A critical U.S. Air Force radar plane damaged by an Iranian attack this past weekend is a significant loss and harms the military’s battlespace awareness for missions in the Middle East and beyond, defense experts say.
An E-3 Sentry, an Airborne Early Earning and Control System aircraft or AWACS, was damaged during a March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, a U.S. official confirmed to Defense One. Photos circulated on social media purporting to be of the aircraft showed a smoldering E-3 split in half on a runway. A U.S. Central Command spokesperson declined to comment on the attack targeting the radar plane.
“Targeting those airfields and getting a lucky hit or two is not beyond reason, but if you take a look at the pictures available online of that particular AWACS aircraft, it’s obvious that was specifically targeted,” said Mark Gunzinger, the Mitchell Institute’s director of future concepts and capability assessments.
The E-3 was one of numerous U.S. military assets targeted at the air base, and marks one of the more expensive aircraft losses since the start of the Trump administration’s war with Iran that began Feb. 28. Each one costs more than $500 million when adjusted for inflation. The aircraft tracks a wide range of airborne threats and can transmit them to other aircraft for a complete picture of friendly and enemy aircraft and missiles in chaotic battle zones. Following the attack, there are now 15 E-3 Sentry aircraft with only 11 of them likely serviceable, one open-source intelligence and aviation tracking account said.
Defense experts said Iran’s continued hits on support aircraft such as radar planes and refuelers is clearly deliberate, and harms the Air Force’s ability to keep key combat aircraft in the fight.
“It is absolutely critical to the conduct of modern air warfare, to deconflict operations from multiple airfields and multiple services, as well as to assure that we have safety of flight over airspace, both hostile and friendly,” Gunzinger said. “So the loss of one aircraft is not good news.”
While being critical to providing command and control support in the ongoing war in Iran, the E-3 aircraft is also widely used for domestic missions to track missile threats. The loss of one harms all of those operations, a former military official said.
“These things are needed for other mission sets beyond this too. They’re needed for homeland defense. They’re needed for missions in the Pacific,” the official said. “Globally, you’re at a deficit. You’re already in a deficit day to day, and now you’re in even more of a deficit.”
“It puts a lot of pressure on other aspects of other missions that are of equal importance,” the former official added.
The attack on the Saudi Arabian base injured 12 service members and also damaged two KC-135 refueling aircraft, the New York Times reported. One of those refueling aircraft crashed earlier this month, killing six airmen and prompting calls from Air Force officials to upgrade communications networks aboard the aging refuelers.
“Our low-density, high-demand combat aircraft, the battle management, command-and-control ISR and air-refueling aircraft are increasingly critical to our ability to project airpower over long ranges,” Gunzinger said. “It’s not surprising that Iran has targeted them.”
The E-3 Sentry entered service in the mid-1970s. The E-7 Wedgetail was pitched as a replacement for the radar plane, but it faced scrutiny and criticism from the Air Force and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced a $2.4 billion award for Boeing to develop E-7 prototypes.
“This is a core Air Force mission set that’s just, once again, atrophied, and put in a position where you’ve got a critical thing you need in a very concentrated, old aircraft,” the former military official said. “[It’s] kind of the price you pay for under-investing.”
