We're fucked.

ETA - This adds on to that complete loss of a fueling plane (with a loss of 6 lives) and the damage of another fueling plane that was part of an apparent collision incident with the lost plane, so that means there are now 7 refueling planes that are OUT OF SERVICE.

That raises the question of why these planes are in a tight cluster, making them vulnerable to an attack like this.

Are they both wearing the same shoes?

There's no way that the heap of pig shit beside him is 6'3".

Donny would be dead if he gave him oversized shoes.

don't dare not wear then in his presence.

Fuck. John D. Rockefeller only gave out dimes to everyone he met.

Iran won't hurt us anymore.

When is congress gonna grow a spine, stand up and say enough is enough?

. . . Florsheims?

idiot trump as there was no need for him to start this war with Iran.

GET US OUT OF IRAN trumpty dumpty.

That way he could pick them off one-by-one with $20K drones.
(Imagine Biden or Obama taking a secret one hour phone call from the country's most dangerous adversary.)

The Air Force isn't going to run out of them anytime soon. But until additional tankers are flown in, this limits combat options when refueling capacity is reduced even for a short time.

Iran has it's own space agency and relatively small fleet of satellites. Safe to assume they've got military surveillance satellites. Targeting a Saudi air base could be from their own capabilities or they might have gotten help. Hard to say. What it does show is they're still in this fight and Whisky Pete is a moron. But we already knew that last part.

I wonder if the Shitler regime is thinking another unthinkable. Destroying Iranian space assets in orbit. Certain orbits are crowded as it is. Could this leaded to a Kessler incident? If so, we'll long for the days when gas prices were the only impact we felt from this debacle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2025/02/18/the-kessler-syndrome-and-its-impact-on-space-warfare/

I was watching flight radar as soon as I heard that we were bombing Iran. There was a bunch of them.

It does take time to get replacements into theater. Then again, US assets aren't unlimited. An increase somewhere means a draw down somewhere else.

at around the same time that two other KC-135s accidentally have a midair collision, causing one to crash, killing its entire crew. In a mid-air collision, mind you, that seems very odd - since they obviously weren't refueling each other - and that nobody from the DoD has bothered to explain in any way.

This all happened in a 24-hour timespan.

Mama, I was born kinda recently, I guess, but it wasn't fucking yesterday.

The USAF does that on long flights. I went on a deployment aboard a KC-10 tanker back in the 80s. We had 4 F-16 flying with us that refueled from our tanker about every hour and a half during a 13 hour flight. Our tanker was itself refueled 3 times by other tankers staged along our route. I got to see our fighters refueled from the boom operators position, I regret not getting to sit in the cockpit jump seat and watch while we refueled. That would have been tense to watch two large aircraft that close together.

I'm not saying that this was what happened but it can't be ruled out. We will find out more as the investigation proceeds.

Oh, an optimist!

The scenario you describe is typical when a squadron is flying an intercontinental route on a mission, and they want to use the same tanker the whole distance. I would have thought all the aircraft in this case would have taken off from bases in the area, so I don't see why a tanker would need to be re-tanked itself.

But that would certainly explain why the two tankers were operating so close to one another.

there are about 100 in the middle east......................so that leaves around 90 in service....................affordability there traitor and your buddy that has a identity and a vanity problem running your war with a business suit on a flag BS in his coat pocket............who is paying .................so far families of the dead and wounded and the taxpayers while you jaunt down to cereal house to play golf..............in fucking Florida........and then he is ranting that the media is reporting about this.................... hey shit for brains ..............we have a right to know dumb shit........did your kid .............Barron volunteer........bet not...................

The ashtrays were getting full on those ones.

Besides, a few hundred million here, a few hundred million there, what's the prob?

Meanwhile, we are leveling girls' schools and exploding ordnance in the heavy population centers exposing millions of people to toxic chemicals.

The planes are recovering and will soon be back on duty.

the KC-135 is no longer procured new, so current “aircraft cost” references often point to the replacement tanker. In the June 2025 FY 2026 procurement exhibit, the KC-46A line shows a gross weapon system unit cost of $186.642 million (FY 2026 base, $M).