Ben Rhodes

That's where we stand.

Game on.

The American people are basically telling the president that they are not okay with any of this.

The military calls them AWACS.

A-W-A-C-S.

A-W-A-C-S.

It stands for Airborne Warning and Control Systems.

This is one.

It's called the E-3 Sentry.

It costs about $300 million.

It's called a sentry because it functions basically as eyes in the sky, that big dome on top, that thing that sits on top of the plane that makes it look like not a normal plane.

That's a 30-foot-long rotating radar.

It can detect anything airborne within 250 miles from the surface of the Earth all the way up to the stratosphere.

We do not have a ton of planes like these, and they are very, very, very expensive.

But AWACS are just key to American air dominance in faraway war zones.

Well, on Friday, Iran blew one up.

Iran carried out a targeted attack on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

That attack wounded a dozen U.S.

troops.

It also destroyed this vital and rare and expensive and strategically critical radar aircraft that we don't have very many of.