Why did Kuwait shoot down 3 US F-15s?

Three US F-15E fighter jets were shot down over Kuwait on Sunday, March 1, by Kuwaiti air defense systems. No deaths were reported.

While an accidental shootdown can happen at any time in a complex warfighting environment, shooting down three F-15s suggests the Kuwaiti air defense operators shot at anything and everything.

Whether that is the case, of course, depends on US Central Command’s investigation, but CENTCOM may not be willing to criticize an ally openly, assuming that is what happened.

Kuwait has modern air defense systems, including Patriot PAC-3 MSE and upgraded PAC-2. Kuwait also operates HAWK (MIM-23), an older air defense system, NASAMS, the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System also known as Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (possibly deployed), and SPADA, an Italian air defense system that uses Aspide interceptor missiles made by a European consortium (MBDA).

PAC-3 is a hit-to-kill kinetic interceptor while PAC-2 (including the GEM and GEM-T versions) uses blast fragmentation warheads. A PAC-3 missile must directly hit the enemy missile or aircraft. The PAC-2 explodes near the target and spews out metal fragments as it explodes.

At least one video of an F-15 in free fall after it was hit shows that the missile that hit it destroyed the vertical stabilizer of the F-15, making it inoperable. This could suggest a terminal heat-seeking missile instead of a radar guided one, but this is speculative.

Both PAC-3 and PAC-2 are guided to their target by ground radar. The same is true for HAWK, which uses an illuminator radar for target acquisition.

Kuwait has other shorter-range air defense systems. One of them is SPADA 2000, which is a low-to-medium-altitude air defense system that uses Aspide 2000 surface-to-air missiles. This missile has a blast fragmentation warhead. It is not known if Kuwaiti SPADA is integrated with their Patriot systems.

Another system is NASAMS (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems). Export of this system to Kuwait from the US was approved in 2022. How many are currently deployed, if any, is not public knowledge. NASAMS (a joint Norwegian-US system) repurposes air-to-air missiles such as AMRAAM (AIM-120) and AIM-9 into ground-based air defenses. These interceptors use blast fragmentation warheads and track targets at the terminal stage using infrared seekers.

Iran attacked Kuwait with ballistic missiles (Khaybar) and cruise missiles (Qadr 380) and two types of drones (Arash-2 and Shahed 136). No Iranian fighter aircraft were involved. According to the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense, Kuwait engaged 97 Iranian ballistic missiles and 283 drones.

We do not know the exact role of the F-15s, but it is highly likely that the F-15s were launched to take down Iranian drones and possibly Iranian cruise missiles. This means that the local air defenses should have focused on the incoming ballistic missiles. However, this was not the case as Kuwait’s air defenses were shooting at both drones and missiles. This suggests questionable coordination between US assets and Kuwait.

One of the shortcomings of the Patriot, at least when actual intercepts are viewed, is that it mostly engages ballistic missiles very close in to their actual targets, and at reasonably low altitude, the same air space where the F-15s were operating.

To guard against friendly fire incidents, Patriot and other US air defenses are equipped with IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) systems. These are transponders that broadcast an encrypted signal that IFF equipped ground radars can read, indicating the aircraft is a friend and marking it on radar displays as such.

Kuwait’s air defenses are supposed to be linked to CENTCOM’s IFF command center, which is in Qatar. US aircraft would not operate in friendly airspace unless the area’s air defenses had IFF with updated codes.

Kuwait has carried out a major upgrade of its Patriot IFF components, hardware and software. While not complete, the upgrade and the existing structure should have been good enough to prevent a friendly fire incident.

The CENTCOM investigation is supposed to be looking into the possibility that Iran could have jammed Kuwait’s radars, rendering the IFF inoperative. Iran had a significant jammer in Bandar Abbas, which is around 1,000 miles away from where the F-15s were hit.

There were three Iranian jamming systems that were allegedly operating at the time of the shootdown, all located on Iran’s territory. These were the Cobra V8, a truck-based platform deployed near coastal regions like Bandar Abbas. It has a reported range of 250 kilometers and is designed specifically to jam airborne radar and satellite signals; Sayyad-4 Radar units which have been repurposed in a non-kinetic role to broadcast interference that disrupts foreign navigation andAvtobaza-M(Electronic Intelligence) systems that can track and jam the control links of drones and aircraft. All these systems seem to have been too far away to jam Kuwait’s IFF.

Assuming the IFF systems were not jammed, how did it happen that Kuwait shot down three F-15s?

Part of the answer could be reckless operation by Kuwait of its air defenses. Shooting down one F-15 is an accident, but shooting down three could well be reckless operation. F-15’s fly much faster than drones, but are considerably slower than missiles, even missiles in the terminal phases. Even without IFF the Kuwaiti operators should have been able to distinguish the types of targets by their radar signature and operating profile. Instead it seems the operators fired at everything, leading to the loss of the F-15s.

It remains possible that there was a technical or operational glitch that caused the loss of the three F-15s. Word coming out of the Pentagon already points in this direction with suggestions IFF units were possibly jammed. But could this be to protect an ally?

There are yet other possible explanations including poor integration of different kinds of air defense systems. A lack of integration and firing at just about everything in the sky in a period of maximum confusion could have cause the loss of the F-15s.

Let’s see if we can learn more after CENTCOM completes its investigation.

Stephen Bryen is a former US deputy under secretary of defense. This article, originally published on his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy, is republished with permission.