It took two hours to pull them out? Seems they would have known exactly where they were, but the area wasn't secure to mount an immediate rescue? Even then, it was by drone.

#3 | Posted by mattm at 2026-06-09 01:56 PM | Reply | Flag:

Saronic Corsair unmanned boat. That timeline and sea state, travelling 30-35 knots to get there. That's pretty good. You're not going to fly over and dip a basket while guys are shooting shoulder mounted missiles at you.

It means the Iranians could shoot at a rescue helo, but can't send out their own boats to nab the pilots, nor detect and engage the rescue boat.

Why would they do that?

#12 | Posted by truthhurts at 2026-06-09 09:42 PM | Reply

Money, stupid. There is a bounty on US aviators.

"Provincial governors and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) placed a bounty of roughly $60,000 (or a "precious prize") on the heads of any downed American aviators"

Iran places the bounties, so yes, yes they would. The bounty is for Iranian civilians to grab them. It's 82,510,500,007.76 rial, which is 7 years of income for the average Iranian. Per pilot. Get both and your entire family is now financial stable for 15 years. Cost to Iran is minimal and they gain a huge advantage in negotiations. They've already been massively bombed. It doesn't trigger regime change. There's no navy or air force left to bomb. Leadership is replaced as fast as you kill them. They're under blockade so energy isn't being exported to begin with.

"If we get these 2 American pilots, our negotiating position would be worse." is the dumbest line of thought put forth about this conflict in awhile. Trumpian even.

If 7 years of upper middle class income isn't sweet enough of a deal to risk your life grabbing an American pilot, because why would you when you can just bang on a keyboard?

For the minimum wage Iranians, it's 41 years of income. Enough to make you think about taking a fishing boat to the site of where that helicopter went in. Except now there's a bunch of converted 737s, F-18s, F-35s, satellites, etc, staring at that spot ready to rain harpoons on you.

It seems curious that there's little info being disseminated about how this helicopter crashed. IOW: how can an Apache helicopter be shot down over a hostile body of water and the two pilots are "OK"?

#36 | Posted by TrueBlue at 2026-06-10 04:34 PM | Reply | Flag:

Pretty handily. Manpads aren't giant warheads, quad rotors even smaller. When things go wrong helicopters autorotate instead of smashing into the ground.

If you want to outright delete an Apache you have to show up with an anti-tank missile or theater defense weapons.

and we're back to bombing. Heavy attacks on Qeshm. Iran is back to shooting MRBMs at everybody, cruise missiles at US ships, and executing Kurdish dissidents for protesting last year.

Did we ever pay the $25M to the guy who led us to Saddam Hussein?

#34 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-06-10 11:16 AM | Reply | Flag:

They paid $30 million for Uday & Qusay. The tips was voluntary.

The bodyguard that tipped us on Saddam was hunted down, arrested, and gave up the info during interrogation. There's no $$ for that.

The point was already made. Irans military can still shoot down

#33 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-06-10 10:58 AM | Reply | Flag:

An Apache flying close to Qeshm at 2000 feet on maritime surveillance patrol.

They have shot down nothing currently bombarding them. All they can bring to bat are manpads and quads for air defense. No S-200, 300, 400, 500.. nothing indigenous. Putins finest was all blown up.

But not sophisticated enough.

#43 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-06-10 09:31 PM | Reply | Flag:

1986s finest, with some updates.

It's like they've got Sun Tzu running their show.

#41 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-06-10 08:26 PM | Reply | Flag:

They can be completely incompetent. As ww2 shows us, you have to firebomb their civilians or you can't regime change.

That wasn't enough. It took nukes, or boots on the ground, mostly Russian ones.

#47 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-06-10 09:41 PM | Reply | Flag:

The firebombing was so extensive that the nukes were just a footnote to it. The only question was could Dow make enough.

and Russian boots on the ground lol, well, okay, if you're reading the Russian version of it.

but yeah, kill them all, or eventually, there's a negotiated settlement, like what will happen in Ukraine, and everybody gets their phyrric victories even though all sides lost.

glancing at the live map, credit to our forward thinking GWOT people. Turning Iraq into an uncontested highway in the sky to blow up Iran 20 years later.