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Posted on 08/18/2026 10:41:19 PM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
The military has lost 25% of its fleet over the past five months
The U.S. has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, worth at least $1.3 billion, since the start of its war on Iran, the Washington Post reported Friday.
The drones can cost between $30 and $50 million each, depending on their sensor and weapons payload. The U.S. military has lost roughly 25% of its pre-war fleet in the past five months.
A defense official told the Washington Post that some of the drones were not shot down by Iranian forces, but instead were lost after their communications link to their operators failed. They did not say how many were lost this way.
Observers say the MQ-9 losses are par for the course amid a costly war with Iran.
“The drip, drip, drip of this news shows how much the Trump administration is drawing down U.S. arsenals to support the war in Iran,” Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told RS. “First it was interceptors, then it was naval deployments, now it is drones, and tomorrow it will be something new.”
“U.S. allies in the region know better, which is why, with the exception of Israel and partly the UAE, they are all pressing for deescalation, not a full-on renewal of the war,” Logan said.
(Excerpt) Read more at responsiblestatecraft.org ...
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Nice try, Tokyo Rose.
This one of the foreign adventures in recent memory that actually makes sense. This insane regime with nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems would have been a disaster... Quibbling over $1.3 Billion in drones when $Hundreds of Billions have been wasted in the Democrat money laundering scheme still going on in Ukraine is absolutely ridiculous.
Denying issues exist is no way to resolve them.
Do you actually think we’re not building more drones?
One suggestion might be to substitute “used” for “lost”. They were not lost - they were deployed to some effect. This piece is nonsense.
“45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, worth at least $1.3 billion”
~$30 million each
31 Iranian refineries + 31 Israeli missiles = Good times for Iranian shoe repairmen
“Denying issues exist is no way to resolve them.”
Ukraine isn’t spending $30 million on each drone hitting a Wildberries warehouse.
The real issue here is: “How on earth do our $30 million plus drones not have auto-navigation (by multiple means) to fly themselves to an area of strong comms, should they lose their controller’s signal?”
My goodness, that tech is at least 40 years old.
If it takes losing some antiquated equipment to demonstrate to knuckleheads at DOD that the equipment is antiquated, the losses are actually a good thing.
It would really only take cheap Ukie style drone hits on the distillation towers. Of note, 10 or 11 is the number of Iranian refineries that can actually crack raw crude oil. Apparently the rest are downstream operations.
Imagine trying to run a country the size (both in area and population) of Iran, with no refined products.
US allies in the region pressing for de-escalation are going to end up with 2 choices if they get their way:
Effective rule from Tehran
or
Acquire their own nukes. The Saudis in particular have (some time ago) stated that if Iran gets nukes, they will as well. A nuclear arms race in the Middle East is as strong a guarantee for eventual disaster as can be imagined.
It sounds like Reaper drones may have some issues that need to be worked out. Better to find out now rather than later.
Exactly. Better to discover one’s own chink in the armor now, rather than in the coming full blown war with the chicoms.
The results of our military campaign are stunning by any measure and this article miscasts our success's as a loss which is total BS
We lost around 600 drones in Vietnam and at the height of the conflict we were losing 75 fighter jets an 100 helicopters a MONTH. This is not to mention the huge loss of American soldiers KIA or wounded
In contrast, we have destroyed Iran, the worlds predominant terrorist state , in a few months for the combat loss of primarily 45 un manned Reaper drones, one F15, two C-130 plus a handful of helicopters
We have literally lost more aircraft in training accidents here in the US than we have in combat losses in Iran
The US has taken on the best air defense systems Russia and China can produce in Iran and we have only lost a handful of our most vulnerable Reaper drones sent into the highest threat environments, one F-15 shot down by a lucky shoulder launched missile and a few helos.
I can assure that the rest of the world's military leaders are stunned these numbers and even more by the light losses in Israeli drones - which have been higher than those of the US
Drones get sent to places we don't want to send manned aircraft because they risk being shot down - that is the job of drones
How old is the reaper drone? Flown in combat in 2001, original production and design, 1990’s. Probably pentium processors, and not designed for gps jamming to a great extent. This is a 30 year old drone design (maybe older). I would expect operational losses of 30 year old equipment on a more modern battlefield. Yes, as things get old they tend to break and malfunction more.
I’m a little unclear on exactly what volume of Ukie drones is, on average, involved in any given attack on a Wildberries warehouse, but it appears such attacks may involve dozens of armed drones, and even higher numbers of decoys, the tactic being to overwhelm Russian AD. (It’s working.)
However, the cost still pales in comparison to the results. That big Wildberries warehouse cooked a couple days ago had somewhere north of $200 million of inventory in it. Then you can add in the cost of the building and equipment, general disruption, and the cumulative psychological impact of these attacks. That last is likely Ukraine’s main goal.
Is that an XX or an XY trying to look XX? Mental health issues could go a long way to explaining it’s penchant for anti-military articles.
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