Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Russia supplied Iran with satellite images of a US base in Saudi Arabia days before a vital spy plane was destroyed in a strike.
On Friday, Iran launched several drones and at least one ballistic missile at the Prince Sultan Air Base, 60 miles south of Riyadh.
The attack injured up to 12 US soldiers, with two currently in a serious condition, and destroyed an E-3 Sentry aircraft.
Dramatic images of the wrecked aircraft showed the plane’s tail was completely severed from the rest of the body.
The plane’s distinct dome, which is used to house a rotating radar, was completely destroyed.
Tracking data indicates the destroyed aircraft was tail number 81-0005, an E-3G Sentry assigned to the 552nd Air Control Wing out of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.
Zelensky said on Saturday, the day after the attack, that the Prince Sultan air base was one of several US military sites photographed by Russian satellites ‘in the interests of Iran’.
He said: ‘On March 25th, they took pictures of the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The Shaybah oil and gas field in Saudi Arabia, İncirlik Air Base in Türkiye, and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar were all imaged on March 26th.’
The Ukrainian leader added that on March 24, ‘[Russia] imaged the U.S.–UK joint military facility on Diego Garcia located in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. They also captured pictures of Kuwait International Airport and parts of the infrastructure of the Greater Burgan oil field.’
CNN’s military analyst Cedric Leighton backed Zelensky’s assessment, stating: ‘Russia most likely gave Iran geographic coordinates and satellite imagery that provided the precise location’.
The E-3 Sentry has a length of 152ft and a wingspan of 145ft. It has a cruising speed of 360mph, and a range of 4,600 nautical miles.
The plane can travel for up to eight hours without refuelling.
It is part of the US military’s airborne warning and control system, or AWACS.
The AWACS allows the US military to monitor up to 120,000 square miles of battlespace from the ground to the stratosphere.
The US had a fleet of 17 of them, each of them with the ability to track 600 targets at a time.
They each have four jet engines, and require a flight crew of four and up to 19 mission specialists.
Their complexity and size mean they are very expensive, with each one costing $540million, adjusted for inflation, to purchase.
Their mobility means they can quickly move to new crisis areas, and are a harder target for enemies than ground-based radars.
Their capabilities have impressed other nations, including France, Saudi Arabia, and Chile, who all operate their own E-3’s. NATO also has a fleet of 14.
Leighton, a former US Air Force colonel who has flown on the aircraft, said the loss of the E-3 Sentry at the Prince Sultan air base was ‘a serious breach of our Force Protection efforts’.
He added: ‘Extraordinary measures are often taken to protect it from hostile enemy fire while in-flight. Sometimes it receives fighter escorts and is never allowed to overfly hostile territory in order to keep it safe’.
Despite being core to intelligence gathering, the E-3 Sentry is an old breed of plane and the Pentagon is looking to replace the ageing fleet, which it has already been retiring.
The Pentagon is in the process of replacing them with Boeing E-7 Wedgetails, at a cost of $700 million each.
First introduced in 1978, the US has been decommissioning E-3’s rapidly in recent years.
In 2015, the US fleet held 35 aircraft, compared to the 17 it now holds.
The US Navy operates a smaller, but similar, aircraft known as the E-2 Hawkeye.
Though it has the ability to fly on and off aircraft carriers, its radar cannot cover as much territory as the E-3. On top of this, it cannot hold as many crew members, meaning operations have to be smaller.
