Before midnight US time the rescue was complete, and the airman was flown to Kuwait for medical treatment, officials said. Trump said the officer was “seriously wounded”, but “he will be just fine”.<\/p>\n
US authorities have not disclosed any information about the airman’s exact location when he was rescued, or his identity.<\/p>\n
Former US military official William Fallon – a retired US Navy admiral – told the BBC that “time of day” probably worked in the rescue mission’s favour. “Darkness is better for our people because they’re used to operating at night.”<\/p>\n
Fallon says that when flying over hostile territory, “you have to be prepared to be the person that’s hit”.<\/p>\n
Just before 00:00 EDT (04:00 GMT) on Sunday US media broke the news that the second pilot had been found. <\/p>\n
Trump wrote on social media that the US would “NEVER LEAVE AN AMERICAN WARFIGHTER BEHIND!” <\/p>\n
Iran insisted that the operation had been a failure. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman Iran’s main military command, said in a video address that several US military aircraft had been forced to make emergency landings.<\/p>\n
“The ignorant president, trapped in the swamp of the war and aggression that he himself started… fully realised that any aggression, ground operation, or infiltration… would face decisive and disgraceful defeat,” he said.<\/p>\n
This rhetoric of “failed” mission has been repeated by Iran’s officials and state TV as well, especially since Donald Trump announced that the pilot had been rescued.<\/p>\n
Some US analysts have described the loss of an F-15E deep inside Iranian territory, followed by the destruction of several rescue aircraft, as showing the limitations of the US air power.<\/p>\n
Gen Frank McKenzie, a former commander of US Central Command, told the BBC’s US partner CBS that “we did in fact lose a couple of aircraft in that mission” but he says you take that loss “any day” in a situation like this.<\/p>\n
“It takes a year to build an aircraft – it takes 200 years to build a military tradition where you don’t leave anybody behind,” he told CBS’s Face The Nation programme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before midnight US time the rescue was complete, and the airman was flown to Kuwait for medical treatment,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-874474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116354242671680419","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}