In close-quarters combat, it can be attacked with an aerial cannon with a bomb load of up to 7.26 tons. The 20-year military career has shown that the F-15 is indeed a genuine air supremacy fighter, and it has defeated 96 enemy planes in all the local wars it has participated in, but it has not lost a single one, creating an incredible record of "clean victory" in the history of air combat. Of course, the achievement of this record was influenced by certain war circumstances, but its quality and merit are indisputable. The F-15 made its debut in the midst of a war in the Middle East. At the end of the 70s of the 20th century, 39 F-15s were sold to Israel. The Israeli Air Force's world-class pilots combined with such first-class fighters immediately set a world-class record. In 1981, 1982 and 1985, the F-15 fought three consecutive battles in the Middle East. On June 7, 1981, six F-15s covered eight F-16s and successfully destroyed the Okshira nuclear reactor in Iraq. On June 9 and 10, 1982, 93 F-15s and F-16s shot down more than 80 Syrian MiG fighters over the Bekaa Valley, of which F-15s accounted for most of them. On 1 October 1985, eight F-15s shocked the Middle East and the world by flying over a long distance of 2,400 kilometres (twice the radius of their operations) and leveling the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization on the outskirts of Tunis. The F-15's most dramatic war was the 1991 Gulf War. In this war, the US Air Force's F-15C/D and F-15E were both dispatched to the Gulf to carry out air strikes against Iraq. The first unit to be equipped with F-15E was the 4th Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 336th Tactical Fighter Wing based at Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the squadron was transferred to Saudi Arabia. In the early morning of January 17, 1991, 400 planes from the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the Kuwaiti Air Force in Saudi Arabia, including F-15C, F-16, B-52, and "Tornado", carried out the first round of bombing of Iraqi military targets in Iraq and Kuwait, which was the first time that F-15E participated in actual combat. At present, the F-15 continues to be improved to meet the needs of modern high-tech warfare, and in the next few years, the F-15 will remain the main combat air superiority fighter of the US Air Force
