Amid a recent avalanche of media headlines warning of significantly depleted US weapons stockpiles, The Washington Post is out with another fresh report Thursday which sounds the alarm, this time over advanced drones.
The US military lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the Iran war, American defense officials were quoted as saying. The same officials estimate that this constitutes roughly 25% of the Pentagon's fleet.
2024 image of American MQ-9 Reaper UAV brought down in Yemen’s Marib. ClashReport/XIf these were the type of small, cheap drones which have been prevalent in the Russia-Ukraine war, no one would see this as much of a problem, but Reapers are highly advanced surveillance systems and also hunter-killer aircraft, capable of flying for 27+ hours straight, and with some variants able to push past 40 hours.
Made by General Atomics, each drone costs between $30 million to $50 million. With 45 drones wiped out, this means that well over one billion dollars in hardware was either shot out of the sky or crashed in the context of Iran war operations.
The US has also at times lost parked aircraft at bases that came under Iranian attack in the Gulf. This was especially true of even pricier large aerial refueling tankers.
The Washington Post explains why the Reaper has been vulnerable to shootdown by Iranian forces over the past several months in the following:
The aircraft have seen heavy use around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route that has become a major flash point in the conflict — and a key obstacle to negotiating a lasting peace deal. But the drones fly slowly and often at low altitudes, making them relatively easy targets for Iran’s military and its regional proxies in Yemen and Iraq.
A fourth U.S. official, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Pentagon data, said that not all of the lost Reapers were shot down. An unspecified number crashed after their operators’ communications link to the drones failed, the official said.
That latter scenario constitutes quite a costly communications error scenario. It's unclear whether there may have been some instances that the comms were intercepted or hacked.
As we featured earlier in the US-Iran conflict, the MQ-9 Reaper drone is being gradually phased out by the US military, although General Atomics continues to produce it for foreign customers.
Prior rare battle footage of Reaper in action over Middle East skies:
Footage of a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper UAV engaging an Iranian missile launcher with an AGM-114 Hellfire via @hey_itsmyturn. pic.twitter.com/vwjePW6ivU
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 1, 2026Iran's proven ability to shoot down MQ-9 Reaper Drones is another demonstration of how it has managed to deploy some air defense, despite prior long-running claims from President Trump that the country's defenses had been "obliterated".
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 14:40Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,
The John F. Kennedy Center’s board voted on Aug. 13 to close the venue for renovations and place President Donald Trump’s name on the building.
“In its meeting today, the board voted to change the front of the building’s facade to read ‘The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,‘ and renamed the physical site ’the President Donald J. Trump Plaza,’” said Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member on the iconic performing arts center’s board.
The final decision, however, will be up to U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper.
While the board voted to close the main building for renovations, the REACH, a separate building on the campus, will stay open for limited programming.
It is unclear how long the renovations will take. The Epoch Times has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment.
President Donald Trump announced in February that the Kennedy Center would be closed for a two-year renovation.
Cooper blocked the planned move on May 29 and ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the institution.
On June 11, the Trump administration appealed the ruling, only to be denied.
The Kennedy Center requested that the court give it more time to follow the order, citing that its management planned to present options to the board for a mid-July vote.
The choices included a full closure with no ongoing programming, a partial closure that would allow “some continued public access and limited programming in spaces unaffected” by the construction work, and executing “a highly limited series of phased closures” to fix the building’s most critical infrastructure needs while having a full slate of programming.
The venue claimed the court order “did not affirmatively require the board to reschedule programming that had previously been canceled or to seek new programming,” and did not stop the board from giving the green light for closing the building.
“Center management currently intends for the center and its building to maintain an operational model past the originally planned closure date of July 5,” the filing reads.
“That model, which the center is currently following, contemplates continued public access to the center’s public spaces and to the living memorial for President Kennedy.”
Trump implemented multiple changes to the Kennedy Center last year, including firing the board and its president, David Rubenstein, whom he said did not share his “vision for a Golden Age in arts and culture,” and renovating the institution, which he called “tired, broken, and dilapidated.”
Trump replaced the board with new appointees, alongside existing ex officio members designated by Congress. The new board then elected the president as chairman.
In a May 29 Truth Social post, after the court blocked the building’s planned two-year closure and renaming, Trump said the venue was originally scheduled to undergo “large-scale renovations and construction due to years of neglect, decay, and poor maintenance.”
The court ruling blocking the name change and closure was in response to a lawsuit brought by Beatty.
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 14:20