Wounded and armed only with his service pistol, the US Air Force colonel began climbing a 7,000-foot ridge to signal for help. His plane, an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet – call sign “Dude 44” – was shot down over Iran on Friday (April 3). The pilot was quickly rescued, but the weapons system officer remained trapped deep inside Iranian territory as US and Iranian forces scrambled to find him. Iranian state television announced a “precious reward” for anyone who could capture the missing plane alive.
Over the next 48 hours, the weapons officer hid inside a crevasse in the mountains, limiting the use of his emergency beacon in case he was captured by Iranian forces searching for him. With an Iranian search party said to be gathering on Mt, The CIA eventually found his hideout and began a deception operation to try to convince the Iranians that he had already been found and was being transported out of the country by road. US bombers and drones attacked suspected Iranian forces approaching the area, while a special operations force led by US Navy SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, undertook a complex rescue operation, eventually reaching the stranded plane by helicopter.
Even then, there was another twist. The wheels of two C-130 heavy planes waiting at a remote airstrip inside Iran to transport them out of the country jammed, and three more planes had to be sent to rescue them. When they finally cleared Iranian airspace, Donald Trump announced the news in a triumphant social media post in the early hours of April 5. “WE PASSED HIM!” The US president wrote, praising “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history” and declaring that the gunnery officer, although injured, would be “fine”. Trump emphasized Operation an “Easter Miracle”.
The extraordinary rescue, surely destined to be made into a Hollywood movie, seems to have only emboldened Trump. Roughly eight hours after announcing the success of the mission, the president issued a profane threat, also on social media, calling on Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin Straits you crazy bastards or you will live in hell,” Trump wrote. In another post, he set a deadline of 8pm EST on Tuesday (April 7) for Iran to follow through on its increasingly pointed threats, including bombing the country “back to the Stone Age” targeting power plants, bridges and water supplies, which would almost certainly amount to a war crime.
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Tehran also appears to have been emboldened by its ability to shoot down a US jet, defying Trump’s repeated insistence that Iran’s military capabilities have “disappeared”. On April 6, the Iranian regime reportedly presented a proposal, through Pakistan, for a “permanent end to the war in accordance with Iran’s considerations” that would include the lifting of all US sanctions. Trump dismissed the proposal hours later as an “important step” but “not good enough.”
The danger is that Trump’s past experience with the use of force has taught him the dangerous lesson that choosing to escalate – and placing his faith in the formidable capabilities of the US military – yields impressive results that reflect well on his presidency. He has boasted of watching the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January as if it were “a TV show”, telling reporters, “if you had seen the speed, the violence – it was an amazing thing”. The events of the weekend are sure to have only reinforced his belief that there is nothing that US military might cannot achieve.
Another leader might have drawn very different conclusions from the two operations. For example, during the Maduro raid, one of the main US helicopters was hit by machine gun fire as it approached the president’s compound in Caracas, seriously injuring the pilot, but he managed to maintain control of the aircraft and return to a US aircraft carrier waiting offshore. The difference between what was celebrated as a remarkable military success and a potential disaster that could have seen an American helicopter crash, possibly capture its crew and fail the mission, rested on the trajectory of those bullets and the actions of a single pilot.
Similarly, in Iran, the downing of an American fighter jet, the desperate search for its crew, and the loss of multiple American aircraft during the subsequent rescue mission might have taught another president a sobering lesson about how close they came to losing too many American lives and the Iranian military’s remaining ability to strike back. However, Trump shows no sign of being intimidated.
Perhaps he will extend the deadline for his ultimatum to Tehran to capitulate once again, as he has done several times already. But it seems just as likely that Trump will opt for escalation, driven by his past experience of deploying military force, which has metastasized from ordering isolated, deadly attacks during his first term, to increasingly ambitious military operations during his first 12 months back in power and now full-scale war with Iran. The problem is that the most immediate issue he currently faces – closing the Strait of Hormuz and the impending global economic crisis it portends – cannot be solved by military force alone.
If the Iranian regime rejects Trump’s offer to surrender, he may succeed in obliterating large areas of the country from the air and inflicting even more suffering on the civilians he once claimed he was preparing to liberate, but he may also become the last American leader to learn the limits of what air power can deliver. Despite the demonstrable capabilities of the world’s most powerful military and the daring rescue they pulled off last weekend, there is only so much a single force can achieve in the absence of a coherent strategy.
Celebrating the success of what he called “one of the biggest, most complex, most gruesome combat quests” at a White House press conference on April 6, Trump seemed to enjoy rehashing the details of the mission. Then he repeated his ultimatum to Tehran. “The whole country could be taken out overnight,” Trump said, “and that night could be tomorrow night.”
(Further reading: “War is peace” in Donald Trump’s America)
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