It’s possible, though I don’t think it’s likely.

Generally speaking, USAF doctrine heavily emphasizes SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defenses) deploying in concert and close coordination with any sort of non-stealthy strike mission, in the interest of minimizing the risk of combat losses - and by all accounts, the USAF is very fucking good at SEAD (having developed the concept - also known as “Wild Weasel” sorties - back in the Vietnam War, after USN and USAF began taking significant losses to Soviet/Vietnamese SAMs, and refining it a lot since, both in terms of tech and doctrine).

For strike planes to be caught flat-footed like that, I would expect that they were out of range of any possible Iranian SAMs, and thus were not in the mindset of constant vigilance, and moreover their SEAD support was probably not either (or had split off to land at another base altogether).

Also: if the shootdown was from a Patriot, their RWR (basically: “what radar is looking at me”) was probably saying it was a friendly radar, and the pilots may have even thought the Patriot (or similar non-Russian system) was giving them cover from something they didn’t see, and they reacted late as a result.

Thus, I do think that the blue-on-blue explanation is likely accurate - especially considering it was three F-15Es, and not just a single one-off shoot down. IMO, someone (not Iranian) was running air defense in the area and didn’t properly check their deconfliction and IFF.

Edit: actually, it appears it was probably a Kuwaiti F/A-18. And as the article points out, if the pilot used Sidewinders, there would be zero warning, as the seeker is passive. However, I’m pretty sure standard loadouts are for a pair of heat seekers and the remaining pylons loaded with AMRAAMs… so that would only explain two of them. We’ll hear more about this in the coming days, most likely.

Kuwaiti army may not have approved of F15 sorties. Bases were supposedly evacuated and not to be used for military operations, so another explanation, is the memo to the contrary not getting to everyone needed.

If that were the case, Iran would have claimed the air kills which afaik they haven't.

Iran did claim to shoot down an F-35 last year which was an obvious lie, so I wouldn't really put too much weight on this claim.

That being said, an F-15 is more plausible of a target against some hidden SAMs. Even Iraq shot down a prrtty decent handful of aircraft during the gulf war, despite losing their airforce in a matter of hours just because they had a crap ton of SAMs on the ground.

That's 6 Tylenol in a US hospital

A different country according to the Trump Administration.

we should not be wasting money

Every time I hear someone complain about how much money this is costing, I picture that bloody backpack from the girl's school we bombed.

The American value of human life must be net-negative at this point.

It's a lot of work to distract people from the president raping children.

Make sense, it does now.

Stories from Veitnam veterans about how this number gets "fixed" by reporting downs as ground to air in order to perpetuate the notion of air superiority.

Not saying that is the case here, but take the US story with a grain of salt.

True, but that Kuwaiti F-18 got 60% of the way to ace, and that was friendly fire

At this rate they might be able to soon convince Taiwan to join them out of their free will to protect against American aggression.

Upgraded to scrap metal