BREAKING: Navy confirms CATASTROPHIC loss of a $240 MILLION spy drone after Trump says there’s no money for Medicare, Medicaid, and daycare for Americans.
While Donald Trump has been telling you that the war in Iran is going brilliantly, and Pete Hegseth has claimed that their military is "gone," the Navy just quietly announced a "mishap" involving a $240 million spy drone.
"Mishap” in that the costly drone no longer exists in any functional form.
The U.S. Navy has confirmed the loss of an MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicle — the first time one of the $240 million drones has been lost since they entered service in 2018 — in what its own aviation report lists as a "crash" on April 9th. The location of the crash was withheld, and the cause was not explained.
It was classified as a Class-A incident because it caused more than $2 million in damage, which is the military's way of saying it was a very expensive problem that they'd prefer you didn't think too hard about.
But the Triton is just the beginning of the inventory disaster unfolding in the Persian Gulf.
According to the investigative military journal, Task & Purpose, at least 16 drones were lost during the fighting with Iran from February 28th until the ceasefire. Iran shot down an F-15 Strike Eagle and an A-10 Thunderbolt II. Kuwait shot down three F-15s in a friendly fire incident. The rescue operation for the
Iran-downed F-15 resulted in the destruction of up to two transport planes and up to four light helicopters, destroyed by American troops themselves because they couldn't fly them out of Iranian territory.
Retired Air Force Brigadier General Houston Cantwell, a former drone operator trainer, called the losses "a big deal" with surgical understatement. "That is a significant percentage of the fleet, and there is no other aircraft that is positioned and ready to assume the responsibilities that the MQ-9 has across multiple combatant commands," he said.
Then came the line that should be on the front page of every newspaper in America: "Right now, there's no plan to backfill all these aircraft being shot down."
No plan. America has lost billions of dollars in military hardware in a war that Trump launched without congressional authorization, that Pete Hegseth has been lying to the president about, that has already killed at least 15 American troops and wounded hundreds more, that has sent gas over $4 a gallon and oil to $100 a barrel — and there is no plan to replace what's been destroyed.
The Navy had 20 MQ-4C Tritons. At $240 million each. One is now a classified "mishap" at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. The Air Force's MQ-9 Reaper costs around $9 million — the Triton costs 26 times more. And 2026 has already seen seven Class-A aviation incidents, more than half of all last year's total, with most of the year still ahead.
Trump told investors last week that Iran had "no anti-aircraft." Then they shot down two American fighter jets. He called it "a lucky hit." The Navy is calling it a pattern.
"Nobody cares" about the equipment, Trump said at a recent press conference. The American taxpayers who paid for it might disagree.
SOURCE
www.foxnews.com
