Nearly 30 years, ago, the Iranian air force modified its U.S.-built F-14 Tomcat fighters to carry air-to-ground ordnance—including, in one spectacular case, a massive, 3.5-ton bomb.

Iran’s bitter enemy Iraq actually inspired the idea of outfitting the twin-engine, swing-wing F-14s as bombers. Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war between 1980 and 1988.

Iraq’s most notorious interceptor and recon jets were also its most prolific bombers. Baghdad’s Soviet-supplied MiG-25 Foxbats could carry free-fall bombs and still reach Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet.

Using the advantage of speed and altitude, a MiG-25RB could release its bombs 50 kilometers from the target and accelerate to Mach 3 for the dash back to base.

The Iranians were desperate to stop the Foxbats. They prepared ambushes along probable approach routes with Chinese HQ-7 and American-made I-Hawk surface-to-air missiles. They even examined Syrian MiG-25s hoping for insight into possible defenses.

But despite all their efforts, the Iranians never could counter the Iraqi MiG-25 bombers. Iran did shoot down a few MiG-25s—but only through sheer luck.

In 1983, the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force decided that if it couldn’t stop the Foxbats, it should at least have an equivalent weapon. Iran’s F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers could carry a heavy load at high altitude, but only at reduced speed.

And the old Phantoms lacked sophisticated bomb-aiming computers, rendering long-range drops inaccurate.

Iran had acquired 79 of the powerful F-14s before the 1979 Islamic revolution that resulted in Tehran and Washington severing ties. The Tomcat has a central under-fuselage canal that reduces the drag effect from large bomb loads.

The F-14 also has a much more powerful computer than the F-4 does, meaning Tehran’s engineers could modify the Tomcats with automatic bomb-release algorithms. What the Iranian F-14s lacked was bomb racks.

The IRIAF’s self-sufficiency office claimed for years that the program to add bombs to F-14s was a fully domestic project. Now we know that’s not true. During a recent air show at 8th Air Base in Isfahan, the air force displayed an F-14 with a dozen free-fall bombs hanging in its central canal.