Retired Gen. Glen VanHerck, former head of NORTHCOM (U.S. Northern Command) and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), used a panel at the Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville to give new credibility to one of the more embarrassing reported episodes of the U.S.-Iran conflict earlier this year: a low-level bombing run by three Iranian F-5 Kowsar jets against Camp Buehring in Kuwait. "We got our rear-end handed to us," VanHerck told the panel, calling the episode "embarrassing as an airman." The U.S. government has still not officially confirmed the attack, which reportedly occurred around March 1, three days into the combined U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, but Iranian state broadcaster PressTV aired a segment in June featuring interviews with the pilots involved, describing a mission flown at times below 50 feet of altitude at high speed specifically to defeat radar coverage, including from E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft overhead.
What makes this episode genuinely significant isn't the sophistication of the attacking aircraft, it's the near-total absence of it. Iran's F-5 fleet traces back to roughly 166 F-5E/Fs acquired from the United States in the 1970s under the Shah, and the aircraft that reportedly flew this mission were locally refurbished Kowsar variants of an airframe design now well over five decades old, flying unguided bomb runs rather than anything resembling a precision strike. That an attack profile this unsophisticated could reportedly penetrate Kuwaiti and U.S. airspace, strike a base that has hosted American forces continuously since 2003, and depart without being intercepted is precisely the "wake-up call" framing VanHerck applied, and it echoes almost exactly the ground-based radar coverage gap TWZ has separately reported as a known Patriot limitation: the system has documented difficulty engaging low-altitude threats approaching from unconventional vectors or those that have already passed overhead, and ground-based air defense more broadly cannot see past the horizon or intervening terrain without a dedicated look-down sensor layer.
VanHerck's more pointed criticism, though, wasn't about hardware at all. "We had two services pointing fingers at each other, and nobody made a decision on whose mission and role responsibility that was, candidly," he said, referring to a still-unresolved ambiguity between the Air Force and Army over which service leads base-defense responsibility, a division rooted in the 1947 split that gave the Army the historical lead on defending both services' installations from aerial attack. That organizational gap, not a missing interceptor type, is what VanHerck argues allowed risk to go unmanaged rather than merely undefended, and it is only now beginning to close, with the Air Force's own chief reportedly stepping forward to take on more of that mission alongside the Army's existing Patriot and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) architecture, and the Marine Corps separately expanding its own lower-tier air defense and counter-UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) forces.
This is where the Camp Buehring episode connects directly to the interceptor stockpile strain already reshaping Army posture following Epic Fury and the 12-Day War. Whatever base-defense reorganization emerges from VanHerck's criticism, it will still ultimately lean on the same finite pool of Patriot and THAAD interceptors the Army has been racing to replenish after drawing its Patriot stockpile down by more than half against Iran, and VanHerck's own warning about a "bifurcated solution" where Patriots, THAADs, and counter-drone systems operate without fused data and shared command and control is a direct articulation of the same magazine-depth and integration problem this blog has tracked since Rafferty's disclosures at this same SMD Symposium. A three-jet F-5 raid succeeding not because Iran fielded something new, but because U.S. and partner forces hadn't resolved who owned the mission of stopping it, is arguably a more damning data point than the cost-exchange imbalance driving the Patriot shortfall in the first place: cheap, old hardware didn't need to beat expensive, modern interceptors technically, it just needed nobody to be responsible for using them.
The unresolved friendly-fire incident referenced alongside this story, in which a Kuwaiti F/A-18 reportedly shot down three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagles amid the chaos and confusion the F-5 raid is said to have contributed to, without any official explanation offered to date, is its own separate indictment of how poorly coordinated the regional air picture was during this period. Taken together with the F-5 raid and VanHerck's criticism, the picture that emerges from Camp Buehring is less about any single capability gap and more about integration: a defense architecture built around exquisite, expensive systems can still be beaten by three 1970s jets and an unresolved org chart, and no amount of additional PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) production alone will fix that if the command and control question stays unanswered.
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