Guess who gets the cool jobs in these countries? Typically not the most highly motivated individuals, but the children of influential people who pull strings to make it happen.
Guess how easy it's to fire those people when they don't pay that much attention during training?
Also flying modern fighter jets is the kind of fun that's typically very hard to buy with money, so you take the opportunity when available.
I would go so far to say as commercial flight is dominated by very rich people who could afford to do the commercial ratings on their own, or middle/lower class people that became military pilots to pay for it.
Plenty of working airline pilots come from regular middle-class backgrounds and never served in the military. They take out student loans to pay for training, then work low-paying jobs as flight instructors or something to build up enough flight hours to get hired at a regional airline.
Those who go the ROTC route can totally get a fighter jet assignment if they want it. Once they get selected for a pilot slot, assignment to a particular airframe is primarily based on how they perform in the training pipeline.
Flying is not in any way some kind of high-status luxurious job. It can be grueling, with intensive and continuous training, wacky shifts, very strict rules, lots of time away from family, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. You can lose your career over a minor mistake that snowballed into a incident due to factors out of your control. Minor health issue? Need mental help? Better get those fixed in secret or you probably won't fly again.
In my line of work, a major mistake would bring down an internal website at a big company for a little while. An airline pilot's major mistake would kill himself and a hundred-plus people.
I can't fathom why anyone who is rich would want to be an airline pilot. It's a shit-ton of work, stress, and risk for not much reward. You gotta love to fly in order to stick with it. If the rich want to fly, they just do the training and buy a plane, they don't need to do it for a living!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_military_servic...
What do you mean by "these countries"? What you lived in "these countries"? What do you know about 'these countries". It sounds like something someone who can't locate Africa on a globe or thinks "arab" is a nationality would say
MENA countries (excepting Israel here) are known to suffer from this significantly, and it is a big factor in their militaries historically underperforming.
It is a valid point to bring this up as possible cause or factor, no need to get all defensive about it.
Btw fighter pilot is extremely physically taxing. It's not for everyone. Any degree of motion sickness and you're out. Everyone joins the air force wanting to become a fighter pilot but only a small percentage can.
In western countries that's the case. In autocratic countries it is essential to keep control of the army by placing the equivalent of the royal family in charge.
Also, fighter pilots were historically considered as the successors for cavalry and manned by the nobility, in Arab countries this means the ruling elite
And my whole point was that it's often not a profession, but a hobby.
Because many of these people see it as a fun hobby, they don't spend much time worrying about potentially being ordered to drop bombs on schools filled with children. It's rather unlikely that their government would order them to do so anyway, compare a list of countries being hit by Iran with a list of countries bombing Iran.
Anybody who ever went through arab countries with eyes opened saw the massive nepotism and corruption at all levels. Army/air force ain't immune to this, in contrary. Do you think ie some general or politician's first son would be treated and pushed up same as common folks?
In the case you're presumably referring to, no fighter pilots were involved. A Tomahawk missile was launched from a US naval vessel, aimed at a military site next door to the girls school.
That was a launched cruise missile from a ship, targeted by an LLM. Apparently the grounds USED to be a valid military target long ago (a decade? I'm not sure exactly) and now there's a school there.
A pilot not trained well on visually IDing some of the most common military planes would be quite a training lapse.
Here's his sim (at least he first few min) of the situation a few days ago but facing SAMs and not F18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7XpVcUV_vQ
Sure, but not the weather conditions and visibility.
And "as accurate of a sim as it gets" isn't true either. War Thunder has much better missile physics.
This is such a joke I cant even imagine how you can formulate this thought...
- Exercise Marauder Shield 26.1 (Nov. 2025) "U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft assigned to the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron takeoff during Exercise Marauder Shield in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, Nov. 8, 2025. A key element of the exercise was the sharpening of combined fighter capabilities between the U.S. and Kuwait Air Forces. This included joint training exercises and hot-pit refueling operations."
- CENTCOM Bomber Task Force mission (July 2022)
"..During the BTF, two B-52H Stratofortresses, assigned to the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command, conducted theater integration training and operations with a variety of U.S. Air Force, partner and ally aircraft, including F-15/18, RJ-135, E-3, KC-135/10/46, FGR-4, and A-330..."
"The bombers’ flight originated at Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford, England, and flew over the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea before departing the region. The mission included fighter escorts from the Royal Air Force and the Air Forces of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...."
"...“Communication is critical,” said Wong, who also serves as the Deputy Director of Combat Operations, Combined Air Operations Center. “By enhancing lines of communication, we are able to establish a clear and direct line in real time amongst the Air Operations Centers of all nations participating..."
Well, the Kuwaitis seem pretty sharp? Three shootdowns is a lot in the modern era. The F-22 program only has two air to air kills in its whole history.
The secondary thing here I've realized is that the missiles in question must not have been using active homing. If they were then the pilots of the US aircraft would have taken evasive action as soon as their radar warning receiver lit up.
This is covered in the article so it's weird to present it as an original thought.
Sorry, but it's totally funny that your nick is literally "Sidewinder".
History buffs may remember that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia was the catalyst that turned OBL into America's foe. He had offered his services to the King to defend KSA against Saddam Hussein (after Saddam swallowed Kuwait), but the King politely refused and speed dialled the USA instead. The rest is history.
only people flying in Kuwait are those with connections to the Emir and his people, and they're unambiguously Sunni
I'd be more concerned with the US just pissing off the Sunnis, stuff like
> In January 2026, the United States government suspended immigrant visas for citizens of Kuwait and 74 other countries due to the high dependency of Kuwaiti immigrants on American welfare benefits.[219] Kuwait is the only GCC country on the visa suspension list.[219]
The issue is that once they shot the heat seaking missile, they aren’t able to select a specific target the way they could with a radar guided missile, so the tool made a lot of sense for what the Kuwaitii pilot was actually doing to the mission planner who may not have realized the proximity to American fighter jets.
stares at wingman angrily
Another fighter pilot’s analysis, seen in video below, questions whether the Kuwaiti pilot might even have gone rogue against an ally. That actually seems possible based on the evidence, but it is hard to believe.
The fact that _three_ were shot down using air-to-air missiles is the clincher.
I get the concern, but i would remmeber to attribute it to incompetance rather than malice. And from my understanding, there is no shorten of incompetance among gulf arab militaries
> In January 2026, the United States government suspended immigrant visas for citizens of Kuwait and 74 other countries due to the high dependency of Kuwaiti immigrants on American welfare benefits.[219] Kuwait is the only GCC country on the visa suspension list.[219]
It's also important to note that these are not democracies. The state frequently does things that people aren't entirely happy with, it's only when the people (or religious leaders!) become sufficiently unhappy that it becomes a problem.
Then it jumps to incredulity that it could happen 3 times.
I don't know why it's so hard to imagine someone pulling a trigger 3 times.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Kuwaiti Air Force switches to ground controlled intercept only after this.
There's open source intel on google that Iran has SU-27s. Under combat conditions you have an instant to tell them apart. Clearly, its possible to misidentify them at least one time historically as the F-15s did get shot down.
I can assure you from having flown around a lot, if you are wildly outnumbered 3 SU-27 (err, F15) to your 1 F-18 you do not attempt a radar lock you do an IR only attack. The article mentions getting a radar lock first but that is unnecessary for IR guided weapons and in a 3-1 situation will just get you shot down.
Waiting for confirmation from the ground means 1 of the 3 will surely notice and you will be shot down.
Ironically if it were a flight of 4 F-18 they'd probably not have been as skittish at radar locking a mere 3 aircraft and the IFF (assuming its probably configured and working etc) would have informed them they're friendlies. IFF can only tell you if everything on both sides is working perfectly and powered up, if you don't get a friendly response all you know is it didn't work. Not unlike a network ping command. If ping works you know they're up and accepting pings from you, if ping doesn't work, you don't really know anything for sure.
Possibly the primary fault was the Kuwaiti lack of situational awareness. Somehow he's in shoot down range of three other A/C and he's got maybe 3 to 5 seconds to shoot them down or be shot down himself.
Somehow there is no discussion on what both A/C were doing. Usually a landing on an airfield would not look like a bombing run but possibly the F15s were doing something "weird" for which they could be blamed. The total censorship of what they were doing points to them being up to something dumb "lets buzz the airfield during active combat would could possibly go wrong" and they get shot down for looking like an attack run. Or a mix up where there's a published ahead of time safe altitude window around 15K but these guys for who knows why were 1000 feet off the ground doing who knows what. Maybe they had a good tactical reason to do it but its damning that nothing is being reported as an excuse.
Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.
I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense. This is the typical journalistic response in ALL disaster situations not just military aviation.
Countermeasure AN/ALE-47
I don't think they had radar lock, I think they were firing IR missiles. They wouldn't have had much time to respond, and IR missiles are normally much smaller than beyond visual range radar missiles, which would explain how all 6 pilots survived.
Rumor is there was a problem with the IFF identification system sync. If that's true, the Kuwaiti pilot just saw 3 jets coming into their airspace with no IFF working, under a very compressed timeframe with lots of inbound UAS and potentially aircraft.
I could see some logic in not putting cams pointing forward because theoretically the pilot is looking where they're going and not putting one facing back because flight time to impact is so low they can't evade anyway, but a side attack is survivable if detected early enough... Also facing back they're going to be "seeing" their own exhaust most of the time.
The total non-reaction by the pilots in the public videos would indicate that if those planes even had -57s they were not working or not working well enough to matter or not working fast enough to matter.
I would agree some monster sized BVR missile will be easier to detect. In practice does it matter if the missile detector works at short range if the attacker would likely be in guns mode at short enough range anyway?
Slaving heatseekers to radar is the standard way of employing them. I reckon by "having flown around" you're referring to DCS, which is absolutely unrealistic when it comes to engagements.
>Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.
MAWS exist and they're employed on a lot of aircraft. I don't believe Strike Eagles have them though. An F-35 would get a missile warning for a heatseeker, it's not science fiction technology for quite a while now.
>I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense.
You don't get practical experience by playing flight simulators, it's not comparable to how planes are employed as weapons systems.
And
Being on but jammed look the same from the perspective of the one shooting them down.
Also, I wonder how resilient it is to the gps spoofing that been going on. If they managed to trick it into identifying itself as a few hundred miles from where it actually was, then very hard to know where it actually is.
All of which is well within Irans technical capabilities.
Iran claim to have used it to bring down US drones in the past.(1)
1. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1215/Exclus...
Why is the US using such dated planes?
Same thing with the F-18.
Eventually of course all of these weapons platforms will be phased out, but for the time being they are still extremely useful, and even more so after the more advanced aircraft and other attack vectors have taken out or limited air defense capabilities or the ability for enemy aircraft to intercept these aircraft. Not that they can't handle their own, anyway.
