Air Force F-15 crews hunting Iranian drones and missiles last year attacked so many of them that they ran out of missiles and seemed to be out of options for those that remained.

“If they could have rolled down the window and thrown rocks at it, they probably would have,” said Lt. Gen. Derek France, head of Air Forces Central, this week.

So the crews tried an almost unheard of tactic: drop bombs on the targets as they flew.

France discussed the innovative, if low-accuracy, air-to-air tactic at a media roundtable on Wednesday during the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

The engagement took place in April 2024, when U.S. forces helped shoot down drones launched by Iran and Houthi rebels in Yemen against Israel. The Iranian attack involved a

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