The Grumman F-14 Tomcat is among the most loved late 20th-century US Navy fighters. While the US Navy retired the Tomcats in 2006, Tomcats are still flown by the Iranians (the US supplied dozens of them to Iran before the revolution of 1979). In the US Navy service, the Tomcats were mostly used in air-to-air and recon missions and later were used in long-range strike fighter missions. The Navy used them in action in the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.