SOFREP Cartoon: The Kuwaiti Air Defense Guide to Shooting Down… Everything

Friendly Fire Is Still Deadly

Somewhere in Kuwait, there is probably a very serious briefing room where a sweaty officer is explaining the difference between a hostile drone, a migrating bird, and a balloon drifting in from a children’s birthday party.

Judging by recent events, that briefing may not be going well, and it is definitely too late.

Three American fighter jets were recently knocked out of the sky by what can only be described as an overly enthusiastic Kuwaiti Air Force F/A 18 pilot.

Friendly fire, they call it, which is one of those tidy military phrases that sounds polite until you realize it involves shooting down your friends at several hundred miles an hour.

When Everything Looks Like the Enemy

SOFREP, using covert and questionable means, has managed to obtain an actual Kuwaiti enemy aircraft identification chart. Now things make sense.

Everything flying is the enemy.

Bird? Drone. Comet? Bomber? The Starship Enterprise? Knock it out of the sky.

Obviously, some Kuwaiti air defense officer has been chugging way too much of that Karak tea stuff they love so much.

How else could you explain what happened? Theirs is the kind of logic that emerges when radar scopes are buzzing, nerves are frayed, and the operator on the console has been awake for 36 hours straight and is tweaked out of his mind.

In that distorted frame of mind, the safest assumption is that if it moves in the sky, it probably wants to kill you. So down it must go.