Did Kuwait really shoot down three F-15s?
Posted on: Mar 04, 2026 14:25 IST | Posted by: Rt
The US armed forces wants you to trust that its mop up daytime of send combat losses since the Vietnam War was the result of a “friendly fire” mishap. But do some digging and that story begins to look far-fetched.
Three US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down over Kuwait on Monday morning in what US Central Command (CENTCOM) called “an apparent friendly fire incident.” All six crew members – two per plane – ejected safely and suffered no serious injuries.
The incident made Monday the joint worst day of losses for the US Air Force since the Vietnam War. Only once in the five decades since Vietnam has the USAF lost three fighter jets in a single day: when two F-16s and an F-15 were shot down over Iraq on the second day of Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
CENTCOM claimed that the F-15s “were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses.” While this story may well be true, some inconvenient plot holes suggest that someone else may have been responsible.
Video footage suggests that the F-15s suffered hits to their engines, indicating that they were taken out by heat-seeking missiles.
WATCH: Moment US fighter jet got shot in Kuwait pic.twitter.com/2nlUnKlmUZ
However, none of Kuwait’s surface-to-air missiles operate this way. Kuwait has 35 M902 Patriot missile batteries, and a smaller number of HAWK, NASAMS, and Italian-made Spada 2000 systems. Those systems all fire radar-guided, not heat-seeking, missiles.
The Patriot’s PAC-3 missiles physically slam into the center mass of incoming jets or ballistic missiles, while the missiles fired by Kuwait’s other systems detonate a fragmentation warhead in close proximity to incoming threats. Used against jets, they typically detonate between the target’s fuel tanks and cockpit.
The trails typically left behind by PAC-3 and similar missiles were not visible in the sky at the time the F-15s were shot down.
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