Iran Has Brought Down at Least Two American MQ-1 Drones in Recent Days, U.S. Officials Tell CBS. The CBO Says 24 Reapers and a $150 Million Triton Have Already Been Lost Since the War Began.
Nobody will say where the aircraft went down or which variant they were. Central Command declined to comment.
WASHINGTON — Iranian forces have brought down at least two American MQ-1 unmanned aircraft in recent days, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told CBS News on Thursday, the latest in a steady drain of American drones over the course of the war that has now cost taxpayers close to $1 billion.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the losses publicly. They did not say where in the region the remotely piloted aircraft were downed, how they were brought down, or which MQ-1 variant was involved. U.S. Central Command, which runs operations against Iran, declined to comment.
The distinction matters for the bill. The U.S. military has fielded two principal MQ-1 variants. The original Predator became a fixture of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Air Force retired it in 2018. The larger Gray Eagle, derived from the Predator, is still flown by the Army, including its special operations forces. If the two lost aircraft were older Predators pulled back into service, the loss would total roughly $8 million. Gray Eagles are considerably more expensive, running into the tens of millions of dollars each depending on the variant.
Both aircraft were built for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, though each can carry Hellfire missiles. In the Strait of Hormuz, they give commanders persistent overhead surveillance of the narrow waterway, tracking Iranian military movements and watching for threats to U.S. forces and commercial shipping. That mission has put them inside the envelope of Iranian air defenses since the first weeks of the conflict.
The two MQ-1s join a much longer list. A Congressional Budget Office report released this week found that at least 24 MQ-9 Reapers have been lost since the war began, a hit of roughly $720 million. The CBO also counted the destruction of a Navy MQ-4C Triton, a high-altitude maritime surveillance drone with a price tag of about $150 million. The same CBO analysis put the overall cost of the war to the Pentagon at $38.1 billion through Aug. 1, growing by $2 billion to $3 billion a month, with missile interceptors alone costing $13.1 billion to replace.
The Reaper, a larger and more capable successor to the Predator, has been the workhorse of the American drone fleet for more than a decade. Its losses over Iran and the Gulf, at a rate of roughly three a month, are unprecedented for the aircraft, which was designed for permissive skies over Afghanistan rather than a peer-level integrated air defense network.
The disclosure came on the same day a U.N.-backed fact-finding mission said it had found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in two Feb. 28 strikes in southern Iran, and a day after President Trump told reporters he hoped the war was nearing its end and that Iran had reached out to him "directly" about a deal. Trump is scheduled to meet Gulf leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday to discuss postwar arrangements.
Originally reported by CBS News.