a North Korean low-altitude night raid on 15 April, 1953, that killed two US soldiers on Cho-do Island. For more than 70 years following that incident, the US maintained near-total air superiority over its military bases.
The incident also undercuts repeated claims that Iran’s air force had been fully neutralized at the outset of the war, demonstrating that even aging aircraft platforms retained operational capability. US officials cited in the reporting said the F-5 approached at low altitude and dropped unguided munitions, exploiting gaps in detection systems designed primarily to counter missiles and higher-altitude threats. The success of the strike, regardless of the aircraft’s fate, has been described as strategically significant in both operational and symbolic terms.
The HESA Kowsar is the aircraft most likely utilized in the operation; Iran’s domestically produced iteration of the American Northrop F-5 Tiger II. Categorized as a third-generation fighter jet, it is based on an airframe design that originated in the late 1950's and entered heavy production throughout the 1960's. Iran successfully reverse-engineered this platform from the fleet of F-5s provided by the United States during the 1970's, prior to the Iranian Revolution. While the Kowsar maintains the traditional single-tail profile of its predecessor, it is frequently distinguished from the Saeqeh, a separate Iranian derivative notable for its modified twin vertical tail configuration.
Beyond the F-5 strike, the report points to a far broader scale of damage across US military installations in the Gulf. Iranian retaliatory attacks hit dozens of targets across multiple countries, damaging warehouses, aircraft hangars, command headquarters, satellite communications systems, runways, advanced radar infrastructure, and multiple aircraft, with repair costs expected to reach into the billions. Some assessments suggest over 100 targets across several bases were struck, raising questions about the full extent of damage not publicly disclosed.
Separate drone strikes further exposed vulnerabilities in US defenses, including a March 1 attack on a tactical operations center near Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba that killed six US service members and wounded more than 60. Analysts say the combination of drone saturation tactics and limited manned aircraft operations forced US defenses to stretch across multiple threat layers, highlighting weaknesses in base protection, logistics resilience, and the survivability of forward-deployed forces under sustained, multi-vector attacks.
(NBC, Defence Security Asia)
