Foreign Policy > Iran

Cheering for the Enemy

The legacy media has an airplane problem.

J.R. Dunn | April 6, 2026

There’s nothing really new in the uproar surrounding the loss of a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle over Iran this past weekend. Media hysteria over the downing of a single U.S. aircraft has become a commonplace schtick in coverage of American wars over the past three decades.

During WW II, the U.S. lost over 23,000 planes in combat. I kid you not, playmates: 23,000 – and that’s only combat losses. Overall losses, including accidents, amounted to 65,164. The media talking heads would have had to be carried out in straitjackets if they’d been active at the time.

Losses dropped sharply following WW II. In Korea, the USAF lost 147 shot down out of a total of 1,000 losses. During the Vietnam War, 67 USAF planes were lost to North Vietnamese MiGs. The majority of the 1737 lost in combat were targeted by SAMs and anti-aircraft artillery.

Media acting out over relatively miniscule losses began in 1991 with the First Gulf War. On January 17, 1991, the opening night of the war, an F/A-18 piloted by Lt. Scott Speicher was shot down over Iraq, the war’s first fatality. It was believed for quite some time that Speicher’s plane had been shot down by an Iraqi SAM anticraft missile. But several years after the war – and this is only the first peculiarity involving this incident – various commentators began insisting that the plane had been shot down by a MiG-25. These claims were made with a disturbing intensity, as if proving that a U.S. aircraft had been downed in air-to-air combat would somehow flip the results........

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