Fox News can confirm that the 2nd crew member of the downed F15E fighter jet has been rescued and he and the members of the rescue team that extracted him from behind enemy lines in Iran are all safely out of Iran. That according to two senior US officials and multiple well placed sources in the region. The Weapons Systems Officer ejected along with the pilot when their F15E Strike Eagle they were flying was struck Thursday night (early Friday local time) in southwest Iran.
The WSO used the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training to evade capture, hiding on an elevated ridge after hiking away from the wreckage and putting out an emergency beacon.) US Special Operations rescue forces to include PJs (United States Air Force Pararescuemen (PJs) and many layers of elite rescue forces took part in the complex, layered mission to both find the crew member and also keep the Iranian forces who were hunting the American weapons system operator at bay. There are videos that have appeared from local eyewitnesses that show what appear to have been injured and dead Iranian members of the IRGC and Basij who were looking for the downed American crew member. Fox has learned there was fighting on the ground but no Americans killed during the operation. “It was a very complex operation to retrieve the downed service member,” a well placed source briefed on the operation told me. Many different branches of the US military were involved in the rescue.
Fox News can confirm the A10 Warthog that crashed Friday was involved in providing cover for the rescue teams searching for the pilot. That A10 crashed in Kuwait (first reported by ABC Friday) but the A10 pilot managed to eject safely and was rescued. There was destruction of aircraft which have sensitive equipment on board, I am told, all part of this complex CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue) mission.
The F15E was pretty much destroyed on impact. Two rescue helicopters were hit by enemy fire on Friday and crew members onboard were injured by enemy fire but managed to make it out of Iran.
There were a lot of elements to this rescue, I am told.
Everything you said about the current state of the Navy's mine countermeasures capability is wrong. Not a little wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, dangerously wrong....
"The four ships we had dedicated to doing this we just decommissioned." The Avengers in Bahrain... Devastator, Dextrous, Gladiator, Sentry. Wooden-hulled ships from the 1980s. Ships that were pushing 40 years old. You know what replaced them? Three Independence-class Littoral Combat Ships... Canberra, Santa Barbara, and Tulsa… all three already deployed to U.S. 5th Fleet, all three operating in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf right now, today, as you wrote this little rant. Not in San Diego. Not in drydock. In theater. Carrying the most advanced mine countermeasures mission package the Navy has ever fielded.
USS Canberra arrived in Bahrain in May 2025 as the first LCS with a full MCM mission package. USS Santa Barbara is in the Arabian Gulf conducting mine countermeasures operations with unmanned surface vehicles… and, by the way, just made naval history by executing the first-ever at-sea launch of a LUCAS one-way attack drone from a littoral combat ship under Task Force 59. USS Tulsa is right there alongside them. Three ships. In the Gulf. Doing the mission. While you say the Navy "is absolutely not ready for this."
These are fundamentally different platforms. Autonomous mine-hunting sonar… the AN/AQS-20C… towed by unmanned surface vehicles so sailors stay outside the minefield. Airborne laser mine detection systems on MH-60 helicopters. Unmanned influence sweep systems for acoustic and magnetic minesweeping. The old Avengers sent sailors INTO the minefield on wooden boats. The new systems keep them OUT of the minefield using robots... something you call a "downgrade"
And while Santa Barbara hunts mines, she's operating under armed overwatch from A-10C Warthogs out of Jordan… loaded with JDAMs, laser-guided APKWS rockets, and enough firepower to shred any fast boat or drone swarm the Islamic Regime throws at them. The Avengers never had anything like that.
"We lost all of our corporate knowledge." Really? The Navy spent a decade building, testing, qualifying, and deploying an entirely new mine warfare architecture specifically to preserve and advance that knowledge. They trained new crews. They ran operational tests on Cincinnati. They deployed the first operational package on Canberra. The Navy's mine countermeasures technical division ran this transition for years with deliberate overlap between old and new platforms. You lose corporate knowledge when you do nothing. The Navy did the opposite of nothing.
"Now we're running an experiment and it's gonna cost people their lives." Three combat ships, forward deployed in the most contested waters on earth, running mine countermeasures with unmanned systems, protected by close air support, integrated with Task Force 59's autonomous warfare network. That's the most capable mine warfare force the United States has put in the Persian Gulf since 1991.
Yelling "amateur hour" at people while getting the basic facts of the Navy's current force posture completely, demonstrably wrong… while three ships are literally in the water doing the job he says nobody can do… that IS amateur hour.
Upset in the Holy Cross Prep Showcase 🏀🏀
Holy Spirit 40
No. 8 Cherry Hill East 32
Rough afternoon shooting the basketball for East. 17-game winning streak comes to an end. Holy Spirit came ready to play