Outside the Beltway

Sunday’s Forum

· Sunday, April 26, 2026 · 16 comments

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.

Comments

  1. Daryl says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 07:55

    Based purely on intuition…you know, the same basis on which Trump started the Iran War…I say last nights shooting was staged.
    Time will prove me right.

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  2. Jax says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 08:53

    I don’t feel like enough attention has been paid to the news story that when the fighter jet went down, Trump was REMOVED from the situation room, and the only thing that kept him from launching nukes was that one of the generals refused.

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  3. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 09:20

    .
    “On hubris”

    Hubris has a particular sound to it. It’s quiet at first. It sounds like confidence, like experience, like a man who has seen enough to believe he has seen it all. And then, without announcing itself, it becomes dismissal. It becomes the assumption that the other man, the other force, the other nation, the intubation in the trauma bay, whatever stands across from you, simply cannot measure up. That is the moment the fight is already turning, even if the scoreboard doesn’t show it yet.

    Iran bombed a major US air base in Kuwait using an F-5, an aircraft the United States retired decades ago and created mostly as a platform for allies who could not afford top-tier fighters in the 1950’s. Not because the platform is impressive. It isn’t. The F-5 is a relic, a lightweight fighter from another era, something we relegated to training aggressor squadrons and then to museums.

    An adversary took an airframe we dismissed as obsolete and turned it into a delivery system for violence. That’s not technological superiority. That’s will, adaptation, and a refusal to accept the script we’ve written for them.

    And the deeper danger is this: we are surprised.

    “How it was done – very impressive”

    When NBC News confirmed this week that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet successfully bombed Camp Buehring in Kuwait — penetrating Patriot missile batteries, short-range interceptors, and a layered American air defense architecture — the pundit class reacted with shock. I wasn’t shocked. I was validated.

    Here’s why — and here’s what actually happened.

    The Aircraft: Don’t Let the Age Fool You

    The F-5 Tiger II is a Cold War export fighter. The Shah of Iran bought them from the United States in the early 1970s. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent arms embargo, Iran was left holding an aging fleet with no spare parts pipeline and no upgrade path. So they built their own.

    Over decades of sanctions-driven ingenuity, Iran developed a series of F-5 derivatives — the Azarakhsh, the Saeqeh, and most recently the Kowsar. These aren’t revolutionary aircraft. But they aren’t museum pieces either. Iran’s Saeqeh variant reportedly carries a Phazotron-NIIR N019 “Baaz” radar capable of tracking ten targets and engaging two simultaneously, with a range of roughly 50 miles. The Kowsar has been fitted with a Grifo fire control radar and fourth-generation avionics including a glass cockpit, heads-up display, ballistic computers, and smart mapping systems. An earlier Chinese-assisted modernization program under Project Silk Road II equipped select F-5s with a SY-80 pulse-Doppler radar, radar warning receivers, chaff and flare dispensers, GPS navigation, and TACAN.

    This wasn’t a flying antique. It was a small, upgraded, highly familiar aircraft flown by a pilot who almost certainly trained extensively on this mission profile. And Iran knew exactly what it was flying into.

    The Penetration: Low, Slow, and Invisible to the Wrong Radar

    Here’s my read, as someone who spent years mission planning bombing runs for B-1s, F-15s, and F-16s — including planning against aggressor squadrons that flew F-5s in Red Flag exercises designed to replicate exactly this threat profile.

    The Patriot system’s Target Acquisition Radar (TAR) — specifically the AN/MPQ-65 — has a well-documented low-altitude performance limitation. It is optimized for ballistic missiles and medium-to-high altitude cruise missiles. A small aircraft approaching at low altitude, at subsonic or transonic speed, with a minimal radar cross-section, presents a detection challenge that Patriot was simply not designed to prioritize. The system can engage low-altitude targets, but the geometry, the radar’s elevation coverage, and ground clutter combine to create a meaningful seam at very low altitudes and very slow speeds.

    The F-5’s profile is almost tailor-made to exploit that seam. It’s small. It’s slow by modern fighter standards. It can fly NOE (nap-of-the-earth) profiles. And critically — the pilot executed what the reporting describes as a “dumb bomb” attack. No missile signature. No radar-emitting munition to track. Just a jet flying low, releasing unguided bombs, and egressing. There was nothing for the missile defense radar to key off of until it may have been too late to engage.

    The emergency $8 billion Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS) radar sale the U.S. pushed through for Kuwait on March 19 — three weeks after the strike — confirms this analysis. LTAMDS is specifically designed to replace the AN/MPQ-65 and close the low-altitude, 360-degree coverage gaps that Patriot’s current radar leaves open. You don’t approve an emergency $8 billion sale if the existing architecture was working as advertised.

    Read the link, there is lots more.

    ETA: Iran is not a bunch of stumblebum clowns like Venezuela. Thinking otherwise was hubris.

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  4. becca says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 09:35

    @Daryl: that the “assassination attempt” was staged seems to be what a lot of folks think. Me, included. The admin is using it to press the desperate need for the gaudy gigantic ballroom Trump is so pathetically obsessed with.

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  5. CSK says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 09:55

    @Jax:

    It sounds entirely credible to me, but Snopes says it hasn’t been verified.

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  6. Steven L. Taylor says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 10:23

    I have a hard time with the notion that a group of people who were too incompetent to figure out that the Strait of Hormuz was in play strategically, or who put tariffs on an island with no people on it could pull off a staged assassination attempt.

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  7. Gregory Lawrence Brown says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 10:33

    If this shooting was staged does this mean that the agent who was shot is a crisis actor who agreed to be shot? Did he trust the shooter to hit his protective armor and not his head? Or was this some Hollywood special effects using props? Are the staff at the hospital the agent was taken to in on this ruse too? Help me understand how this all works.

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  8. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 10:35

    @becca: I doubt it was staged. If it were staged they wouldn’t have left the perp alive. My cynicism runs different directions.

    There are plenty of looney tunes in this country, any country, but we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure they can all be armed. And he failed to breach the security perimeter, which makes this a non-story. A nothingburger. It’s already being blown up to support the ballroom although security at the Hilton proved adequate. The MSM will join FOX/GOP in making it a big story for days. Trump’s approval, IIRC, didn’t get a bump after the earlier attempts, and may not this time. If so, I’ll take it as an indication most non-MAGA people are just done with Trump.

    After Reagan there was a push for gun control, producing the Brady Bill. I doubt we’ll see much this time. And I agree with Atrios, this will be an occasion for much narcissism by the press.

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  9. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 10:52

    @charontwo: Necessity does mother invention. We’ve seen it in Ukraine, and Iran is entrepreneurial and technically sophisticated.

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  10. becca says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 11:00

    @gVOR10: The brunt of the skepticism on Trump assassination attempts is that he and his minions lie like rugs about everything all the time.
    All. The. Time.

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  11. Michael Cain says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 11:11

    @becca:

    The admin is using it to press the desperate need for the gaudy gigantic ballroom Trump is so pathetically obsessed with.

    So, the new White House Ballroom will be rented out for private functions? The WHCD put on by the WHCA is first and foremost a black-tie affair with a high ticket price to raise funds for the WHCA’s charities.

    ETA: I would not be surprised to learn that the Washington Hilton hosts the event gratis, as an in-kind donation.

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  12. CSK says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 11:49

    @Jax:

    I don’t think Trump was removed from the situation room. According to the WSJ story, he was prevented by his aides from entering it.

    I wonder if they physically restrained him.

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  13. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 12:05

    @CSK:

    I bet they used miniatures of the Epstein Ballroom to distract him.

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  14. CSK says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 12:18

    @Kathy:

    Perhaps they furnished him with bottles of ketchup to hurl around the Oval Office.

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  15. Scott says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 13:30

    @charontwo: Supposedly, Iran still possesses about 20 F-14s left over from the Shah days.

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  16. dazedandconfused says:
    Sunday, 26 April 2026 at 14:40

    Another threat to rule-of-law. Seems Trump’s DOJ is troubled by their lawyers getting disbarred for unethical conduct, so an executive order was issued that removed the power of the states to do so. Stephan Miller wants to go further, transferring the power entirely to the federal government, effectively the power to disbar lawyers who argue against their phony cases.

    An old joke modified: “…in America, law break you!”

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