After an F-15E Weapons Systems Officer ejected injured over Iranian territory, the United States military and intelligence community moved Heaven and Earth to find him, rescue him, and return him safely home. While we might never know the exact figures, somewhere between 100-200 personnel were involved in the rescue, including perhaps two small Night Stalker helicopters, and two MC-130J Commando II Special Forces cargo planes that had to be destroyed on the ground.
Four specialized aircraft for one WSO?
What a bargain!
But it isn't a bargain our NATO partners in Western Europe can afford.
Let me take you on a quick detour through exactly how American forces were able to track and finally pinpoint the location of the injured WSO. It's a nifty little device called the Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL), and it's worn by pilots and combat aircrews at risk of getting shot down over enemy territory.
CSEL looks a little like an old-school satellite phone, and that's because they share some DNA. Automatically activated during ejection, a CSEL communicates in short, encrypted bursts the ejectee's location and movement. Short bursts prevent the enemy from triangulating a position (assuming they knew what to listen for), frequency hopping prevents repeated attempts at listening, and encryption means the bad guys can't read the location data if even they did manage to intercept a transmission.
When a rescue team gets close, CSEL changes modes, "guiding helicopters straight to them in terrain that would otherwise swallow a man alive," as Gene Robinson put it on X.
Even with near-perfect data, rescue crews don't necessarily have it easy. Tehran's $60,000 bounty on our WSO's life drew all kinds of armed vermin out of the woodwork, and our Special Forces are believed to have killed an unknown numbers of them during the extraction, estimated anywhere from dozens up to 100.
So let's put this all together.
U.S. forces established a hasty airhead in enemy territory, landed two Special Forces cargo planes there, held it against heavy enemy fire — and when things went south, destroyed the planes before calling in two more just like them to complete the rescue.
We got our man out and lost zero men doing it. So, yeah, when President Donald Trump says this was one of the most "daring" rescues in history, he's right.
All made possible by a CSEL whose only purpose is to "phone home" via satellite by the most secure means possible — and there's no other country on Earth that can make that kind of extraction so deep in enemy territory.
If one of our NATO allies, God forbid, had a pilot shot down over Iran — I know, I know; they'd have to send some warplane first — it would be American men and women putting their lives on the line to bring them out.
This post is indicative of the mindset, and Western Europe's comparative inability to conduct such rescues.
Lose all this to rescue 1 pilot and call it your greatest military success of all time. pic.twitter.com/EB36KGNxC5
— Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇫🇷 (@Arrogance_0024) April 5, 2026
But as I replied on X, we don’t call it our “greatest military success of all time.” We call it “business as usual.”
"If you want to know why the U.S. & IAF have the best and most committed pilots/aviators in the world, it’s because they know we will do everything in our power to bring them home."
Or as former CENTCOM commander Ret. Gen. Frank McKenzie put it Sunday on Face the Nation, “It takes a year to build an aircraft, and it takes 200 years to build a military tradition where you don't leave anybody behind.”
As another wit said, France can't afford to lose two of its 14 cargo planes, but we have hundreds. That's the inevitable result of free-rider military budgets that countries like France and Britain are willing to make.
Our air crews know that when they go out, they have the entire force and will of the United States military backing them up.
Is it any wonder they're so damn good?
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