President Donald Trump’s foes had a field day over the weekend when Iran downed two American planes, an F-15E Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog. But many of his critics drew precisely the wrong message from the incidents.

Aaron Blake of CNN quickly weighed in on Friday. The events, he wrote, “puncture the Trump administration’s claims about its complete dominance of the skies over Iran — along with the veneer of impenetrability it has attempted to construct over the past month.”

Really? The United States and Israel have carried out nearly 19,000 sorties over Iran, according to the U.S. Central Command and the Jerusalem Post. Iran has managed to knock two of those missions out of the sky. That’s a success rate for the enemy of one-one-hundredth of 1 percent. That could indeed be described as “complete dominance” by the United States and Israel.

In addition, the United States hasn’t sustained a single death in the conflict over the past four months. And the fate of those involved in the recent aviation incidents is highly instructive as it pertains to American military might.

The pilot of the A-10 was able to fly his crippled aircraft into Kuwaiti airspace before ejecting. The pilot of the F-15 was rescued in Iran within hours, thanks to a mission that involved two helicopters penetrating west-central Iran. News reports said the helicopters faced small arms fire but made it out safely with the pilot.

Finally, a second crew member on the F-15, an Air Force colonel serving as a weapons-systems officer, was picked up Sunday during a daring mission in interior Iraq that involved more than 100 special forces personnel and numerous aircraft. The aviator, equipped only with a radio, beacon and a pistol, had made his way to higher ground and hid “in a remote mountain crevice,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Iranian forces “were on the airman’s trail, using helicopters and drones to find him.”

The rescue featured a deception campaign by the CIA to convince Iran that the crewman had already been saved and was “moving out of the country in a ground convoy,” The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, U.S. forces held Iranians in the area at bay with a bombing campaign, allowing rescuers to reach the site. “In the end, Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos extracted the officer,” the Times revealed, adding that “there were no U.S. casualties among the rescue team.”

The success of the mission is a tribute to the professionalism, capability and ingenuity of the American military. We’ll see how the war plays out moving forward. But those who see U.S. weakness in this weekend’s events are misreading the reality of this 5-week-old conflict.

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