During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement. At the time, Baghdad was known to have the highest density of SAM protection out of any city in the world.
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
> A second Air Force combat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf region on Friday, and the lone pilot was safely rescued, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The A-10 Warthog attack plane went down near the Strait of Hormuz about the same time that an Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, the officials said. In that incident, one crew member was rescued and search-and-rescue operators are looking for the second airman. Officials provided scant details about the A-10 crash, including how and where it happened.
there's some additional osint rumor mill that a blackhawk helicopter involved in rescue operations was also shot down but claims that crew been recovered
On top of these cases there is all of the aircraft that has been destroyed while grounded. The high tech AWACS getting blown up was a big hit, among others. The losses are likely much worse than we know since the military has been trying to keep a lid on most of them.
Not to mention the multiple THAAD radars taken offline. Those are $500M assets - and only 8 exist in the world. 24,000 precise transceivers all liquid cooled… not available on Amazon for next day deliver either.
a single AN/FPS-132 radar costs $1.1 bln, not $500m. And Iran stuck 17 of the CENCCOM sites hosting radars of all kinds across Qarar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, etc).
Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.
in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).
So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available
Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions
This is exactly the situation I think of when I hear news of rescue missions. Running a rescue in a place with functional air defense is a recursive rescue problem that could quickly get out of control.
…against the viet cong, where the biggest risk was the pilot getting pierced from small arms fire (in addition to the helo going down from pilot error). Quite different from the anti-air weapons modern day Iran possesses.
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
"Just fine" for what? AGM88 is air-to-ground and manpads are surface-to-air. If you're implying that manpads work just fine instead of A-10s, you're wrong.
Well, A-10s are well suited for strafing runs, etc. Presumably they'd be sent in if the area they're entering is presumed safe. That clearly didn't pan out.
The reality is avoiding a ground operation was probably the wrong move at this point (ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not)
It's really hard to truly guarantee surface to air capabilities are gone when you're relying purely on sat images + aerial surveillance (and obviously this carries risk). Iran has fairly portable SAM systems that are public knowledge.
> ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not
How spicy of a debate is that really? How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
Clearly this war isn't popular but that's a far cry from saying there's no debate. Like many other topics/questions we're seeing people following their tribe and bubbles rather than actual debating.
I would question to what extent repeating propaganda, qualifies as debate.
Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate.
There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Iran needed to be bombed, it took absurd incompetence to start doing so before planning how to handle asymmetric warfare against drones in an affordable way.
I also think there was an initial “euphoria” (I guess) during the initial days of the campaign.
People I know (even Iranian expats) were excited to see the regime get hammered and there was hope for possibility of change (and also a little bloodlust)… but I think as the war drags on and the US is exposed to be in an un-winnable mess, sentiment will continue to sour.
This has already started to happen in Nate Silver’s post you linked.
Your first link says 28% support it, so somewhere between 28 and 37%. I do wonder how many of those people could find Iran on a map, though I suppose you could ask the same about the people who are against it.
75 million using the YouGov number and just under 100 million using the Nate Silver average. (I think you must have used the more Trump-favorable number AND included children in your computation, which is not reasonable.)
Also worth noting that Nate Silver's measure has been declining for almost 3 weeks, the majority of the duration of the invasion.
Before the invasion, a University of Mariland poll says 55 million and a YouTov poll says 71 million support. These are useful numbers because we know there's a rally around the flag effect that distorts thinking during a conflict.
Surprisingly so, I would say. Without going into any identifying details, my buddy, who is otherwise fairly reasonable, thinks it was. I disagree. Reported country split ( US ) seems to fall some along common political lines though, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.
Then again.. I can no longer can rely on those surveys in any meaningful way.
At least in this case, that is not fully accurate; very much a product of the internet so I am not aware of him actually watching TV though admittedly it is not like I keep a track of his habits.
As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it. My only complaint is they didn't do these strikes when the massive street protests were happening a few months ago.
This is what bringing democracy looks like?! The regime is more entrenched than ever and our commander in chief keeps threatening to commit war crimes on a massive scale. If he follows through on what he says he will do and obliterates all the civilian infrastructure in the country it will kill mass numbers of innocent people and turn millions of survivors into impoverished refugees.
As bad as the regime is, and it's very bad, what we're doing is even worse for most Iranians and the odds a democratic government arises from the ashes of our bombing campaign is incredibly unlikely.
> As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it.
As others have stated. This war will not bring democracy. Bombing Iranians have united them with the regime.
Also, US and Israel do not want a democracy in Iran. Israel would prefer a non-functioning place like Palestine or a mostly non-functional place like Lebanon that they can easily control.
Yes, bombing schools, universities and dessalination plants is a sure way to have more democracy in a country. Especially double taps where you kill the rescuers.
The US have so many examples where they did so and worked!
Oh, didn't you hear, we actually _triple tapped_ the school, so after the first wave of rescuers was also hit, anyone who came to help was also attacked.
If this is a troll it is masterful. If it's an honest opinion I would invite you to check your skull for unexpected holes where your brain may have fallen out.
Literally none of the fighting countries want Iran to be democratic. Neither USA nor Israel nor Iran. Israel dont want the country functional and would prevent democracy. USA idea of regime change is to keep regime, change head for someone who pays extortion money. And if Iranian leadership wanted democracy they would have one. Not sure if you noticed, but American admin loves dictators and insults democracies
So ,WTF are you talking about here.
Also, bombing city with that double tap tactic during protests ensures you kill protesters.
At war there's a lot more pressure on ground and air crews that can lead to more mistakes. Also the mission would be flown closer to the limits vs. training.
So... We don't know? If your question is whether that's a good guess/greater than zero probability then sure. Is it a certainty? No. The Iranians will claim they shot it down. The Americans may or may not admit and if they deny then people will say they're lying.
In the first Iraq war, the KARI system in Iraq, which was built by Thompson-CSF, had its specifications leaked and the US obtained access to back doors and codes that allowed it to bypass and/or disable much of that system. You need to remember that the US and much of the West had friendly relations with Iraq and provided some infrastructure assistance and military support because Iraq invaded Iran.
No such analogous advantage exists in Iran, which is a much larger country, with better air defenses, and no western contractors ready to provide back doors into systems.
By that same logic that fact that we only lost 1 F-15 in, what, almost 3 weeks of bombing is actually a pretty good sign. Especially when you factor in that the Russians (proven) and Chinese (yet to be proven) are assisting Iran and Iran has been buying and building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people just for this very attack, only to have almost everything obliterated.
And 3 weeks in to the war and the US is flying refueling tankers to refuel Blackhawks in the very area the F-15 was shot down to recover the pilots (1 so far has been received) should be much more informative than it seems to be.
Is that reliable? The IRGC basically runs the economy and takes a significant cut. The IGRC is also separate from the military. The nuclear program, quite obviously for military use, may also not be included. What about support for proxy groups? Hezbollah alone gets support above $1B per year.
They should probably be closer to 0 or more in line with European countries but these numbers aren’t accurate and don’t tell the full story. They don’t, for example, include money paid to and missiles transferred to Houthis to launch from Yemen. Nevermind Hamas and Hezbollah, rebels in Iraq and so forth.
> European countries are protected by NATO and a nuclear umbrella.
Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time, which is the ideal thing, but it seems like maybe we can't live in that ideal world, anyway...
I'm not suggesting that Iran shouldn't have a military, but instead questioning the purposes for which it would have one. Today its military is used for sending missiles at Gulf States, funding Hezbollah, and oppressing its people. So for it to have little to no military practically speaking would be a good thing.
Second at 2.5% GDP (again these figures are highly questionable) that's plenty to have defensive capabilities versus neighbors. There's nobody there to really worry about because who outside of the United States is going to invade Iran? And even then the US is only doing it because they won't stop doing crazy shit and launching missiles at everyone.
They wouldn't be under attack if they weren't being run by the regime that is running their country. Notice how it's just Iran that's being attacked? And even so, what good did that military to them? They still got attacked, and their military assets were still significantly/mostly destroyed. What's the point of a military if the military you're buying just gets obliterated by the only country that is going to attack you for things you did in the first place and didn't have to do?
There is no civilization on the planet that would accept full disarmament under the logic that they should just trust that you won’t attack them if they weren’t armed.
> Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time,
UK and France have nukes, european nato part isn't going to be invaded without nuclear exchanges.
Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
Which is a logical result of decades of sanctions, allowing only the insiders to profit from the country's ressources while the common man is bared from providing an alternative. Sanctions do not work and only entrench regimes, as we see in Russia, Cuba, North Korea and now Iran.
Extensive domestic economic control by security forces is also a feature of Egypt and Pakistan. America does not complain about those examples of course, because those countries bend the knee.
The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people
Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
> The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
Which makes them irrelevant here in this discussion but sure yea. Russia (those sneaky guys who invaded Ukraine and are being supplied by Iran) provide targeting information to Iran, Iran has missiles, we can't shoot them all down, and here we are. It's unfortunate but that's what happens in a war. Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
> Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
We can easily afford both, but we choose not to because our political system is full of morons and corruption, but instead of Iran being more like the US and being dysfunctional in this regard, it should be more like Norway (excluding population differences) and pump and sell the oil and do so for the benefit of their citizens instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
> Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits:
Figures provided here are inaccurate and don't account for spending on proxy groups, for example.
> Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
This is an interesting take given that the US seems to have ignored many of the most important lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
As for "end up in another war", the language you chose is very revealing. You don't just "end up in...war". Wars don't start themselves. Someone starts them and in the case of the US, it's almost always the US.
US welfare system seems to contain a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board, so this will be a good chance to cleanse the system of fraud.
or at least US citizens should protect legitimate entitlements and inspect everything to cut down on corruption
US welfare system seems to contain a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board, so this will be a good chance to cleanse the system of fraud.
Taking money from social programs and piling into the military which contains "a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board", certainly is a choice. Sort of the opposite of a smart choice, but definitely a choice for sure.
I’m reading one of those Blackhawks was shot down. An A-10, F-16, and a refueling plane, in addition to the F-15 so far today. Which, if true, is not a good sign.
We'll have to wait and see what comes out but I don't think this is a bad sign. In war you lose equipment and aircraft. It's silly to think the US wouldn't lose some during the course of the war. After all, the OP to this thread highlighted all of the advantages Iran has. Yet we've wiped out quite a bit of their military infrastructure and have complete control over the skies. Russia can't say the same though for their little adventure ;)
We must be using different definitions for ‘complete’. I think Iran is using loitering anti-air missiles with IR seeking which seems to be effective. Maybe this sudden spike is reflective of receiving new equipment from China.
Could be. I guess my definition is “US can do whatever it wants without contest” and that seems to be the case here. What fighter jets does Iran have that are not destroyed? Do they have significant anti air defenses that we can’t attack and that limit our operations? Not to my knowledge but maybe there are parts of the country where that’s true, for now.
Of course in any war someone can fire back at and sometimes hit your aircraft even if you have complete airspace control.
I don't view it as contested because there aren't to my knowledge limitations on US operations. There's no aircraft for the US to worry about, nor are the SAM capabilities unknown. Guys get rockets and shoot them at aircraft, that makes it dangerous but not necessarily contested.
Yes the US probably is still using precision weapons because, well, unlike the Iranian government we don't want to use so-called dumb munitions and indiscriminately bomb civilians or civilian targets. And of course in general, why even fly into the airspace if you don't have to - malfunctions happen too.
The us has air dominance but not air supremacy, which is why missiles are mostly used rather than bombs with gps kits, requiring to get much closer.
And the US has been very keen to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure, along with Israelis, since the start of the war [0]. The US-Israelis are guilty of war crimes.
The recent bombing of an unfinished bridge is another example of the US-Israeli actions, especially since they did a double-tap to kill rescuers.
> Yes the US probably is still using precision weapons because, well, unlike the Iranian government we don't want to use so-called dumb munitions and indiscriminately bomb civilians or civilian targets.
Are you referring to the "precision" weapons that hit the girls' school?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It is completely expected to lose aircraft in an operation of this scale, against an opponent with this level of sophistication. People put way too much stock in all of these modern stealth systems and whatnot. Stealth, for example, is a buzzword. It will give a slight edge, but it's not going to make your aircraft completely invisible and unshootable.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
It was pretty much a given that over time some of these airplanes would be shot down. There's no way to get every single MANPAD or even some of the larger anti-aircraft setups. A jet can even be brought down by a canon or a bullet given enough luck. We've had quite a few near misses, there's a video of an Israeli F-16 evading a surface to air missile, there have been the F-35 that was hit but managed to continue and land, there were countless drones shot down.
This was inevitable and just a question of time. Out of >10k sorties something is going to get hit. I've no idea what range the military planners expected and how we're doing vs. that.
OP left a little to interpretation, but, I think, top of the list starts with 'mission accomplished 2.0' meme followed by increased US casualties ( though I suppose the exact order likely depends on your current disposition ).
> During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement.
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
per wiki, f-15e was first produced in 1987, so there were very few in service at that time, and most of ground strikes were carried by other aircrafts.
Yes, most ground strikes were by other aircraft types, but the F-15E did have a lot of sorties, almost as many as the F-111 or F-4G (although the F-16 had many, many more sorties, but not all of them were air-to-ground)
It seems like the Iraqis were relatively poor operators of their systems. A few days ago I was reading about the Nato bombing of yugoslavia on wikipedia and it had the following entry:
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
Seems to me their strategy is to shut down the Strait as cheaply as possible, force ground operations on known strategic points of interest, then just missile and drone strike Americans in Iranian territory where they have ~no air defense.
There are 4 players in this war and they all have very different goals and "victory" conditions.
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.
You forgot the 5th actor - Russia - which is benefiting hugely from the collapse of NATO, the loosening of oil sanctions, the huge hike in oil prices, and the way the US was persuaded to expend a ridiculous percentage of its conventional missile stockpiles on a pointless project.
Ukraine is doing its best to minimise Russian oil exports, and that's certainly having an effect.
But strategically, Russia is a huge beneficiary of this mess.
It depends where you draw the line. The extended players include:
1. Russia (as you say): I think this war of choice virtually guarantees a settlement of the Ukraine war along the current borders. At some point Europe will need to ease their energy crisis with Russian oil and gas. Well done, everybody, the system works;
2. Europe: like the GCC they are finding US security guarantees and the NATO protection racket aren't what they were sold. Pax Americana was an illusion. I've elsewhere predicted this is going to lead to arms and tech nationalism within Europe. It's actually a race between fascism taking over Europe and Europe divorcing itself from the US and I suspect fascism is currently winning; and
3. China: the biggest wineer of all this. China is still receiving Iranian oil exports. In fact, the US "punished" Iran by lifting oil sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil to China at market rates instead of below market (because of the sanctions). Again, well done, everybody; and
4. Asia: this has exposed their weakness of imported oil, particularly Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I would not be surprised if this war of choice is the turning point that leads to a China-cenetered Asian security compact.
In one year, the US has essentially torn up the entire post-1945 rules-based international order, which it designed for its own benefit.
The post-1945 rules-based order was already a slow motion train crash that most of the West remained in denial about until Putin wiped his behind with it in the 2014 invasion of Crimea. To pretend that Trump is somehow breaking an otherwise intact system at this point is fanciful.
I think this war is actually pushing many away from fascism. Trump was the reference for a lot of the European right and this is showing people he was terrible and, by extension, embarrassing them all.
Heck, Orbán is currently running an electoral campaign as "the candidate of peace".
It'll partly depend on what internal housecleaning—or perhaps fumigation—and reform happens in the US.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I don't think we do. I think this is our Teutoburg Forest moment [1].
Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war (eg [2][3][4]). They just oppose the way it was initiated. In other words, they have a process objection not a policy objection.
I've seen lamenting over Harris losing the elction (as well as more than a few doing "stolen election") about how the world could be different. But US foreign policy is uniparty
> The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
Saudi and the UAE don't want the pre-war status quo, they want America to bomb Iran back to the stone age so it can't continue missile or launcher production.
What we can tell though is that Iran is still firing missiles (including cluster munitions) at Israel's civilians and at gulf states. So the ground facts are that it can still do that.
We also have to remember that Iran has a large number of different missile systems for different ranges. It's mostly not the same missiles they are firing at the nearby gulf states as they are firing into Israel. Some of the longer range missile systems they have need to be fired from western Iran to make it to Israel. There's a lot of other nuance, solid fuel vs. liquid fuel, mobile vs. fixed launchers etc.
I don't think we'll see anything close to reliable reporting any time soon.
The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.
By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.
Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.
>> Doesn't break out anti-air, but Iran absolutely has a lot of teeth left.
With the price of oil having skyrocketed, and the new revenue that will be coming from the Hormuz tolls, they will also be rebuilding their previous capacity in no time.
They certainly have, but the general idea is to first use stealth jets to bomb defensive systems (including radar observability) to conquer the skies, and then you can fly around somewhat freely. While SAM technology has improved, so have America's observability and stealth bombing capabilities. It will be interesting to learn the context and sequence of events which led to an F-15 being shot down by enemy fire.
(In 1991, the United States relied on the F-117 Nighthawk to penetrate Baghdad and launch salvos against radar and SAM sites. Simultaneously, Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against similar communication and defense sites. In this war with Iran, the F-35 and B-2 have been used for stealth missions).
Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.
Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.
The story is actually quite interesting. The Serbs observed that a nighthawk would routinely fly the same route but their radar couldn’t lock on it unless the missile hatch were open, which they managed to elicit.
In short, it took 2 rare events to occur for it to happen.
Most of the F15 upgrades have been against other aircraft. The F15 is primarily an air superiority fighter, it isn’t designed for attacks or defence against ground forces. The F15E is modified to attack ground targets, but ideally they would be targets without any air defences.
The F-15E Strike Eagle variant is definitely designed for attacks and defense against ground forces, but overall air defense is a probability game so it's not too surprising that it eventually happened
Yes, although it’s designed for interdiction, rather than primarily a ground attack aircraft, the difference being that it’s intended to be used against defenceless ground targets (like supply lines), not on the front lines.
You can't really take out "the whole" air defense system because there will always be folks out with MANPAD-type things, those will score hits on occasion. That's probably what we saw here. I doubt MANPADs were nearly as common in the early 90s as they are today.
True but without radar they have a relatively difficult task of being out there setup and waiting for a fast moving jet to pass within range.
Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.
Yeah my guess was they were coming in along predictable routes at this point and that's what got them? I saw that the search and rescue mission was in an area close to water. I believe many Stinger hits in Ukraine can be attributed to predictability.
US also has A-10s doing gun runs in Iraq too. It makes sense the US is more willing to take risks 1-month into the war given how effective they've been and for Iran to also adapt their manpad teams after they probably failed a ton of times previously.
You saw the same pattern where Ukraine and Russia both constantly adapted on the battlefield and the war changed rapidly over the first year.
Yeah I have seen the clip with Iran polices firing at the UH-60s, which is very concerning. Sure SIGINT makes sure there is no serious AD but there is no way to guarantee that there is no MANPADs somewhere close.
Iraq is pretty flat on the routes between the US-allied countries and the major strongholds (Basra, Baghdad). You can't easily conceal rocket launchers there.
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
My concern is that other countries can aid Iran with weapons in a direct and indirect way. There is no guarantee to block the railroads from East and the shipments from North.
That's not a concern it's a reality. Iran is not shut-off or blockaded to any meaningful degree. It has tons of unmolested border crossings and Caspian sea access, and maintains full control within it's own borders (minus the parts that have been blown up).
Also ships are still transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from Iranian ports taking goods in from China, with who knows what on board. They are also exporting more oil now than they were before the war.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
Even the Philippines, a US ally, has struck a deal with Iran for safe passage. Meanwhile, Oman is working with Iran on a toll scheme. There's an emerging chance that no US-flagged vessel crosses the Straight of Hormuz again in our lifetimes (except maybe for a retreating 5th fleet).
The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
The success of the war depends on the approval ratings of the US president which will almost certainly take hits when US military takes hits so the US citizens seeing the US military taking hits at a higher rate than relatively recent wars in the area is a bad sign for "winning" whatever "winning" means here.
Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
TBH I went through SERE school (aircrew) and I questioned its value, since the training is in eastern Washington/northern Idaho area mountainous woodland environment and all the evasion they showed us relied on that kind of cover and "bushcraft"
And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
Iran isn't just central Tehran. Look up the Zagros Mountains and the Alborz Mountains. Or just look at a picture of the northern Tehran skyline, it is at the foot of the Alborz, a huge mountain range. There's plenty of woodlands and forest too. Some parts of the Hyrcanian forests get over 50 inches of annual rainfall, which isn't Forks, WA, but it is substantial.
You'd get additional specific training for deployments and the skills are transferrable. But obviously they can't train everyone in every biome that we have, otherwise you'd spend a whole year just flying around to different areas of the country to train and on a 4-year contract it's just not going to work time-wise.
Sounds like typical one-sized-fits-all, checkbox military nonsense. Perhaps there are better and/or climate-specific SERE courses in one or more services? Because if it's ineffective, it's a waste of time and money more so than usual and puts expensive-to-replace personnel at risk.
Seems like it's all about vacating the area and busting out the CSEL (or NGSR when materialized) personal SAR comms is the best way out, or it may well turn into a weeks(s) long, nonstop spy-shit ordeal getting out. Perhaps some forethought and packing with knowledge and specific local-appropriate items (and chunk of cash) would help more than MIL-STD Walmart camping aisle prepper bullshit.
No, we actually train to be tortured and held if caught, but everyone knows the risks before you take off. Captured marines or soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re clear eyed about it.
I've found that most of our population has almost no connection to the people that actually fight wars, and therefore have no idea what they think. With the exception of a few criminals, none of us desire to commit war crimes. None of us want to send rounds into civilian infrastructure, seeing regular people struggle to get food, fuel, and water in Iraq did not make me feel powerful and it was obvious it did not advance our goals on the ground.
The jingoistic commentary people hear from politicians and former military podcasters that don't fight anymore is repugnant, and this backsliding in the (at least attempt at) honorable execution of war is not going to bode well for our country. It's probably trite when we're double tapping girl's schools, but I want to think that purposely striking civilian infrastructure, universities, hospitals, water resources... this was all something "we" didn't do.
This is actively devaluing the meaning of being a Marine. Maybe this already happened in Mai Lai, maybe this was further chipped away by Abu Ghraib, maybe letting Eddie Gallagher off... etc etc. But this feels different in a way I've never felt before.
Why do it, then? I'm not trying to be inflammatory or ask loaded questions here, I'm genuinely curious (as someone who, as you note, has almost no connection to the Americans who fight in wars; I have friends who are vets, but have been out of the military for years), and I just don't understand.
I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?
Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?
I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)
We want them to. At the same time that we sit at our keyboards and philosophize about how soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders, we [collectively] do not really want them spending all that much time pondering it. The most obvious cases, sure, but in general we want them to do what they are told, and do it quickly. That is why there are lawyers in the field to make fast judgements.
The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.
I don't have a good answer for you. I expected the upper and middle officer corps to conduct themselves with honor and they aren't.
I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)
But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.
And they have DOD lawyers (with backup from the DOJ) saying the whole thing, and specific targets, are legal. Along with that, much of the most Sr leadership (of both combat forces, and legal) have been fired and replaced with MAGA loyalists.
There have been so many crimes and zero accountability. I frankly wouldn't know where to start, but maybe a good example is "collateral murder", which Assange has been persecuted for revealing for the better part of the past two decades.
"No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars. We fight to win,” Hegseth said."
It's a self-soothing performance of self-importance, like everything else this administration does.
This is not an administration run by adults who model consequences.
Everything happens to reassure the Commander in Chief - and the people behind him, like Miller and Vought - that they're exceptionally special and gifted people who can have anything they want and do anything they want, to anyone, without limits.
There's pretty clearly negative value in having civilian leader whose most notable accomplishments are being a TV opinion host, and quitting the Army because they decided he was too dangerous to be allowed to serve as a guard for a presidential inauguration.
It’s not not woke, it’s wokeness of a different kind. They exclude those who disagree with their brand of orthodoxy, it seems like to me they’re firing anyone who says no to the ground invasion.
Right but the reason we have rules against people declaring no quarter is to prevent a race to the bottom. It is absolutely reasonable to respond to a no quarter declaration in kind, which is... again... the entire reason we have prohibitions on it.
They won't face any US law. AIUI, they have been getting letters from the DOJ office of legal counsel that say it's legal. This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).
The best shot would be to turn them over to the ICC
Yep. And war crime seems to have lost all meaning in the US.
But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
> But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
If they landed anywhere near a town they are probably captured. The kuwait video from the f15 that was hit with friendly fire was crazy. Like 6 suvs worth of locals immediately surrounded this guy and they were threatening to beat him with a galvanized pipe.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
As a matter of fact, if Iran comes out of the war having not committed war crimes they’ll have a huge worldwide moral and public image victory over the United States and Israel.
How am I reading this? Wasn't the regime mowing down tens of thousands of its own citizens prior to this war? I mean, not a "war" crime, I guess, but it seems ludicrous to give them any "moral victories".
Iran has for nearly fifty years pursued unilateral hostilities against the US and Israel, including funding numerous terrorist groups and militias to wage war on them. It can’t negotiate its way out of this quagmire because the IRGC’s core ideology and mission is hatred (and hostage-taking).
In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.
One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.
What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.
Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.
They already targetted civilian infrastructure, so they already commited war crime. They also threatened to attack universities wh8ch is war crime on itself (after attack on their universities).
Prisoner exchanges are a pretty strong motivator for any group, even hardline ones. If the Taliban was up for exchanges I think the IRGC is pretty likely to want to keep prisoners for that too.
I would note ISIS put out some high res, professionally edited video of burning a (Jordanian?) pilot to death while inside a cage. Quite savage, but the propaganda effect is more profound than about anything else I've seen.
Yes, after that video it was clear that Daesh and everyone in their little caliphate would be hunted down. And it was, they were. They were attacked everywhere they tried to return to. From minor girls returning to the Netherlands to 45 year old men (trying to) return to South Africa, all were persecuted, and that one video had a lot to do with that happening. After that video, even muslim nations started hunting these people.
And yet, they are still around, made famous and split into separate groups, still actively fighting on multiple fronts all over Africa. And if the Iranian government falls for sure they will be coming back with a vengeance in the area.
First: count the responses to my thread of people suggesting Iran cannot/should not be held to the Geneva convention: 4,5 (I'm counting the Hegseth comment as 0.5)
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
> Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage.
Expect there to be a lot of operatives of the US in Iran. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it wouldn't be the first time a CIA or something operative is caught and this is the cover.
France vetoed proposal about opening the straight by force. France and Europe in general dont want to dragged into this war.
Also, I dont see UN punishing Israel or American war crimes either ... so it makes sense to not apply "whatever goes" standard to aggressors and different one to the defender.
You mean the army shooting 40.000 protestors just 2 months ago including 1000+ children, then executed a child that won an international wrestling competition, now accusing everyone else of warcrimes?
I think I'll need some reeducation on this concept of "dignity" you speak. Could you explain further?
None of those numbers are verifiable. The opposition has every incentive to lie. And let's not forget there was a lot of armed agitators amongst those protesters. Mike Huckabee let the cat out of the bag with a tweet boasting of how a mossad agent walks beside every protester.
That's a lovely thing to say, but if your existence is being threatened by an aggressor, I wouldn't blame you for throwing out the rulebook.
In my view, if someone invades your territory and starts attacking you, you have no obligation to follow any sort of "principles" or "rules" when it comes to how you fight back. Anything you need to do to the attackers in order to defend yourself and your people is, by definition, morally defensible.
(Do note that I said "need". Doing arbitrary messed-up things that don't actually further the goal of driving back the attackers is not ok.)
There is no if. We've already done that. So yes, we are no better than them. So answer the question. Why would Iran follow conventions it's enemy that started a war of aggression is not following?
Especially after the double-tap on civilians and first responders the US just did on that bridge. Or the threat for no quarters from the secretary of defense. Or the threats to destroy critical civilian infrastructure for water or power.
I didn’t downvote you, but a terse “well actually it’s prisoner of war” doesn’t really add to the conversation. Imagine doing that in person, you’d annoy everyone around you.
If you explained why it’s distinct and what that might mean for downed crew I think it wouldn’t have been down voted
No, they wouldn't annoy everyone around them, that's just your subjective projection. I, for one, found it an important distinction that highlights how easy it is to skew a narrative towards a more sympathetic one. It saw it as having similar value to those Instagram posts juxtaposing headlines reporting on "dead Palestinians" vs "killed Israeli victims".
Approximately never. We are in a situation where Congress is unusually beholden to their constituents for once, because those people care deeply about Donald Trump. So this is what they want; not just the war, but everything -- they want all the power to rest with Trump.
Plot twist: The Dem leadership (Schumer, Jeffries, et al) also supports this.
That's why their main complaints have been procedural: "Why didn't you come to us first with your plans?". And why they slow-walked the vote on a war powers act.
The dems have no power against a unified GOP front, and they already look pretty weak on issues like this. They are trying to figure out how they can mollify their base while attracting enough centrist voters to retake Congress later this year. I don't care for the dem leadership but I feel a little sympathy for them. Catering to their loudest supporters is a pretty big reason they are the minority party right now.
If everyone is somewhat implicated in Epstein files, then everyone is afraid of Putin / Netanyahu who might pull up the files. It's funny how they are so scared to face justice, but also interesting how American law enforcement became so corrupt.
There's a very strange problem with this whole thing where, of course, whatever these powerful people have done behind closed doors that is illegal and exploitative and harmful is terrible and they should be put to justice.
However, if the direction of the country is being seriously altered via blackmail, IMO that is many orders of magnitude worse than anything they could have done. Like we are currently bombing yet another middle eastern country for no clear reason.
I would personally be open to some kind of Epstein jubilee where we absolve everyone involved in order to nullify the blackmail.
Like it's not great, it's terrible for the victims and for justice, but at the moment we are getting terrible from both ends, could we at least reduce it to one end?
I think an A-10 is also down (pilot ejected and safe). I'm surprised that they decided to fly an A-10 into Iran. I mean it's a solid plane that can sustain some AD fire, but at the same time it usually operates within the height that MANPADs can reach.
The US military is in the middle of a top-level political purge; both honesty and competence as an institution will be below normal levels for the forseeable future, and honesty about sensitive operations during wartime is never much even as a baseline.
What’s the buzz like amongst military right now? Is moral low? High?
It’s been fascinating to see my Father (Marine and Army veteran) and my brother (soon be a commissioned Air Force officer) who usually are very aligned politically start develop the first rift I’ve ever seen regarding this war.
Because almost all of the people inside Iran have been disconnected for the past 35 days [1]. And believe it or not, they are texting these news live to all mobile phones on a daily basis as well. Some regime supporters believe it, because the want to believe it, they need to believe it. Just in the past 24 hours I have received 5 different messages from different organizations claiming victory and damage to US / Israel assets.
Just for a quick laugh, look at the official (Iranian) president's letter to the American people published yesterday [2]. The font changes between the paragraphs!
> Iran tweets about taking down an American jet basically daily.
Sure. We have two sets of demonstrable liars here. See, for example, the E-3 Sentry that got blown up; it took leaked photos for that to be admitted.
And don't get me started on the several times in the last few months we've "obliterated" Iran's nuclear capacity and missiles and whatnot only to be told it's time to do it again.
The claim being addressed is a shootdown over Qeshm island, which is the biggest island just west of the strait of Hormuz. The current CSAR operations are happening somewhere in the Khuzestan province. Probably somewhere within the 150 km radius of [1] based on online footage of the C-130 flying over.
Hate to say it and sound so "conspiracy-like", but I no longer can trust what the current US administration is saying. Ever since the path of a hurricane was redrawn with a sharpie, it's been... unusual.
I think the problem is that in previous administrations at least they had some skill in lying in ways that were not so constantly contradicting one another.
Regardless of whether it's a "perfect setup" or not, the facts speak for themselves.
Most competent governments don't say things that are outright wrong. They may use double speak, or not comment on a topic. But this government (and unfortunately it's this specific adminstration/president) has acted time and again in a way that both of us know very well.
Not really. Just that trust ain't binary and the govt is made of people. I don't like this admin but this too shall pass. Cultivate your garden. Electing bad people has consequences.
None of what's happening today could have happened without everything that came before it.
The blue team carries plenty of blame for not fielding better candidates. If nobody is buying your bullshit, it's a little weak to blame the customer.
And all of the us electorate carries plenty of blame for letting our government get so massive and out of control over time. We've let this beast metastasize and grow, and now were stuck with it.
The American people are ultimately to blame for it, they've got the government they deserve, which is actively dismantling the US empire day by day. The American people voted for Trump instead of Kamala, and that is rather damning of the state of the American people, far more so than however damning it may also be for the Democratic party.
Or the bootlicker olympics for those who want everyone else to ignore the constant lies because they think bigger, more powerful government is utopian.
I wouldn't be so pleased with myself over such "You will get wet in a rainstorm." style predictions.
truths from different angles that are at odds with one another produce mistrust and thoughts of conspiracy. We have more of that now than we have ever had, ever. It doesn't take Nostradamus to point to the trend.
tl;dr : Gee, where did this mistrust in the current government come from? I'd point but I don't have that many hands.
The crew of the IRIS Dena were warned twice by the US to abandon ship according to a report from one of the sailor’s father. They refused.
Not sure if it’s possible to treat enemies better than that. And I doubt the Iranians will treat a US pilot well. Look at how they treat their own citizens.
The ship was an unarmed vessel on its way to a goodwill visit to Sri Lanka and coming from an international maritime exercise hosted by India, which the United States also attended and participated in. The US torpedoed it, and when it sank, the US did not apparently attempt to rescue any of the Dena's crew. Fortunately, Sri Lanka showed up and saved 30 people.
Mind you, the details of war are not always clear. The US says that the ship was armed, and it also says that they did make an effort to rescue the crew. The US does not explain why it failed to actually rescue anybody, of course.
If the source below is correct, the commander of the Dena ordered his troops to stay on the ship despite the warnings, there was a bit of a mutiny and the survivors are those who rejected those orders and jumped off.
OK if I come to your car, declare you’re my enemy, and tell you to get out before I toss a Molotov at you, does that mean I can’t be tried for murder later if you refuse?
This was a sneak attack outside of an established war zone, for an illegal war, so don’t try to conflate this as an attack on America’s enemies. The USA made them their enemies themselves.
That doesn't seem like the most trustworthy source.
>Established in May 2017 and funded by Saudi Arabia,[1][2][3][4][5][6] it actively promotes former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as the next ruler of Iran.
"They killed unarmed civilians so that means we can kill unarmed soldiers!"
Are you seriously trying to say this war of aggression on Iran is about democracy for their people? That's not what the US does. What the US does is lip service to democracy while destroying it around the world for capitalist interests.
Based on the initial comment, I believe we were trying to deduce how the Iranian regime might respond to the capture of a US pilot… what do you think they will do if they kill 18 year olds for protesting?
PS: I’m not sure why you feel the need to be passive-aggressive. That’s how I interpreted your comment at least.
Of course I'm serious, why would my age affect how I feel about a soldier dying invading another country? But you are right that probably in the big context of things a POW is better for negotiating an ealier cease fire, which would ultimately be the better outcome.
Irrespective of whether you think that the war is a good idea, having a plane shot down after 20+ days of war isn't exactly embarrassing. If anything, it shows the opposite: The extreme capability of the U.S. military.
Iran had one of the largest and most extensive integrated air defense networks in the world. US has been bombing Iran from day 0 of this war. Those are the air losses they took.
Being able to counter air defenses to this degree and operate with this level of impunity is a major SEAD/DEAD win.
The article says this is the first jet that was shot down by enemy fire this war, but this confuses me. Was the F35 that was downed a while back friendly fire or something? Are F35s not fighter jets?
The missiles have what’s effectively a flak shotgun shell at the tip, when they’re pointed at an object and close by it shoots flak in a tight cone towards the front.
Flak spreads the damage better and does more kinetic damage than trying to ram a plane with a missile and hoping the concussion from a the resulting explosion damages something.
You're talking about a single "dash" on the frame before it goes all white. First question, if it were a laser, would be what exactly are you seeing there? A laser from the side is invisible, there'd need to be dust there, or the air would need to have turned into plasma. I don't think either makes that much sense. Second question/problem would be… it would have failed/be malfunctioning because —
— pretty much all AA munition works by exploding in close proximity to the target and showering it in shrapnel. So this might even have "helped" the missle/shell against malfunction in its fuse. And considering that this is designed to work like that, and it's likely not the greatest quality work on the Iranian side, it's also possible that the thing is already exploding and just ejected some piece of intentional shrapnel (or unintentionally itself) early, ahead of the actual detonation.
Or the Iranians edited that "dash" into that one frame, it's not exactly like it's a reputable source and it's in their interest to confuse things. Maybe they want the US to believe that the countermeasures are malfunctioning and helping their attacks, so they turn it off…
Read the section titled 'The Gamble' if you want that opinion, but the tl;dr is that our 2025 strike against Iran ceded our ability to claim dis-involvement in Israeli strikes, and so Israel was able to draw us into this war whether we wanted to or not.
It's pretty normal for planes to go down in a war. They've flown 5000+ sorties, it's a pretty huge accomplishment this is the first one lost over Iran. Especially considering all of the last decade's speculation about how tough attacking Iran would be.
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
2-3 a week is not great for the greatest military, more than half attributable to Iran.
With 300+ US casualties, that's ~10/day, a fatality every ~2 days. No boots on the ground (that we know of, sure there are some elite ops in the country)
You must not have read about all the hype Iran had before the war and before 2024 especially. The US airforce/navy has performed extremely well. In Desert Storm they lost far, far more aircraft and that only lasted 1.5 months (Iran is 1 month in). Even the ballistic missile strikes against Israel haven't been exceptionally notable, considering Iran is going full-bore and has thousands of ballistic/cruise missiles and drones. They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
The main issues with this war are strategic questions and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication. But otherwise for an air campaign this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
the big difference with Iran is the strait of hormuz. It doesn't matter how "well" it goes if it stays closed and torpedos the global economy
> inconsistent communication
I feel like "inconsistent communication" is putting it lightly, with trump going back and forth between "we won", "we'll take the oil", and "whatever we'll leave" often within the same day.
Does it matter? US is a net oil exporter, and not exactly starved for Gulf oil. And every day the strait stays closed is a day other Gulf states have a very pressing reason to conflict with Iran. As if Iran didn't give enough of those to the entire region.
Iran isn't somehow able to exert infinite economic pressure forever. They can play the chaos monkey, but how much does it helps them? Threats only work on those who cave in to them.
It does matter because oil is a global commodity, the fact that the US is a net exporter doesn't stop the prices from going up and other follow-on impacts to the global economy.
It means that US isn't hit the hardest. There's no "we have to end the war this month or our country grinds down to a halt". Just the slow grind of economic pressure that, I remind, affects more countries than just the US - and many of them far stronger.
US leadership can just say "this isn't enough to deter us" and proceed with the rest of the war however they want.
US military is performing quite well. US political leadership is the questionable part of this war.
It would sure be nice if White House gave a reason to believe that there's an actual plan for dismantling Iran's regime, or Iran's influence, that goes beyond "wing it".
Iran's regime is an radical Islamic theocracy that has "Death to America" as a matter of policy, supports every other radical Islamist militia in the entire Middle East region, and tried to build nukes after being told, repeatedly, not to build nukes.
I don't know about you, but the idea of a radical Islamic theocracy and a well known source of Middle East instability having nukes doesn't sit well with me. As far as reasons to invade countries go, this alone would make for a damn good one.
If a button existed that magically turned Iran into a secular-ish democracy(-ish) like Turkey then, yes, I would expect the President of the United States to press it.
No such button exists, and it's increasingly clear that this war will leave the entire world far worse off while further entrenching the current Iranian regime.
"Far worse off" how exactly? "Entrenching" how exactly?
Iranian regime wasn't doing that well even when it wasn't actively bombed. And "rally around the flag" only goes so far in a country that has been killing protestors by the thousands.
I don't see this war ruining Iran's regime overnight as is. But if it comes up with a sustained effort to pressure Iran, or a ground operation to topple the regime directly, it well might.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
I don't see why they couldn't. The obvious strategy for Iran right now is to use cluster munitions and Shahed waves to expend as many interceptors as possible before sending in the high-throw unitary (or nuclear) warheads. It makes sense that we saw the smaller MRBMs first since they're the cheapest minimum-viable threat.
> this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
We're deep in the missile age. Air campaigns like this sucked during the Scud hunt, and it triple-sucks now that America has to contend with drone warfare. The limits of an air-only campaign have been constricting for the past three decades, and the death toll can only climb if the air war fails.
I wouldn't draw comparisons to Desert Storm, 36 years ago and a differently composed US military, along with all the ISR advancements since then.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
Could, they are not going all out, but they do keep striking gulf states on the regular
> people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Asking questions, we the people deserve some clarity instead of half a dozen changing reasons and being told we already won, but still need to win, and that we'll be done in a few weeks a few times now. We the people have to pay for this, we deserve answers, especially what's the plan for when the shooting stops?
Israel, or at least Bibi, seems to be the only one who is very clear about the goals and intentions.
The only ones I'm seeing act like there should be no expectation of losing aircraft in a war are social media figures who always want to bloviate about something.
Iran doesn't have to shoot down a single jet to win this war. Just move military hardware into caves. Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target. Wait it out until American domestic pressure from perceived war crimes ends the war. They can't afford to fight a land war or garrison over the entire country.
The fact that Israel has leveled much of the 140 square miles of gaza over the past 3 years and still fails to remove Hamas from power. No chance against 636,372 square miles and 93 million people. Worse odds than Vietnam. There isn't even a defined victory condition.
It's even worse if you consider what rational options the mullahs have. Yes, they are a murderous dictatorship and enemies of US - no question about that. But they did nothing to provoke this particular attack and they still got bombed.
Backing off without first inflicting severe pain is just not an option in this situation. It would be an invitation to get bombed at will.
> Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target.
I'm imagining the air crew going "Huh, there are no clear actual targets to bomb. Hey, Cleetus, command won't be happy about us not bombing anything at all, retarget on that school over there, let's get this over with and go home."
They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.
Probably because their air defenses were too busy getting shot to shit.
There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.
Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.
It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.
I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.
1. Iran was retarded and didn't preemptively strike US staging who had local overmatch and first mover advantage. Nothing to do but weather hits, chip away at regional basing and wait until US+Israel operation tempo goes down. Can't sustain surge sorties forever, especially with regional logistics wrecked. US pilots tired now, on stims, making mistakes.
2. Iran not remain retarded, was hide and bide, waited for US to get complement, gathering data / building tactics to squeeze out surface-air without getting glassed. Regardless, Iranian capability seems much less degraded than claimed. Who knows how many of the 20k+ targets hit was basically just drawing down highend munition inventory, which now forces flying closer on lower end munitions.
At the end of the day, Iranian mosaic forces are chilling in underground bunkers waiting for US+co to make mistakes. Consider Iraq, a much smaller country by every metric ate 5x more sorties from more carriers and sustained regional air campaign and fell because they hedged on centralized IADs. Granted most Iranian hits are precision munitions (more efficient per sortie), but we simply should not expect Iran doctrine built on distributed survivability to be remotely defeated relative to effort expended.
Air defense is not static. Even fixed launchers can be moved, and reacting to how your enemy is operating is an important part of air defense tactics. The famous F-117 shootdown happened because the air defense operators carefully planned around how the US was using its aircraft. If most Iranian air defenses were destroyed in the first few days, it'd make more sense for them to hold whatever was still available for the sort of situation where they had much higher chances of scoring a kill than just throwing it out there to get destroyed immediately and accomplish nothing.
I just looked it up. Those are turboprop (slower) but have a high ceiling of 50k feet. So Iran did have something better than stingers left. Maybe they just got lucky this time.
I didn't downvote, but your post sounds like you're implying some kind of tomfoolery, deception, or other hidden reasons. There are very likely none, it just takes time to adapt to a specific enemy, probability slowly increases while you get more attempts, and then after some time (t) the first shootdown is "properly" successful. And note how this was preceded by that half-successful shootdown where the plane made an emergency landing. And they shot down drones.
You sound like they roll an antiaircraft cannon out of the hangar and immediately successfully down a plane. That's not how that works. The AA was probably there from the beginning, just not successful.
We don't know what downed it yet, so it's hard to say. Iran is hiding and rationing their offensive munitions, we know that, so it's not surprising when the number of drone and missile attacks spikes after weeks of bombing. That's part of the plan. But the ability to take down a US fighter jet is not something they are rationing- it's likely at the edge of their capabilities and they got lucky. If they could be knocking down more, they would be.
C-130s and helicopters flying low over Iran right after they shot down an F-15 in the same spot is wild. Whatever I think of the war idiocy, that's brave.
It's breaking news...meaning it may be inaccurate. CENTCOM certainly is saying it's false [0]. But there are enough signs of it being genuine, to be concerning at this stage.
Flying low over Iran at this point is planned, expensive "standoff" munitions were planned to give way to more accurate and less expensive munitions once air superiority was reached - which U.S. has been claiming has happened for a while now.
> An F-15 fighter jet pilot has been rescued alive by the U.S. military after their aircraft went down over Iran, a U.S. official said Friday.
> White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump had been briefed on the incident — the latest dramatic development in the war, now more than a month old.
The use of "a" instead of "the" pilot suggests more than 1 personnel on the plane, considering F15's carry 2 people (unless it's some magical F15 I haven't heard of), it means there's still 1 guy missing out there.
Or he (I assume) could also have been found dead, and is not being mentioned before his family is notified of the sacrifice Donald Trump made of his life.
If true I can’t imagine it will play well even among Trumps base. When was the last time a US fighter jet was shot down? 1999 during the intervention in the balkans?
Honestly it seems like the only thing Trump's base cares about is the price of gasoline. They don't give a shit about what's actually happening in the war.
Trump leads a personality cult not a traditional political base. There are some who have stopped supporting him because they thought he aligned with their political views but 35% or so of the US population still support him despite his 180 degree turn on two of his foundational election promises: to keep the US out of foreign wars and to bust open an international pedophile ring run for elites.
If the pilots are recovered we probably won't hear about it from either side for hours. Iran will want to get them a mile underground before they send out the B-rolls. If recovered by the US, they will want them out of theater before anyone knows better so they can't be targeted.
> A particular concern, they said, was threats made by the US to Iran’s energy infrastructure. “International law protects from attack objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.”
I am not going to lie, I am beyond disgusted at the United States.
And the "it's Trump" card doesn't work, Americans defend this travesty of an old non functioning constitution.
> One of two US crew members rescued after F-15E jet shot down over Iran
That's quite the partisan title, showing the Guardian's sympathies. To take the opposite perspective: "In another illegal operation, US forces prevent international criminal aviator from answering for his actions against Iran and its people"
Think what you will of the Iranian regime (I'm certainly not a fan) - the US and Israel have no justification, legal or moral, to attack and invade Iran. Doubly so after their co-perpatration of a slew of genocidal actions in Gaza. Which, by the way, are continuing to this day: The gradually narrowing perimeter of concentration, the siege and starvation, the bombing of civilians and remnants of infrastructure...
And as if that's not enough, Israel has now ethnically cleansed South Lebanon, and has begun demolishing all buildings in the southernmost strip of land. Bombings further north are continuing. Government ministers and public figures are already presenting plans for replacing the native villages and towns with renamed Zionist settlements.
Via the NYT:
Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and a key government figure overseeing the war, took to social media to mock the Trump administration as U.S. forces searched for a missing American airman from a downed fighter plane. “This brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’”he said in a post on X. “Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”
dang moved the comment from those threads to here, so the discussion is empty. I'm not sure if the press coverage has more info. (My guess is that they are quite similar.)
Let's hope Iran doesn't follow the "no quarter, no mercy" policy laid out by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. For the unfamiliar, it means executing survivors and surrendering combatants. Aka war crimes.
Iran just killed ~40,000 of their own people in January, the biggest single event massacre since the Holocaust. I don't think Pete Hegseth is going to move the needle in their ideology.
This is the dumbest, most pointless military conflict in American history. There is nothing plausible to win, but we can conceivably lose everything. A pyric victory is among the most favorable outcomes. We are led by corrupt imbeciles. I can only hope the outcome includes regime change for the U.S.
China and Russia have an enormous opportunity to do a lot of in the field testing right now, and they absolutely should be taking advantage of it.
And let me be clear of my position: For the safety and security of planet Earth, large numbers of US aircraft need to be shot out of the sky. Some B52s and maybe a few B2s need to be scattered wreckage.
The US has already bombed 10 countries over the past 12 months. Often grossly illegal operations, having zero support from the civilized world. Like, can anyone on the planet rationalize what position the US is in to be blocking ships to Cuba? There is zero international basis for it, beyond "might makes right".
The US' incredibly stupid idiocracy government openly flouts piracy and looting the resources of foreign nations. They are blowing up ships in international waters with zero pretence, and then double-tapping the survivors (again, grotesque war criming). The head of the "Department of War", a halfwit alcoholic joke of a Fox News host whose own military career is pathetic, spouts absurd war-crime celebrating "got it from ChatGPT" speeches that are a travesty to humanity. An administration filled with utter garbage people, and I mean Trump openly declares that he surrounds himself with losers.
Never, in the history of humanity, has a nation needed to be punched in the mouth with brass knuckles to such an extent.
Man, what an achievement. What a stunning descent to rogue worldwide threat. No nation on Earth deserves a regime change more than that busted shithole.
Do Americans realize this is how most of the world feels about you now? You are not some great freedom fighters or democracy guardians (HAR!), you're a busted criminal idiocracy where vile, vile, incredibly stupid clowns are completely eviscerating what good people spent decades building.
Large, sophisticated, expensive war assets like fighters and carriers are brilliant against literally cavemen like we've been going around fighting lately, but are quite useless against enemies with even slight technological progress. If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
I don't even know why I clicked on this thread. It's like reading a thread on economics or other topics where we tech folk think our success at pushing around bits makes us instant expert on anything we ponder.
Most of the responses here are either demonstrating a heavy bias, an utter lack of background knowledge or both.
When the first-tier hostile leadership structure was eliminated in the first day of the war, and only after a month do the surviving enemies finally manage to damage a plane so severely that it can't return to a friendly base to land, is "quite useless" an adequate and accurate description of the technology used to prosecute that war?
It's useful in saving the pilot's life. With less advanced tecnologies, more pilots would have been shoot down. It's useful in targeted attacks, but they have proved themself uneffective (at least for now) as the new leadership is alined with the objective of the replaced one. It's close to useless when it comes to making the war cost-effective, which start being a relevant metric when the conflict start lasting too long. Of course the US has a bigger economy, so all the news about cheaper systems damaging or destroying quite expensive ones may still lead to a US victory, but a costly one for sure
When you decapitate a well organised military, all you achieve is installing a new enemy you know little about you can’t predict their actions and that now know they are fighting for their own survival.
Whether you have specific leadership or not doesn't matter much to (a) having to adapt to the enemy and learn what works, and (b) probability just doing its thing, more chances and so on, and (c) US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
It reminds me of a Age of Empires campaign I played at a LAN from a long while back, where the game went on for 20 hours and ended in a stalemate between an atomic age player and a very primitive age player. The atomic player had total control of the map, they were carpet bombing the entire thing with nuclear weapons. But they could only create them so fast while the primitive player was running around on horses, just surviving enough to prevent the other player from winning. The only reason the game ended was because I tripped over the power cord to one of the computers.
Weapons are designed with an opponent in mind, and guarded against the expected threat models from that opponent. Everything breaks down when the opponent does not what you want them to.
It's only "high tech" to the aforementioned cavemen. To everyone else it's a 707 you can't even get spare tires for any more, equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard. I mean it has a mechanical waveguide for crying out loud.
During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement. At the time, Baghdad was known to have the highest density of SAM protection out of any city in the world.
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
New reporting that an A-10 ~was also shot down~ has also gone down (unconfirmed if it was shot down)
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/03/world/iran-war-trump...
> A second Air Force combat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf region on Friday, and the lone pilot was safely rescued, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The A-10 Warthog attack plane went down near the Strait of Hormuz about the same time that an Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, the officials said. In that incident, one crew member was rescued and search-and-rescue operators are looking for the second airman. Officials provided scant details about the A-10 crash, including how and where it happened.
there's some additional osint rumor mill that a blackhawk helicopter involved in rescue operations was also shot down but claims that crew been recovered
On top of these cases there is all of the aircraft that has been destroyed while grounded. The high tech AWACS getting blown up was a big hit, among others. The losses are likely much worse than we know since the military has been trying to keep a lid on most of them.
Not to mention the multiple THAAD radars taken offline. Those are $500M assets - and only 8 exist in the world. 24,000 precise transceivers all liquid cooled… not available on Amazon for next day deliver either.
a single AN/FPS-132 radar costs $1.1 bln, not $500m. And Iran stuck 17 of the CENCCOM sites hosting radars of all kinds across Qarar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, etc).
Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.
in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).
So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available
Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions
[delayed]
[delayed]
This is good news. Actually not for those whom chose to start the 2nd Epstein war.
I really hope that Israeli and Iranian governments both go to hell. May both destroy each other.
AFAIK, the one in Qatar was paid by Qatar and operated by US.
Cmon. At least it is all justified with good reasons!
we have likely moved on from this to satellite as a stop gap.
This is exactly the situation I think of when I hear news of rescue missions. Running a rescue in a place with functional air defense is a recursive rescue problem that could quickly get out of control.
Isn't that basically the plotline of the Blackhawk Down movie?
And, more importantly, the real-life events on which it's based?
Exactly what happens to me in Kerbel Space Program.
Rescue team for the rescue team.
Did you tactically forgot to put parachute on the landing pod? Or run out of fuel mid mission?
The US did it all the time in Vietnam.
And it did sometimes get way out of control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Bat_21_Bravo
That's an example of things getting out of control.
Possibly the best example
Not sure if it was actually used, but a fun idea for pilot recovery..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_ROE_Rotorcycle
…against the viet cong, where the biggest risk was the pilot getting pierced from small arms fire (in addition to the helo going down from pilot error). Quite different from the anti-air weapons modern day Iran possesses.
Are you aware that hundreds of American fixed wing aircraft were lost to surface to air missiles in North Vietnam? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._aircraft_losses_t...
Ah yeah, well I didn’t know it was that high!
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
Or a MiG-17 that could outrate your F-4/F-105 at every subsonic flight regime.
What are A-10s doing there? There isn't yet any ground operation, right?
They were largely being used for maritime patrol against fast boats. I saw a newsblurb a couple days ago that more were being sent to the region.
To my understanding blowing up drone boats designed to destroy shipping.
The A-10 carries AGM 88 anti-radiation missiles, and while it's a slow aircraft it can still passably perform SEAD with the AGM 88.
Shahed drone also carries air-to-air missile, so sending slow archaic manned airframe is just suicide mission (aka shaheed)
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-used-shahed-drone-arme...
Manpads (man portable air defense) works just fine.
I'm not sure that I understand what you are implying.
That A-10’s can’t suppress manpads
"Just fine" for what? AGM88 is air-to-ground and manpads are surface-to-air. If you're implying that manpads work just fine instead of A-10s, you're wrong.
Well, A-10s are well suited for strafing runs, etc. Presumably they'd be sent in if the area they're entering is presumed safe. That clearly didn't pan out.
The reality is avoiding a ground operation was probably the wrong move at this point (ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not)
It's really hard to truly guarantee surface to air capabilities are gone when you're relying purely on sat images + aerial surveillance (and obviously this carries risk). Iran has fairly portable SAM systems that are public knowledge.
> ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not
How spicy of a debate is that really? How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
Apparently 37.7% of Americans, so roughly 116 million people, support the war. I'm not sure "this was a good idea" was a the exact question though.
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54454-most-americans-oppos...
https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro...
Clearly this war isn't popular but that's a far cry from saying there's no debate. Like many other topics/questions we're seeing people following their tribe and bubbles rather than actual debating.
I would question to what extent repeating propaganda, qualifies as debate.
Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate.
There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Iran needed to be bombed, it took absurd incompetence to start doing so before planning how to handle asymmetric warfare against drones in an affordable way.
I also think there was an initial “euphoria” (I guess) during the initial days of the campaign.
People I know (even Iranian expats) were excited to see the regime get hammered and there was hope for possibility of change (and also a little bloodlust)… but I think as the war drags on and the US is exposed to be in an un-winnable mess, sentiment will continue to sour.
This has already started to happen in Nate Silver’s post you linked.
Your first link says 28% support it, so somewhere between 28 and 37%. I do wonder how many of those people could find Iran on a map, though I suppose you could ask the same about the people who are against it.
I lost trust in humanity when I saw how many people on HN fell for the CERN Mario Kart April fools article.
75 million using the YouGov number and just under 100 million using the Nate Silver average. (I think you must have used the more Trump-favorable number AND included children in your computation, which is not reasonable.)
Also worth noting that Nate Silver's measure has been declining for almost 3 weeks, the majority of the duration of the invasion.
Before the invasion, a University of Mariland poll says 55 million and a YouTov poll says 71 million support. These are useful numbers because we know there's a rally around the flag effect that distorts thinking during a conflict.
https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/do-americans-favor-at... https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54158-few-americans-suppor...
Surprisingly so, I would say. Without going into any identifying details, my buddy, who is otherwise fairly reasonable, thinks it was. I disagree. Reported country split ( US ) seems to fall some along common political lines though, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.
Then again.. I can no longer can rely on those surveys in any meaningful way.
> seems to fall some along common political lines though
While true, I think it's more correct to say that the determining factor is which television news media people most readily consume.
At least in this case, that is not fully accurate; very much a product of the internet so I am not aware of him actually watching TV though admittedly it is not like I keep a track of his habits.
As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it. My only complaint is they didn't do these strikes when the massive street protests were happening a few months ago.
This is what bringing democracy looks like?! The regime is more entrenched than ever and our commander in chief keeps threatening to commit war crimes on a massive scale. If he follows through on what he says he will do and obliterates all the civilian infrastructure in the country it will kill mass numbers of innocent people and turn millions of survivors into impoverished refugees.
As bad as the regime is, and it's very bad, what we're doing is even worse for most Iranians and the odds a democratic government arises from the ashes of our bombing campaign is incredibly unlikely.
As a person who believes in democracy, don't you think it should be the US Congress the one declaring war?
Supporting an illegal war would be a funny way to support democracy. Or maybe they believe in democracies that ignore their constitution.
> As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it.
As others have stated. This war will not bring democracy. Bombing Iranians have united them with the regime.
Also, US and Israel do not want a democracy in Iran. Israel would prefer a non-functioning place like Palestine or a mostly non-functional place like Lebanon that they can easily control.
Yes, bombing schools, universities and dessalination plants is a sure way to have more democracy in a country. Especially double taps where you kill the rescuers.
The US have so many examples where they did so and worked!
Oh, didn't you hear, we actually _triple tapped_ the school, so after the first wave of rescuers was also hit, anyone who came to help was also attacked.
Totally not a war crime.
Would you say you fall into the hardcore trump base category?
No, I disagree with trump on most things, including possibly why he started the war.
[delayed]
Why did he start the war?
If this is a troll it is masterful. If it's an honest opinion I would invite you to check your skull for unexpected holes where your brain may have fallen out.
What do you think the odds are that this war results in more democracy?
Bringing democracy and freedom to the world by bombing school children. God bless America!
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of school children.
Literally none of the fighting countries want Iran to be democratic. Neither USA nor Israel nor Iran. Israel dont want the country functional and would prevent democracy. USA idea of regime change is to keep regime, change head for someone who pays extortion money. And if Iranian leadership wanted democracy they would have one. Not sure if you noticed, but American admin loves dictators and insults democracies
So ,WTF are you talking about here.
Also, bombing city with that double tap tactic during protests ensures you kill protesters.
Your link and your quote does not say the A-10 was shot down though.
It's on NYT site now.
Their point is that the NYT says it crashed, the cause isn't clear.
Do A-10's normally crash? Or is there reason to believe that an A-10 flying in hostile territory was downed because it was shot?
My comment was re: stating it as fact which is misleading. Beliefs or guesses are not facts.
Military airplanes do crash, there are lots of crashes every year: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/11/military-aircraft...
At war there's a lot more pressure on ground and air crews that can lead to more mistakes. Also the mission would be flown closer to the limits vs. training.
So... We don't know? If your question is whether that's a good guess/greater than zero probability then sure. Is it a certainty? No. The Iranians will claim they shot it down. The Americans may or may not admit and if they deny then people will say they're lying.
In the first Iraq war, the KARI system in Iraq, which was built by Thompson-CSF, had its specifications leaked and the US obtained access to back doors and codes that allowed it to bypass and/or disable much of that system. You need to remember that the US and much of the West had friendly relations with Iraq and provided some infrastructure assistance and military support because Iraq invaded Iran.
No such analogous advantage exists in Iran, which is a much larger country, with better air defenses, and no western contractors ready to provide back doors into systems.
By that same logic that fact that we only lost 1 F-15 in, what, almost 3 weeks of bombing is actually a pretty good sign. Especially when you factor in that the Russians (proven) and Chinese (yet to be proven) are assisting Iran and Iran has been buying and building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people just for this very attack, only to have almost everything obliterated.
And 3 weeks in to the war and the US is flying refueling tankers to refuel Blackhawks in the very area the F-15 was shot down to recover the pilots (1 so far has been received) should be much more informative than it seems to be.
But sure... the KARI system in Iraq.
> Iran has been buying and building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people
Iran spends about 2.5% of its GDP on defense, compared to USA at around 3.5%. How much should they be spending?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
Is that reliable? The IRGC basically runs the economy and takes a significant cut. The IGRC is also separate from the military. The nuclear program, quite obviously for military use, may also not be included. What about support for proxy groups? Hezbollah alone gets support above $1B per year.
They should probably be closer to 0 or more in line with European countries but these numbers aren’t accurate and don’t tell the full story. They don’t, for example, include money paid to and missiles transferred to Houthis to launch from Yemen. Nevermind Hamas and Hezbollah, rebels in Iraq and so forth.
Europe is just under 2% of their GDP spent on military. Where are you getting this "0" figure? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
EU countries spend about 2% of GDP on their militaries. It's not at the high US levels, but it's closer to Iran's number than it is to zero.
> They should probably be closer to 0 or more in line with European countries
Expand on this logic please.
European countries are protected by NATO and a nuclear umbrella.
Why would you expect a nation state to not invest in its military?
> European countries are protected by NATO and a nuclear umbrella.
Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time, which is the ideal thing, but it seems like maybe we can't live in that ideal world, anyway...
I'm not suggesting that Iran shouldn't have a military, but instead questioning the purposes for which it would have one. Today its military is used for sending missiles at Gulf States, funding Hezbollah, and oppressing its people. So for it to have little to no military practically speaking would be a good thing.
Second at 2.5% GDP (again these figures are highly questionable) that's plenty to have defensive capabilities versus neighbors. There's nobody there to really worry about because who outside of the United States is going to invade Iran? And even then the US is only doing it because they won't stop doing crazy shit and launching missiles at everyone.
> I'm not suggesting that Iran shouldn't have a military, but instead questioning the purposes for which it would have one.
Well, they're currently being attacked. "Defending against attackers" is a pretty important purpose for a military.
They wouldn't be under attack if they weren't being run by the regime that is running their country. Notice how it's just Iran that's being attacked? And even so, what good did that military to them? They still got attacked, and their military assets were still significantly/mostly destroyed. What's the point of a military if the military you're buying just gets obliterated by the only country that is going to attack you for things you did in the first place and didn't have to do?
There is no civilization on the planet that would accept full disarmament under the logic that they should just trust that you won’t attack them if they weren’t armed.
> Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time,
UK and France have nukes, european nato part isn't going to be invaded without nuclear exchanges.
Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
Almost half of the economy is controlled by the IRGC: https://fortune.com/2026/03/02/iran-islamic-revolutionary-gu...
Which is a logical result of decades of sanctions, allowing only the insiders to profit from the country's ressources while the common man is bared from providing an alternative. Sanctions do not work and only entrench regimes, as we see in Russia, Cuba, North Korea and now Iran.
Extensive domestic economic control by security forces is also a feature of Egypt and Pakistan. America does not complain about those examples of course, because those countries bend the knee.
If by "bend the knee" you mean that they don't regularly chant "death to America", sure.
Those countries, like Iran, are also quite poor because the army siphons off so much of their resources.
The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people
Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Iran
> The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
Which makes them irrelevant here in this discussion but sure yea. Russia (those sneaky guys who invaded Ukraine and are being supplied by Iran) provide targeting information to Iran, Iran has missiles, we can't shoot them all down, and here we are. It's unfortunate but that's what happens in a war. Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
> Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
We can easily afford both, but we choose not to because our political system is full of morons and corruption, but instead of Iran being more like the US and being dysfunctional in this regard, it should be more like Norway (excluding population differences) and pump and sell the oil and do so for the benefit of their citizens instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
> Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits:
Figures provided here are inaccurate and don't account for spending on proxy groups, for example.
> Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
This is an interesting take given that the US seems to have ignored many of the most important lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
As for "end up in another war", the language you chose is very revealing. You don't just "end up in...war". Wars don't start themselves. Someone starts them and in the case of the US, it's almost always the US.
US welfare system seems to contain a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board, so this will be a good chance to cleanse the system of fraud.
or at least US citizens should protect legitimate entitlements and inspect everything to cut down on corruption
At least something positive
Did you completely miss the disaster of DOGE in the first year of this administration?
US welfare system seems to contain a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board, so this will be a good chance to cleanse the system of fraud.
Taking money from social programs and piling into the military which contains "a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board", certainly is a choice. Sort of the opposite of a smart choice, but definitely a choice for sure.
How about taking money from fraud waste and abuse and piling into military, while preserving social programs ??
Americans do have a real chance to make it happen, if they show a political will
Uh huh. Do you have any confidence that this administration will do a competent job of that inspection? I don't. I mean, they could surprise me...
I’m reading one of those Blackhawks was shot down. An A-10, F-16, and a refueling plane, in addition to the F-15 so far today. Which, if true, is not a good sign.
We'll have to wait and see what comes out but I don't think this is a bad sign. In war you lose equipment and aircraft. It's silly to think the US wouldn't lose some during the course of the war. After all, the OP to this thread highlighted all of the advantages Iran has. Yet we've wiped out quite a bit of their military infrastructure and have complete control over the skies. Russia can't say the same though for their little adventure ;)
> Yet we've wiped out quite a bit of their military infrastructure and have complete control over the skies.
How can you believe that the US has "complete control over the skies" given today's events?
We must be using different definitions for ‘complete’. I think Iran is using loitering anti-air missiles with IR seeking which seems to be effective. Maybe this sudden spike is reflective of receiving new equipment from China.
Could be. I guess my definition is “US can do whatever it wants without contest” and that seems to be the case here. What fighter jets does Iran have that are not destroyed? Do they have significant anti air defenses that we can’t attack and that limit our operations? Not to my knowledge but maybe there are parts of the country where that’s true, for now.
Of course in any war someone can fire back at and sometimes hit your aircraft even if you have complete airspace control.
I would term it; the US has air dominance but the airspace is still contested as evident by the recent losses.
Also, I think the US is still predominantly using standoff munitions instead of switching to dumb munitions because the airspace is still contested.
I don't view it as contested because there aren't to my knowledge limitations on US operations. There's no aircraft for the US to worry about, nor are the SAM capabilities unknown. Guys get rockets and shoot them at aircraft, that makes it dangerous but not necessarily contested.
Yes the US probably is still using precision weapons because, well, unlike the Iranian government we don't want to use so-called dumb munitions and indiscriminately bomb civilians or civilian targets. And of course in general, why even fly into the airspace if you don't have to - malfunctions happen too.
The us has air dominance but not air supremacy, which is why missiles are mostly used rather than bombs with gps kits, requiring to get much closer.
And the US has been very keen to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure, along with Israelis, since the start of the war [0]. The US-Israelis are guilty of war crimes.
The recent bombing of an unfinished bridge is another example of the US-Israeli actions, especially since they did a double-tap to kill rescuers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Qeshm_Island_desalination...
> Yes the US probably is still using precision weapons because, well, unlike the Iranian government we don't want to use so-called dumb munitions and indiscriminately bomb civilians or civilian targets.
Are you referring to the "precision" weapons that hit the girls' school?
Oh yeah, its going great, so much achieved for only 30B and untold human lives, the winning!
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It is completely expected to lose aircraft in an operation of this scale, against an opponent with this level of sophistication. People put way too much stock in all of these modern stealth systems and whatnot. Stealth, for example, is a buzzword. It will give a slight edge, but it's not going to make your aircraft completely invisible and unshootable.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...
It was pretty much a given that over time some of these airplanes would be shot down. There's no way to get every single MANPAD or even some of the larger anti-aircraft setups. A jet can even be brought down by a canon or a bullet given enough luck. We've had quite a few near misses, there's a video of an Israeli F-16 evading a surface to air missile, there have been the F-35 that was hit but managed to continue and land, there were countless drones shot down.
This was inevitable and just a question of time. Out of >10k sorties something is going to get hit. I've no idea what range the military planners expected and how we're doing vs. that.
OP left a little to interpretation, but, I think, top of the list starts with 'mission accomplished 2.0' meme followed by increased US casualties ( though I suppose the exact order likely depends on your current disposition ).
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Wrong. It's a great sign. We have had enough of the barrage of US aggression around the world.
Have you ever considered not to have your parliament chant death to America?
> During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement.
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
Both F-15s lost in the 1st Gulf War were the air-to-ground focused F-15E Strike Eagles. https://rjlee.org/air/ds-aaloss/
per wiki, f-15e was first produced in 1987, so there were very few in service at that time, and most of ground strikes were carried by other aircrafts.
Yes, most ground strikes were by other aircraft types, but the F-15E did have a lot of sorties, almost as many as the F-111 or F-4G (although the F-16 had many, many more sorties, but not all of them were air-to-ground)
Source is the Gulf War Airpower Survey, page 184 (PDF page 205): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA273996.pdf
This one is also an F-15E it seems.
It seems like the Iraqis were relatively poor operators of their systems. A few days ago I was reading about the Nato bombing of yugoslavia on wikipedia and it had the following entry:
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
The latest reporting is that only 50% of Iran's missile capacity has been destroyed
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/politics/iran-missiles-us-mil...
Doesn't break out anti-air, but Iran absolutely has a lot of teeth left.
Seems to me their strategy is to shut down the Strait as cheaply as possible, force ground operations on known strategic points of interest, then just missile and drone strike Americans in Iranian territory where they have ~no air defense.
There are 4 players in this war and they all have very different goals and "victory" conditions.
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.
You forgot the 5th actor - Russia - which is benefiting hugely from the collapse of NATO, the loosening of oil sanctions, the huge hike in oil prices, and the way the US was persuaded to expend a ridiculous percentage of its conventional missile stockpiles on a pointless project.
Ukraine is doing its best to minimise Russian oil exports, and that's certainly having an effect.
But strategically, Russia is a huge beneficiary of this mess.
Oh, also China who benefits from US deterrence being relocated from APAC and buried into Iranian dirt
It depends where you draw the line. The extended players include:
1. Russia (as you say): I think this war of choice virtually guarantees a settlement of the Ukraine war along the current borders. At some point Europe will need to ease their energy crisis with Russian oil and gas. Well done, everybody, the system works;
2. Europe: like the GCC they are finding US security guarantees and the NATO protection racket aren't what they were sold. Pax Americana was an illusion. I've elsewhere predicted this is going to lead to arms and tech nationalism within Europe. It's actually a race between fascism taking over Europe and Europe divorcing itself from the US and I suspect fascism is currently winning; and
3. China: the biggest wineer of all this. China is still receiving Iranian oil exports. In fact, the US "punished" Iran by lifting oil sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil to China at market rates instead of below market (because of the sanctions). Again, well done, everybody; and
4. Asia: this has exposed their weakness of imported oil, particularly Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I would not be surprised if this war of choice is the turning point that leads to a China-cenetered Asian security compact.
In one year, the US has essentially torn up the entire post-1945 rules-based international order, which it designed for its own benefit.
In other words, all the ingredients for WW3. Lets hope we can somehow avoid that.
The post-1945 rules-based order was already a slow motion train crash that most of the West remained in denial about until Putin wiped his behind with it in the 2014 invasion of Crimea. To pretend that Trump is somehow breaking an otherwise intact system at this point is fanciful.
> I suspect fascism is currently winning
I think this war is actually pushing many away from fascism. Trump was the reference for a lot of the European right and this is showing people he was terrible and, by extension, embarrassing them all.
Heck, Orbán is currently running an electoral campaign as "the candidate of peace".
Not sure how the US comes back from this.
Who will trust US treaties going forward?
It'll partly depend on what internal housecleaning—or perhaps fumigation—and reform happens in the US.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I don't think we do. I think this is our Teutoburg Forest moment [1].
Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war (eg [2][3][4]). They just oppose the way it was initiated. In other words, they have a process objection not a policy objection.
I've seen lamenting over Harris losing the elction (as well as more than a few doing "stolen election") about how the world could be different. But US foreign policy is uniparty
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/8/kamala-harris-says-...
[3]: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/lea...
[4]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/hakeem-jeffries-wo...
> The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
Saudi and the UAE don't want the pre-war status quo, they want America to bomb Iran back to the stone age so it can't continue missile or launcher production.
Yep, all sounds right to me
What's the reliability of this reporting?
What we can tell though is that Iran is still firing missiles (including cluster munitions) at Israel's civilians and at gulf states. So the ground facts are that it can still do that.
We also have to remember that Iran has a large number of different missile systems for different ranges. It's mostly not the same missiles they are firing at the nearby gulf states as they are firing into Israel. Some of the longer range missile systems they have need to be fired from western Iran to make it to Israel. There's a lot of other nuance, solid fuel vs. liquid fuel, mobile vs. fixed launchers etc.
I don't think we'll see anything close to reliable reporting any time soon.
The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.
By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.
Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.
>> Doesn't break out anti-air, but Iran absolutely has a lot of teeth left.
With the price of oil having skyrocketed, and the new revenue that will be coming from the Hormuz tolls, they will also be rebuilding their previous capacity in no time.
Surely SAMs have improved since 1991? Have the F-15s improved significantly? (I know nothing about military stuff.)
They certainly have, but the general idea is to first use stealth jets to bomb defensive systems (including radar observability) to conquer the skies, and then you can fly around somewhat freely. While SAM technology has improved, so have America's observability and stealth bombing capabilities. It will be interesting to learn the context and sequence of events which led to an F-15 being shot down by enemy fire.
(In 1991, the United States relied on the F-117 Nighthawk to penetrate Baghdad and launch salvos against radar and SAM sites. Simultaneously, Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against similar communication and defense sites. In this war with Iran, the F-35 and B-2 have been used for stealth missions).
> F-117 Nighthawk
Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.
Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.
https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...
The story is actually quite interesting. The Serbs observed that a nighthawk would routinely fly the same route but their radar couldn’t lock on it unless the missile hatch were open, which they managed to elicit.
In short, it took 2 rare events to occur for it to happen.
Turns out Iran is good at hiding stuff in caves and driving it out on a truck platform. Who would have known?
Next you're going to tell me that operating out of your own mountainous terrain has an advantage.
Would be news to the US military it seems. Mountains, jungles, who would have thought?
Possibly true, but at least they don't have the ability to control some critical waterway or something to hold everyone at ransom.
The Serbs successfully used a similar tactic to down an F-117A, so yeah.
Most of the F15 upgrades have been against other aircraft. The F15 is primarily an air superiority fighter, it isn’t designed for attacks or defence against ground forces. The F15E is modified to attack ground targets, but ideally they would be targets without any air defences.
The F-15E Strike Eagle variant is definitely designed for attacks and defense against ground forces, but overall air defense is a probability game so it's not too surprising that it eventually happened
Yes, although it’s designed for interdiction, rather than primarily a ground attack aircraft, the difference being that it’s intended to be used against defenceless ground targets (like supply lines), not on the front lines.
A lot of the planes are doing attack runs at altitudes where they are susceptible to man pads I imagine.
That was 35 years ago. That only shows that the plane is pretty old. I assume SAMs evolved since then.
You can't really take out "the whole" air defense system because there will always be folks out with MANPAD-type things, those will score hits on occasion. That's probably what we saw here. I doubt MANPADs were nearly as common in the early 90s as they are today.
True but without radar they have a relatively difficult task of being out there setup and waiting for a fast moving jet to pass within range.
Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.
Yeah my guess was they were coming in along predictable routes at this point and that's what got them? I saw that the search and rescue mission was in an area close to water. I believe many Stinger hits in Ukraine can be attributed to predictability.
And maybe they do have some kind of radars?
Operation Desert Storm was only 43 days long. Epic Fury is most of the way there.
I also saw some news saying an F-35 was possibly hit--but I can't find any reasonable-seeming sources to confirm that. Maybe someone here knows more?
an F-35 was hit but made it back to base.
Iran has systems they can pull out of a cave and deploy in a couple hours or less. We will never get all their anti air out.
With the altitudes they've been flying at, shoulder mounted MANPADs are a viable option.
US also has A-10s doing gun runs in Iraq too. It makes sense the US is more willing to take risks 1-month into the war given how effective they've been and for Iran to also adapt their manpad teams after they probably failed a ton of times previously.
You saw the same pattern where Ukraine and Russia both constantly adapted on the battlefield and the war changed rapidly over the first year.
Waiting to see the Shaheds with AA missiles like Russia was using (until their starlink was finally shut off late last year)
If you go over 3000m then manpads are not useful I think.
Sure, but there are videos of US war planes strafing, like that near hit clip.
Yeah I have seen the clip with Iran polices firing at the UH-60s, which is very concerning. Sure SIGINT makes sure there is no serious AD but there is no way to guarantee that there is no MANPADs somewhere close.
Iraq is pretty flat on the routes between the US-allied countries and the major strongholds (Basra, Baghdad). You can't easily conceal rocket launchers there.
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
My concern is that other countries can aid Iran with weapons in a direct and indirect way. There is no guarantee to block the railroads from East and the shipments from North.
I would be more concerned if more countries did not help Iran, since in this conflict it's the victim.
That's not a concern it's a reality. Iran is not shut-off or blockaded to any meaningful degree. It has tons of unmolested border crossings and Caspian sea access, and maintains full control within it's own borders (minus the parts that have been blown up).
Also ships are still transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from Iranian ports taking goods in from China, with who knows what on board. They are also exporting more oil now than they were before the war.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
Even the Philippines, a US ally, has struck a deal with Iran for safe passage. Meanwhile, Oman is working with Iran on a toll scheme. There's an emerging chance that no US-flagged vessel crosses the Straight of Hormuz again in our lifetimes (except maybe for a retreating 5th fleet).
The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
The success of the war depends on the approval ratings of the US president which will almost certainly take hits when US military takes hits so the US citizens seeing the US military taking hits at a higher rate than relatively recent wars in the area is a bad sign for "winning" whatever "winning" means here.
Seriously. Makes me glad we attacked when we did. They could have bolstered their anti air defenses even more.
Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
TBH I went through SERE school (aircrew) and I questioned its value, since the training is in eastern Washington/northern Idaho area mountainous woodland environment and all the evasion they showed us relied on that kind of cover and "bushcraft"
And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
Iran isn't just central Tehran. Look up the Zagros Mountains and the Alborz Mountains. Or just look at a picture of the northern Tehran skyline, it is at the foot of the Alborz, a huge mountain range. There's plenty of woodlands and forest too. Some parts of the Hyrcanian forests get over 50 inches of annual rainfall, which isn't Forks, WA, but it is substantial.
You'd get additional specific training for deployments and the skills are transferrable. But obviously they can't train everyone in every biome that we have, otherwise you'd spend a whole year just flying around to different areas of the country to train and on a 4-year contract it's just not going to work time-wise.
If you're doing SERE school you're probably not on a 4 year contract. Pilots have 10 year contracts.
some enlisted air crew go to SERE. loadmasters, airborne intelligence, and SMA (Special Mission Aviators).
As an added benefit, enlisted air crew have no restrictions on mustache length or on professional wear of the uniform.
Add Huey crew chiefs to this list
Eastern Washington has a lot of hot desert
Washington indeed has a giant desert but it's in the middle fwiw, the SERE school is in Spokane
Spokane is in the Eastern arid region of the state.
What an absolutely pointless thing to get pedantic about. Put "spokane washington" into Google images and tell me if that looks like a desert to you.
They're also wrong. The geographic center (around Ellensburg or so) is also in what is known as Eastern WA (east of the Cascades).
Spokane is Eastern Washington, the college in Cheney is literally called Eastern, its just not a desert.
Spokane is not desert. Even surrounding territory is more plains. Some desert military training happens at Yakima much further west.
Sounds like typical one-sized-fits-all, checkbox military nonsense. Perhaps there are better and/or climate-specific SERE courses in one or more services? Because if it's ineffective, it's a waste of time and money more so than usual and puts expensive-to-replace personnel at risk.
Seems like it's all about vacating the area and busting out the CSEL (or NGSR when materialized) personal SAR comms is the best way out, or it may well turn into a weeks(s) long, nonstop spy-shit ordeal getting out. Perhaps some forethought and packing with knowledge and specific local-appropriate items (and chunk of cash) would help more than MIL-STD Walmart camping aisle prepper bullshit.
Do they train for a “no quarter“ conflict where injured or surrendered combatants are killed?
No, we actually train to be tortured and held if caught, but everyone knows the risks before you take off. Captured marines or soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re clear eyed about it.
And lied to about the reasons of the war.
Now they even lie about it being a war, while they claim they have already won the war, that isn’t a war.
Every war since Korea, we’re very used to this.
The other wars were woke. This is not a woke war.
I wish I was joking.
I know you're not.
I've found that most of our population has almost no connection to the people that actually fight wars, and therefore have no idea what they think. With the exception of a few criminals, none of us desire to commit war crimes. None of us want to send rounds into civilian infrastructure, seeing regular people struggle to get food, fuel, and water in Iraq did not make me feel powerful and it was obvious it did not advance our goals on the ground.
The jingoistic commentary people hear from politicians and former military podcasters that don't fight anymore is repugnant, and this backsliding in the (at least attempt at) honorable execution of war is not going to bode well for our country. It's probably trite when we're double tapping girl's schools, but I want to think that purposely striking civilian infrastructure, universities, hospitals, water resources... this was all something "we" didn't do.
This is actively devaluing the meaning of being a Marine. Maybe this already happened in Mai Lai, maybe this was further chipped away by Abu Ghraib, maybe letting Eddie Gallagher off... etc etc. But this feels different in a way I've never felt before.
Why do it, then? I'm not trying to be inflammatory or ask loaded questions here, I'm genuinely curious (as someone who, as you note, has almost no connection to the Americans who fight in wars; I have friends who are vets, but have been out of the military for years), and I just don't understand.
I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?
Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?
I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)
> the soldiers continue to follow orders
We want them to. At the same time that we sit at our keyboards and philosophize about how soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders, we [collectively] do not really want them spending all that much time pondering it. The most obvious cases, sure, but in general we want them to do what they are told, and do it quickly. That is why there are lawyers in the field to make fast judgements.
The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.
I don't have a good answer for you. I expected the upper and middle officer corps to conduct themselves with honor and they aren't.
I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)
But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.
And they have DOD lawyers (with backup from the DOJ) saying the whole thing, and specific targets, are legal. Along with that, much of the most Sr leadership (of both combat forces, and legal) have been fired and replaced with MAGA loyalists.
There have been so many crimes and zero accountability. I frankly wouldn't know where to start, but maybe a good example is "collateral murder", which Assange has been persecuted for revealing for the better part of the past two decades.
At least we're not pretending anymore.
Thank you for expressing your humanistic thoughts, but do consider the history of the institution and the government.
What's different this time is that they haven't bothered with the PR.
Care to elaborate on this?
"No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars. We fight to win,” Hegseth said."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
What’s the value of having a civilian SecDef if he blathers on like this?
It's a self-soothing performance of self-importance, like everything else this administration does.
This is not an administration run by adults who model consequences.
Everything happens to reassure the Commander in Chief - and the people behind him, like Miller and Vought - that they're exceptionally special and gifted people who can have anything they want and do anything they want, to anyone, without limits.
There's pretty clearly negative value in having civilian leader whose most notable accomplishments are being a TV opinion host, and quitting the Army because they decided he was too dangerous to be allowed to serve as a guard for a presidential inauguration.
To win what? Because it’s not a war and not a game. So what else can be won?
It’s not not woke, it’s wokeness of a different kind. They exclude those who disagree with their brand of orthodoxy, it seems like to me they’re firing anyone who says no to the ground invasion.
As he said. Military members are pretty clear eyed about things.
... But conducted by the self proclaimed Department of War.
Interesting, I had interpreted their comment to be asking if they were trained to carry out a no-quarter order.
Unless I missed something, Only Hegseth was promising no quarter (ie war crimes)
he what? this is on the record?
Yes, he said it in front of reporters at a Pentagon briefing.
https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...
> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.
Hegseth is not in charge of the Iranian military.
Right but the reason we have rules against people declaring no quarter is to prevent a race to the bottom. It is absolutely reasonable to respond to a no quarter declaration in kind, which is... again... the entire reason we have prohibitions on it.
But he did publicly declare his intention to commit war crimes.
Actually even just declaring no quarter is itself a war crime.
Hes also liable for the death sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 2441 — War Crimes Act (1996) & 10 U.S.C. § 950t — Military Commissions Act (more relevent)
They won't face any US law. AIUI, they have been getting letters from the DOJ office of legal counsel that say it's legal. This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).
The best shot would be to turn them over to the ICC
Alas, the USA isn't signed up to the ICC.
Sure, but, if somehow they fell into ICC custody overseas...
We've already committed several war crimes.
In case anyone else doubted this, I will save you the time to look it up. Yup, it's sadly true.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/hegseth-no-quarter-interna...
Yep. And war crime seems to have lost all meaning in the US.
But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
> But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
Even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, a no-quarter declaration is against _US law_, specifically subject to the penalty of death with no other lawful penalty defined: https://www.govregs.com/uscode/title18_partI_chapter118_sect....
Relevant: This is a very interesting read:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5150259-u-s-air-force-su...
If they landed anywhere near a town they are probably captured. The kuwait video from the f15 that was hit with friendly fire was crazy. Like 6 suvs worth of locals immediately surrounded this guy and they were threatening to beat him with a galvanized pipe.
Prisoner of war, not hostage.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
Not a Prisoner of War - a Prisoner of a limited military excursion.
Prisoner of a three day military operation.
It's more of a 'romp' than an 'excursion,' if you will.
That is assuming Iran holds itself to the Geneva conventions, which ... seems like an extremely risky bet to make.
We are expecting Iran to honour an International Convention when US and Israel have squarely shat on every convention's face, so to speak.
The person you’re replying to is very explicitly not expecting them to honor the International Convention…
The funny thing is that I am, even if that puts me in the naive minority in this thread.
As a matter of fact, if Iran comes out of the war having not committed war crimes they’ll have a huge worldwide moral and public image victory over the United States and Israel.
How am I reading this? Wasn't the regime mowing down tens of thousands of its own citizens prior to this war? I mean, not a "war" crime, I guess, but it seems ludicrous to give them any "moral victories".
Iran has for nearly fifty years pursued unilateral hostilities against the US and Israel, including funding numerous terrorist groups and militias to wage war on them. It can’t negotiate its way out of this quagmire because the IRGC’s core ideology and mission is hatred (and hostage-taking).
In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.
One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.
What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.
Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.
They already targetted civilian infrastructure, so they already commited war crime. They also threatened to attack universities wh8ch is war crime on itself (after attack on their universities).
It's not naive to have adult expectations for adults
Prisoner exchanges are a pretty strong motivator for any group, even hardline ones. If the Taliban was up for exchanges I think the IRGC is pretty likely to want to keep prisoners for that too.
Does the US have any prisoners to exchange? Wouldn't we need boots-on-the-ground to capture enemy combatants?
Israel probably has some prisoners that Iran might want released, is my thinking?
I would note ISIS put out some high res, professionally edited video of burning a (Jordanian?) pilot to death while inside a cage. Quite savage, but the propaganda effect is more profound than about anything else I've seen.
Yes, after that video it was clear that Daesh and everyone in their little caliphate would be hunted down. And it was, they were. They were attacked everywhere they tried to return to. From minor girls returning to the Netherlands to 45 year old men (trying to) return to South Africa, all were persecuted, and that one video had a lot to do with that happening. After that video, even muslim nations started hunting these people.
And yet, they are still around, made famous and split into separate groups, still actively fighting on multiple fronts all over Africa. And if the Iranian government falls for sure they will be coming back with a vengeance in the area.
They're going back to the stone age, remember? The Geneva convention wasn't around then AFAICR.
What has Iran done to show it would not uphold Geneva conventions?
Maybe Iran is more civilized than the Barbarians attacking them.
We have to wait and see if Iran is fighting a woke war.
Why wouldn't they?
Reprisals are legally permitted to a limited extent if you're a victim of war crimes, as Iran is.
First: count the responses to my thread of people suggesting Iran cannot/should not be held to the Geneva convention: 4,5 (I'm counting the Hegseth comment as 0.5)
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
> Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage.
Expect there to be a lot of operatives of the US in Iran. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it wouldn't be the first time a CIA or something operative is caught and this is the cover.
In war the first victim is always the truth
France vetoed proposal about opening the straight by force. France and Europe in general dont want to dragged into this war.
Also, I dont see UN punishing Israel or American war crimes either ... so it makes sense to not apply "whatever goes" standard to aggressors and different one to the defender.
Iranians have dignity. Something American top brass doesn’t even know the meaning of.
You mean the army shooting 40.000 protestors just 2 months ago including 1000+ children, then executed a child that won an international wrestling competition, now accusing everyone else of warcrimes?
I think I'll need some reeducation on this concept of "dignity" you speak. Could you explain further?
None of those numbers are verifiable. The opposition has every incentive to lie. And let's not forget there was a lot of armed agitators amongst those protesters. Mike Huckabee let the cat out of the bag with a tweet boasting of how a mossad agent walks beside every protester.
Right. Go watch CNN. “Back to the Stone Age” will surely save so many of the lives spared.
Come on US media tell us the truth, you want to save people by killing them or to just kill them?
The US doesn't hold itself to the conventions, why should the country it started a war of aggression with?
If you throw away your principles because you are fighting an unprincipled enemy, you are no better than them.
It’s such a shock to the system to realise that “unprincipled enemy” referenced here is the US.
That's a lovely thing to say, but if your existence is being threatened by an aggressor, I wouldn't blame you for throwing out the rulebook.
In my view, if someone invades your territory and starts attacking you, you have no obligation to follow any sort of "principles" or "rules" when it comes to how you fight back. Anything you need to do to the attackers in order to defend yourself and your people is, by definition, morally defensible.
(Do note that I said "need". Doing arbitrary messed-up things that don't actually further the goal of driving back the attackers is not ok.)
FWIW, during the Iran-Iraq war (where Iraq invaded Iran), Iran used a bunch of pretty questionable tactics like suicide squads of child soldiers.
There is no if. We've already done that. So yes, we are no better than them. So answer the question. Why would Iran follow conventions it's enemy that started a war of aggression is not following?
Becaus two wrongs don't make right. If they are smart they will stick to the convention.
Especially after the double-tap on civilians and first responders the US just did on that bridge. Or the threat for no quarters from the secretary of defense. Or the threats to destroy critical civilian infrastructure for water or power.
Or Hegseth running his mouth about exactly this issue...
Hegseth explicitly ordered to give the enemy “no quarter”.
...but we aren't at war, according to the President and his secretary of Defense (war).
what a fucking mess.
It’s a “well, actually” and counter to the HN guidelines
There's a significant difference between a hostage and a prisoner of war, and in this context that distinction seems highly relevant.
Only for someone breaking the guideline of "Assume good faith".
I didn’t downvote you, but a terse “well actually it’s prisoner of war” doesn’t really add to the conversation. Imagine doing that in person, you’d annoy everyone around you. If you explained why it’s distinct and what that might mean for downed crew I think it wouldn’t have been down voted
No, they wouldn't annoy everyone around them, that's just your subjective projection. I, for one, found it an important distinction that highlights how easy it is to skew a narrative towards a more sympathetic one. It saw it as having similar value to those Instagram posts juxtaposing headlines reporting on "dead Palestinians" vs "killed Israeli victims".
List of aviation shootdowns and accidents during the 2026 Iran war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an...
Iran: 40, Israel: 18, US: 36, Others: 7
It's a bit weird counting drones in the same list as expensive fighter jets (and other expensive planes).
MQ-9s are ~$30 million USD and are strike capable.
At what point is congress gonna grow a spine and retake their power? Every day the goalposts just get moved a little farther.
I think they have 60 days from when hostilities begin, right?
Approximately never. We are in a situation where Congress is unusually beholden to their constituents for once, because those people care deeply about Donald Trump. So this is what they want; not just the war, but everything -- they want all the power to rest with Trump.
Republicans in congress support it. It is not about congress not having abstract spine.
It is about republican congressmen actively supporting all of this.
And bonus, they don't have to go on record voting for all the things they support but know are immensely unpopular.
How can you tell the difference?
Plot twist: The Dem leadership (Schumer, Jeffries, et al) also supports this.
That's why their main complaints have been procedural: "Why didn't you come to us first with your plans?". And why they slow-walked the vote on a war powers act.
The dems have no power against a unified GOP front, and they already look pretty weak on issues like this. They are trying to figure out how they can mollify their base while attracting enough centrist voters to retake Congress later this year. I don't care for the dem leadership but I feel a little sympathy for them. Catering to their loudest supporters is a pretty big reason they are the minority party right now.
If everyone is somewhat implicated in Epstein files, then everyone is afraid of Putin / Netanyahu who might pull up the files. It's funny how they are so scared to face justice, but also interesting how American law enforcement became so corrupt.
Protecting pedos on such a scale?
There's a very strange problem with this whole thing where, of course, whatever these powerful people have done behind closed doors that is illegal and exploitative and harmful is terrible and they should be put to justice.
However, if the direction of the country is being seriously altered via blackmail, IMO that is many orders of magnitude worse than anything they could have done. Like we are currently bombing yet another middle eastern country for no clear reason.
I would personally be open to some kind of Epstein jubilee where we absolve everyone involved in order to nullify the blackmail.
Like it's not great, it's terrible for the victims and for justice, but at the moment we are getting terrible from both ends, could we at least reduce it to one end?
That creates a far worse problem down the line because they will just do it again, more publicly.
Really the rot set in with the pardons of Nixon and Oliver North.
Can you justify that assertion? How would they do it again, more publicly?
It's not like a blackmail ring is that easy to set up, it seems to have taken a lot of heavy lifting to get this one going.
I think an A-10 is also down (pilot ejected and safe). I'm surprised that they decided to fly an A-10 into Iran. I mean it's a solid plane that can sustain some AD fire, but at the same time it usually operates within the height that MANPADs can reach.
One crew member rescued, other is still MIA and being actively searched for https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/iran-us-fighter-shot-down
Non-walled article reporting the rescue:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-fighter-jet-f15e-downe...
And CENTCOM's lying about it.
https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2039805134704660622
No, that tweet is from 20 hours ago, and is about a separate incident which happened two days ago over Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.
The current F-15 crash incident happened today near the city of Lali, in Iran’s Khuzestan Province.
The US military is in the middle of a top-level political purge; both honesty and competence as an institution will be below normal levels for the forseeable future, and honesty about sensitive operations during wartime is never much even as a baseline.
What’s the buzz like amongst military right now? Is moral low? High?
It’s been fascinating to see my Father (Marine and Army veteran) and my brother (soon be a commissioned Air Force officer) who usually are very aligned politically start develop the first rift I’ve ever seen regarding this war.
All true. So we should expect it, but we still shouldn't normalize it.
That tweet is from yesterday.
Iran tweets about taking down an American jet basically daily. By their count we are down 40 f-35s, 4 aircraft carriers and thousands of MQ-9s.
And they have not edited it or taken it down... why?
Because almost all of the people inside Iran have been disconnected for the past 35 days [1]. And believe it or not, they are texting these news live to all mobile phones on a daily basis as well. Some regime supporters believe it, because the want to believe it, they need to believe it. Just in the past 24 hours I have received 5 different messages from different organizations claiming victory and damage to US / Israel assets.
Just for a quick laugh, look at the official (Iranian) president's letter to the American people published yesterday [2]. The font changes between the paragraphs!
[1] https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/116339631989805542
[2] https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2039418009052119190?s=20
> That tweet is from yesterday.
That's when the shootdown happened, yes.
> Iran tweets about taking down an American jet basically daily.
Sure. We have two sets of demonstrable liars here. See, for example, the E-3 Sentry that got blown up; it took leaked photos for that to be admitted.
And don't get me started on the several times in the last few months we've "obliterated" Iran's nuclear capacity and missiles and whatnot only to be told it's time to do it again.
The claim being addressed is a shootdown over Qeshm island, which is the biggest island just west of the strait of Hormuz. The current CSAR operations are happening somewhere in the Khuzestan province. Probably somewhere within the 150 km radius of [1] based on online footage of the C-130 flying over.
[1] 31.941606, 50.311765
"We"
Very cool that you have a side hustle as a US fighter jet pilot!
It's known as the Air National Guard. Work for United during the week, and fly F16's one weekend a month.
Hate to say it and sound so "conspiracy-like", but I no longer can trust what the current US administration is saying. Ever since the path of a hurricane was redrawn with a sharpie, it's been... unusual.
Your comment is a perfect setup for the cynicism olympics where people rush to say you could never trust the govt.
You should never trust this administration. The US government in general has a spotty history, but this administration does nothing trustworthy.
I think the problem is that in previous administrations at least they had some skill in lying in ways that were not so constantly contradicting one another.
Regardless of whether it's a "perfect setup" or not, the facts speak for themselves.
Most competent governments don't say things that are outright wrong. They may use double speak, or not comment on a topic. But this government (and unfortunately it's this specific adminstration/president) has acted time and again in a way that both of us know very well.
Do you have some reasons for hope for the cynics in the crowd?
Not really. Just that trust ain't binary and the govt is made of people. I don't like this admin but this too shall pass. Cultivate your garden. Electing bad people has consequences.
None of what's happening today could have happened without everything that came before it.
The blue team carries plenty of blame for not fielding better candidates. If nobody is buying your bullshit, it's a little weak to blame the customer.
And all of the us electorate carries plenty of blame for letting our government get so massive and out of control over time. We've let this beast metastasize and grow, and now were stuck with it.
The American people are ultimately to blame for it, they've got the government they deserve, which is actively dismantling the US empire day by day. The American people voted for Trump instead of Kamala, and that is rather damning of the state of the American people, far more so than however damning it may also be for the Democratic party.
Red team could have sane candidate, but they did not. They spent a lot of money amd effort into making this happen.
They are 100% at fault.
Has there been a time where (after later facts came out) they were wrong?
Nukes in Iraq?
That was what the gov’t was saying was true - which was a lie, and was later proven to be a lie.
Which reinforces my point?
Or the bootlicker olympics for those who want everyone else to ignore the constant lies because they think bigger, more powerful government is utopian.
That has been (rightly) said every year there has been a current US administration.
It is not a conspiracy theory if it's true.
And no, it's not "cynicism Olympics", it's observation.
Right on cue!
I wouldn't be so pleased with myself over such "You will get wet in a rainstorm." style predictions.
truths from different angles that are at odds with one another produce mistrust and thoughts of conspiracy. We have more of that now than we have ever had, ever. It doesn't take Nostradamus to point to the trend.
tl;dr : Gee, where did this mistrust in the current government come from? I'd point but I don't have that many hands.
I hope the aviators are OK, and also hope whoever they were bombing are also OK.
I do wonder if Iran finds them first, will they treat them better than the US treated survivors of the ship sunk by a US torpedo in the Indiana Ocean?
The crew of the IRIS Dena were warned twice by the US to abandon ship according to a report from one of the sailor’s father. They refused.
Not sure if it’s possible to treat enemies better than that. And I doubt the Iranians will treat a US pilot well. Look at how they treat their own citizens.
The ship was an unarmed vessel on its way to a goodwill visit to Sri Lanka and coming from an international maritime exercise hosted by India, which the United States also attended and participated in. The US torpedoed it, and when it sank, the US did not apparently attempt to rescue any of the Dena's crew. Fortunately, Sri Lanka showed up and saved 30 people.
Mind you, the details of war are not always clear. The US says that the ship was armed, and it also says that they did make an effort to rescue the crew. The US does not explain why it failed to actually rescue anybody, of course.
The US is busy shooting “drug boats” with no evidence, that is who they are now
If the source below is correct, the commander of the Dena ordered his troops to stay on the ship despite the warnings, there was a bit of a mutiny and the survivors are those who rejected those orders and jumped off.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603071125
OK if I come to your car, declare you’re my enemy, and tell you to get out before I toss a Molotov at you, does that mean I can’t be tried for murder later if you refuse?
This was a sneak attack outside of an established war zone, for an illegal war, so don’t try to conflate this as an attack on America’s enemies. The USA made them their enemies themselves.
That doesn't seem like the most trustworthy source.
>Established in May 2017 and funded by Saudi Arabia,[1][2][3][4][5][6] it actively promotes former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as the next ruler of Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International
Can you cite something to support this. Quite keen to read.
You left out 'unarmed'.
Unarmed like the 45,000 protestors the Iranian regime killed early January?
"They killed unarmed civilians so that means we can kill unarmed soldiers!"
Are you seriously trying to say this war of aggression on Iran is about democracy for their people? That's not what the US does. What the US does is lip service to democracy while destroying it around the world for capitalist interests.
No I’m not "seriously trying to say" anything you say.
I am saying: This regime murdered 45,000 unarmed civilians simply for protesting.
By the way, today they executed an 18-year-old, also unarmed.
So, more whataboutism? Is this your m.o. here?
Based on the initial comment, I believe we were trying to deduce how the Iranian regime might respond to the capture of a US pilot… what do you think they will do if they kill 18 year olds for protesting?
PS: I’m not sure why you feel the need to be passive-aggressive. That’s how I interpreted your comment at least.
> I hope the aviators are OK
Why? They were evil people supporters of mass murder. I'd forgive it if they were forcibly conscripted, but they've made their choices.
You have zero understanding of how systems work.
I think you would be surprised!
Are you serious? How old are you?
Of course I'm serious, why would my age affect how I feel about a soldier dying invading another country? But you are right that probably in the big context of things a POW is better for negotiating an ealier cease fire, which would ultimately be the better outcome.
"Flawless victory" is becoming sillier every day.
With each new fatality, they continue to test our might. It may not be long until the situation starts to get toasty.
It's called Operation Epic Fuckup for a reason.
Operation Epic Fail.
Operation Epstein Fury
Yep. It's just a lie.
Irrespective of whether you think that the war is a good idea, having a plane shot down after 20+ days of war isn't exactly embarrassing. If anything, it shows the opposite: The extreme capability of the U.S. military.
Getting shot down shows... extreme capability? HOW?
Iran had one of the largest and most extensive integrated air defense networks in the world. US has been bombing Iran from day 0 of this war. Those are the air losses they took.
Being able to counter air defenses to this degree and operate with this level of impunity is a major SEAD/DEAD win.
nice strawman
The article says this is the first jet that was shot down by enemy fire this war, but this confuses me. Was the F35 that was downed a while back friendly fire or something? Are F35s not fighter jets?
The F35 was able to make an emergency landing in a gulf country. This one actually went down in Iran.
I’m not sure a plane can be landed when the crew ejected.
I thought the IR video of that showed it made the missile detonate before the missile hit, maybe shrapnel hit the jet
Then again idk the jet exhaust becomes more significant not sure if afterburner or damage
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1ry6ma2/f35_...
That's how anti-aircraft missiles always work.
In that video it seems like something shoots at the missile is what I'm saying from the F35
Someone said maybe a form of DIRCM
The missiles have what’s effectively a flak shotgun shell at the tip, when they’re pointed at an object and close by it shoots flak in a tight cone towards the front.
Flak spreads the damage better and does more kinetic damage than trying to ram a plane with a missile and hoping the concussion from a the resulting explosion damages something.
You're talking about a single "dash" on the frame before it goes all white. First question, if it were a laser, would be what exactly are you seeing there? A laser from the side is invisible, there'd need to be dust there, or the air would need to have turned into plasma. I don't think either makes that much sense. Second question/problem would be… it would have failed/be malfunctioning because —
— pretty much all AA munition works by exploding in close proximity to the target and showering it in shrapnel. So this might even have "helped" the missle/shell against malfunction in its fuse. And considering that this is designed to work like that, and it's likely not the greatest quality work on the Iranian side, it's also possible that the thing is already exploding and just ejected some piece of intentional shrapnel (or unintentionally itself) early, ahead of the actual detonation.
Or the Iranians edited that "dash" into that one frame, it's not exactly like it's a reputable source and it's in their interest to confuse things. Maybe they want the US to believe that the countermeasures are malfunctioning and helping their attacks, so they turn it off…
Yeah I was also thinking the the dash might be the missile itself
The single exhaust plume does become multiple on the F35 suggesting damage
Almost like a seeking flak shell. I had no idea.
We have always been at war with Eastasia
That one was damaged and managed to land safely, iirc. Depends on your definition of "shot down" I guess, but the pilot didn't eject, so...
Maybe they shouldn't be attacking Iran? Duhhhhhh.
Oh well, it was bound to happen. We need to get the Hell out of there.
cough and an A10
apparently, Iran is claiming that the search and rescue helicopter has also been hit by a projectile.
Why is the US there again? Open up a straight that was open?
Not expecting a reply.
The idiocy of the average American voter and its consequences
Israel
Sweet AIPAC money
The opinion in https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/ is interesting here.
Read the section titled 'The Gamble' if you want that opinion, but the tl;dr is that our 2025 strike against Iran ceded our ability to claim dis-involvement in Israeli strikes, and so Israel was able to draw us into this war whether we wanted to or not.
To distract from the Epstein files.
> Not expecting a reply.
Then why are you even here? This is a place of discussion not a personal vendetta machine.
Perhaps they're a US taxpayer wondering why a $150+ million strike fighter was just written off?
the last time US wanted some country to reset back to Stone Age the same thing happened. turn out those aircrafts are not undefeatable at all.
It's pretty normal for planes to go down in a war. They've flown 5000+ sorties, it's a pretty huge accomplishment this is the first one lost over Iran. Especially considering all of the last decade's speculation about how tough attacking Iran would be.
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
First to go down in Iran, but a surprising amount of attritions thus far
- 3x F-15 friendly fire
- 2x KC-130 refuel mid air collision (1 loss, 1 damaged)
- 1x F-35 damaged
- 1x AEWACs base strike
- 3x KC-130 base strike (same)
- 1x F-15 (this one)
2-3 a week is not great for the greatest military, more than half attributable to Iran.
With 300+ US casualties, that's ~10/day, a fatality every ~2 days. No boots on the ground (that we know of, sure there are some elite ops in the country)
You must not have read about all the hype Iran had before the war and before 2024 especially. The US airforce/navy has performed extremely well. In Desert Storm they lost far, far more aircraft and that only lasted 1.5 months (Iran is 1 month in). Even the ballistic missile strikes against Israel haven't been exceptionally notable, considering Iran is going full-bore and has thousands of ballistic/cruise missiles and drones. They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
The main issues with this war are strategic questions and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication. But otherwise for an air campaign this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
the big difference with Iran is the strait of hormuz. It doesn't matter how "well" it goes if it stays closed and torpedos the global economy
> inconsistent communication
I feel like "inconsistent communication" is putting it lightly, with trump going back and forth between "we won", "we'll take the oil", and "whatever we'll leave" often within the same day.
Does it matter? US is a net oil exporter, and not exactly starved for Gulf oil. And every day the strait stays closed is a day other Gulf states have a very pressing reason to conflict with Iran. As if Iran didn't give enough of those to the entire region.
Iran isn't somehow able to exert infinite economic pressure forever. They can play the chaos monkey, but how much does it helps them? Threats only work on those who cave in to them.
It does matter because oil is a global commodity, the fact that the US is a net exporter doesn't stop the prices from going up and other follow-on impacts to the global economy.
It means that US isn't hit the hardest. There's no "we have to end the war this month or our country grinds down to a halt". Just the slow grind of economic pressure that, I remind, affects more countries than just the US - and many of them far stronger.
US leadership can just say "this isn't enough to deter us" and proceed with the rest of the war however they want.
> US is a net oil exporter, and not exactly starved for Gulf oil
I suggest not taking anything Trump says as the truth: https://xcancel.com/chrismartenson/status/203952370406177223...
Pretty much.
US military is performing quite well. US political leadership is the questionable part of this war.
It would sure be nice if White House gave a reason to believe that there's an actual plan for dismantling Iran's regime, or Iran's influence, that goes beyond "wing it".
> The main issues with this war are strategic questions
That's an exceptionally nice way of saying we invaded a country for no valid military reason, starting a war of aggression.
We're no better than Russia now, with their invasion of Ukraine.
> ... and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Well-deserved mockery. He continues to lie about what's happening, every other sentence.
Iran's regime is an radical Islamic theocracy that has "Death to America" as a matter of policy, supports every other radical Islamist militia in the entire Middle East region, and tried to build nukes after being told, repeatedly, not to build nukes.
I don't know about you, but the idea of a radical Islamic theocracy and a well known source of Middle East instability having nukes doesn't sit well with me. As far as reasons to invade countries go, this alone would make for a damn good one.
If a button existed that magically turned Iran into a secular-ish democracy(-ish) like Turkey then, yes, I would expect the President of the United States to press it.
No such button exists, and it's increasingly clear that this war will leave the entire world far worse off while further entrenching the current Iranian regime.
"Far worse off" how exactly? "Entrenching" how exactly?
Iranian regime wasn't doing that well even when it wasn't actively bombed. And "rally around the flag" only goes so far in a country that has been killing protestors by the thousands.
I don't see this war ruining Iran's regime overnight as is. But if it comes up with a sustained effort to pressure Iran, or a ground operation to topple the regime directly, it well might.
And that’s exactly why sharing a video might lead to prison sentence somewhere?
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
I don't see why they couldn't. The obvious strategy for Iran right now is to use cluster munitions and Shahed waves to expend as many interceptors as possible before sending in the high-throw unitary (or nuclear) warheads. It makes sense that we saw the smaller MRBMs first since they're the cheapest minimum-viable threat.
> this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
We're deep in the missile age. Air campaigns like this sucked during the Scud hunt, and it triple-sucks now that America has to contend with drone warfare. The limits of an air-only campaign have been constricting for the past three decades, and the death toll can only climb if the air war fails.
I wouldn't draw comparisons to Desert Storm, 36 years ago and a differently composed US military, along with all the ISR advancements since then.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
Could, they are not going all out, but they do keep striking gulf states on the regular
> people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Asking questions, we the people deserve some clarity instead of half a dozen changing reasons and being told we already won, but still need to win, and that we'll be done in a few weeks a few times now. We the people have to pay for this, we deserve answers, especially what's the plan for when the shooting stops?
Israel, or at least Bibi, seems to be the only one who is very clear about the goals and intentions.
The only ones I'm seeing act like there should be no expectation of losing aircraft in a war are social media figures who always want to bloviate about something.
Is this not just FAFO?
Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-news-2026?mod=WSJ_...
"U.S. Conducting Rescue Operation After Jet Went Down Over Iran"
why is this not showing at top of HN search sorted by date?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It's in the front page now. It's how I found it.
1. search time settings, use 24h
2. the query string, "F-15" (capitalization is still important)
Why didn't Iran use its capability to take down enemy jets for an entire month?
Iran doesn't have to shoot down a single jet to win this war. Just move military hardware into caves. Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target. Wait it out until American domestic pressure from perceived war crimes ends the war. They can't afford to fight a land war or garrison over the entire country.
The fact that Israel has leveled much of the 140 square miles of gaza over the past 3 years and still fails to remove Hamas from power. No chance against 636,372 square miles and 93 million people. Worse odds than Vietnam. There isn't even a defined victory condition.
> There isn't even a defined victory condition.
It's even worse if you consider what rational options the mullahs have. Yes, they are a murderous dictatorship and enemies of US - no question about that. But they did nothing to provoke this particular attack and they still got bombed.
Backing off without first inflicting severe pain is just not an option in this situation. It would be an invitation to get bombed at will.
> Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target.
I'm imagining the air crew going "Huh, there are no clear actual targets to bomb. Hey, Cleetus, command won't be happy about us not bombing anything at all, retarget on that school over there, let's get this over with and go home."
Wow, "perceived war crimes", what an interesting way of saying war crimes.
Real and perceived. The lay public aren't generally students of international law.
They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.
Probably because their air defenses were too busy getting shot to shit.
There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.
Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.
It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.
I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.
Speculation.
1. Iran was retarded and didn't preemptively strike US staging who had local overmatch and first mover advantage. Nothing to do but weather hits, chip away at regional basing and wait until US+Israel operation tempo goes down. Can't sustain surge sorties forever, especially with regional logistics wrecked. US pilots tired now, on stims, making mistakes.
2. Iran not remain retarded, was hide and bide, waited for US to get complement, gathering data / building tactics to squeeze out surface-air without getting glassed. Regardless, Iranian capability seems much less degraded than claimed. Who knows how many of the 20k+ targets hit was basically just drawing down highend munition inventory, which now forces flying closer on lower end munitions.
At the end of the day, Iranian mosaic forces are chilling in underground bunkers waiting for US+co to make mistakes. Consider Iraq, a much smaller country by every metric ate 5x more sorties from more carriers and sustained regional air campaign and fell because they hedged on centralized IADs. Granted most Iranian hits are precision munitions (more efficient per sortie), but we simply should not expect Iran doctrine built on distributed survivability to be remotely defeated relative to effort expended.
Downvoters, care to explain?
Seriously, it's been sitting on this for entire month and now, all of a sudden, rolled out antiaircraft defense? What's going on?
Air defense is not static. Even fixed launchers can be moved, and reacting to how your enemy is operating is an important part of air defense tactics. The famous F-117 shootdown happened because the air defense operators carefully planned around how the US was using its aircraft. If most Iranian air defenses were destroyed in the first few days, it'd make more sense for them to hold whatever was still available for the sort of situation where they had much higher chances of scoring a kill than just throwing it out there to get destroyed immediately and accomplish nothing.
~15/16 MQ-9 Reapers have been shot down inside Iran. Not jets but still combat(strike and reconnaissance) aircraft.
I just looked it up. Those are turboprop (slower) but have a high ceiling of 50k feet. So Iran did have something better than stingers left. Maybe they just got lucky this time.
I didn't downvote, but your post sounds like you're implying some kind of tomfoolery, deception, or other hidden reasons. There are very likely none, it just takes time to adapt to a specific enemy, probability slowly increases while you get more attempts, and then after some time (t) the first shootdown is "properly" successful. And note how this was preceded by that half-successful shootdown where the plane made an emergency landing. And they shot down drones.
You sound like they roll an antiaircraft cannon out of the hangar and immediately successfully down a plane. That's not how that works. The AA was probably there from the beginning, just not successful.
Because it obviously doesn't have the capability. Similar to how the US has no capability to "win" from the air only.
Maybe it was friendly fire but I did not see that in the news yet.
We don't know what downed it yet, so it's hard to say. Iran is hiding and rationing their offensive munitions, we know that, so it's not surprising when the number of drone and missile attacks spikes after weeks of bombing. That's part of the plan. But the ability to take down a US fighter jet is not something they are rationing- it's likely at the edge of their capabilities and they got lucky. If they could be knocking down more, they would be.
Also reported at https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/03/iran-f-15e-debris/
C-130s and helicopters flying low over Iran right after they shot down an F-15 in the same spot is wild. Whatever I think of the war idiocy, that's brave.
It's breaking news...meaning it may be inaccurate. CENTCOM certainly is saying it's false [0]. But there are enough signs of it being genuine, to be concerning at this stage.
Flying low over Iran at this point is planned, expensive "standoff" munitions were planned to give way to more accurate and less expensive munitions once air superiority was reached - which U.S. has been claiming has happened for a while now.
[0] https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2039805134704660622
> CENTCOM certainly is saying it's false…
Any time this administration cries "fake news" is probably a tell.
> Flying low over Iran at this point is planned…
But with C-130s and helos, in an area that just shot down a F-15? That's risky. One of the videos shows the C-130 deploying flares.
You do have a point. F-18 narrowly missed a MANPAD recently too
The other way around.
Update: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/us-fighter-jet-went-ir...
> An F-15 fighter jet pilot has been rescued alive by the U.S. military after their aircraft went down over Iran, a U.S. official said Friday.
> White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump had been briefed on the incident — the latest dramatic development in the war, now more than a month old.
CENTCOM lied.
The government would never lie: the "damaged" plane was already accounted for, just in the ground, in enemy territory.
The use of "a" instead of "the" pilot suggests more than 1 personnel on the plane, considering F15's carry 2 people (unless it's some magical F15 I haven't heard of), it means there's still 1 guy missing out there.
Or he (I assume) could also have been found dead, and is not being mentioned before his family is notified of the sacrifice Donald Trump made of his life.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/iran-us-fighter-shot-down
previous conversation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626347
There are fairly credible X posts now saying the 2nd pilot has also been rescued. Pretty impressive.
What makes them credible? Not doubting, just curious.
If true I can’t imagine it will play well even among Trumps base. When was the last time a US fighter jet was shot down? 1999 during the intervention in the balkans?
Looks like yes. Last jet shot down was a warthog in Iraq 2003. Last fighter jets shot down were a nighthawk and falcon in 1999.
You overestimate the base.
The war machine is already rewriting this as Iranian hostility.
The base is incapable of seeing this as a failure of their cult leader.
Instead they'll see it as the very rationale and justification of the war.
If they were ambivalent about it before, now they'll scream bloody murder for even more off-the-leash barbarism from the US and Israel.
Why are you helping them galvanize? Let them come up with their own raison d'etre.
Honestly it seems like the only thing Trump's base cares about is the price of gasoline. They don't give a shit about what's actually happening in the war.
Trump leads a personality cult not a traditional political base. There are some who have stopped supporting him because they thought he aligned with their political views but 35% or so of the US population still support him despite his 180 degree turn on two of his foundational election promises: to keep the US out of foreign wars and to bust open an international pedophile ring run for elites.
If the pilots are recovered we probably won't hear about it from either side for hours. Iran will want to get them a mile underground before they send out the B-rolls. If recovered by the US, they will want them out of theater before anyone knows better so they can't be targeted.
One pilot rescued. Only one seat spotted suggesting other one didnt make it.
CNN is reporting this confirmed by three US sources
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics/us-fighter-jet-iran
> A particular concern, they said, was threats made by the US to Iran’s energy infrastructure. “International law protects from attack objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.”
I am not going to lie, I am beyond disgusted at the United States.
And the "it's Trump" card doesn't work, Americans defend this travesty of an old non functioning constitution.
[delayed]
> One of two US crew members rescued after F-15E jet shot down over Iran
That's quite the partisan title, showing the Guardian's sympathies. To take the opposite perspective: "In another illegal operation, US forces prevent international criminal aviator from answering for his actions against Iran and its people"
Think what you will of the Iranian regime (I'm certainly not a fan) - the US and Israel have no justification, legal or moral, to attack and invade Iran. Doubly so after their co-perpatration of a slew of genocidal actions in Gaza. Which, by the way, are continuing to this day: The gradually narrowing perimeter of concentration, the siege and starvation, the bombing of civilians and remnants of infrastructure...
And as if that's not enough, Israel has now ethnically cleansed South Lebanon, and has begun demolishing all buildings in the southernmost strip of land. Bombings further north are continuing. Government ministers and public figures are already presenting plans for replacing the native villages and towns with renamed Zionist settlements.
Via the NYT: Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and a key government figure overseeing the war, took to social media to mock the Trump administration as U.S. forces searched for a missing American airman from a downed fighter plane. “This brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’”he said in a post on X. “Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627182
dang moved the comment from those threads to here, so the discussion is empty. I'm not sure if the press coverage has more info. (My guess is that they are quite similar.)
Let's hope Iran doesn't follow the "no quarter, no mercy" policy laid out by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. For the unfamiliar, it means executing survivors and surrendering combatants. Aka war crimes.
Iran just killed ~40,000 of their own people in January, the biggest single event massacre since the Holocaust. I don't think Pete Hegseth is going to move the needle in their ideology.
You love that whataboutism, dontcha.
Downvotes for quoting the secretary of defense, never change HN
Secretary of War thank you, no dead naming glorious leaders very fine people
This is the dumbest, most pointless military conflict in American history. There is nothing plausible to win, but we can conceivably lose everything. A pyric victory is among the most favorable outcomes. We are led by corrupt imbeciles. I can only hope the outcome includes regime change for the U.S.
"We've had vicious kings, and we've had idiot kings, but I don't think we've ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king!"
China and Russia have an enormous opportunity to do a lot of in the field testing right now, and they absolutely should be taking advantage of it.
And let me be clear of my position: For the safety and security of planet Earth, large numbers of US aircraft need to be shot out of the sky. Some B52s and maybe a few B2s need to be scattered wreckage.
The US has already bombed 10 countries over the past 12 months. Often grossly illegal operations, having zero support from the civilized world. Like, can anyone on the planet rationalize what position the US is in to be blocking ships to Cuba? There is zero international basis for it, beyond "might makes right".
The US' incredibly stupid idiocracy government openly flouts piracy and looting the resources of foreign nations. They are blowing up ships in international waters with zero pretence, and then double-tapping the survivors (again, grotesque war criming). The head of the "Department of War", a halfwit alcoholic joke of a Fox News host whose own military career is pathetic, spouts absurd war-crime celebrating "got it from ChatGPT" speeches that are a travesty to humanity. An administration filled with utter garbage people, and I mean Trump openly declares that he surrounds himself with losers.
Never, in the history of humanity, has a nation needed to be punched in the mouth with brass knuckles to such an extent.
Man, what an achievement. What a stunning descent to rogue worldwide threat. No nation on Earth deserves a regime change more than that busted shithole.
Do Americans realize this is how most of the world feels about you now? You are not some great freedom fighters or democracy guardians (HAR!), you're a busted criminal idiocracy where vile, vile, incredibly stupid clowns are completely eviscerating what good people spent decades building.
Large, sophisticated, expensive war assets like fighters and carriers are brilliant against literally cavemen like we've been going around fighting lately, but are quite useless against enemies with even slight technological progress. If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
It’s mind boggling how wrong that statement manages to be in only two sentences. It’s like every word manages to be wrong multiple times
Hats off to you sir
I don't even know why I clicked on this thread. It's like reading a thread on economics or other topics where we tech folk think our success at pushing around bits makes us instant expert on anything we ponder.
Most of the responses here are either demonstrating a heavy bias, an utter lack of background knowledge or both.
OP sentences have issues, but I understood what they meant.
When the first-tier hostile leadership structure was eliminated in the first day of the war, and only after a month do the surviving enemies finally manage to damage a plane so severely that it can't return to a friendly base to land, is "quite useless" an adequate and accurate description of the technology used to prosecute that war?
It's useful in saving the pilot's life. With less advanced tecnologies, more pilots would have been shoot down. It's useful in targeted attacks, but they have proved themself uneffective (at least for now) as the new leadership is alined with the objective of the replaced one. It's close to useless when it comes to making the war cost-effective, which start being a relevant metric when the conflict start lasting too long. Of course the US has a bigger economy, so all the news about cheaper systems damaging or destroying quite expensive ones may still lead to a US victory, but a costly one for sure
As the Soviet Union made us learn, you don’t need a big military victory to make your enemy spend themselves into defeat.
When you decapitate a well organised military, all you achieve is installing a new enemy you know little about you can’t predict their actions and that now know they are fighting for their own survival.
Not the best place to be.
Americans seem to underestimate everyone else.
Whether you have specific leadership or not doesn't matter much to (a) having to adapt to the enemy and learn what works, and (b) probability just doing its thing, more chances and so on, and (c) US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
> US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
And they voted for this not only once, but twice.
A month after the president claims total air superiority over Iran and complete destruction of their anti air capabilities.
It reminds me of a Age of Empires campaign I played at a LAN from a long while back, where the game went on for 20 hours and ended in a stalemate between an atomic age player and a very primitive age player. The atomic player had total control of the map, they were carpet bombing the entire thing with nuclear weapons. But they could only create them so fast while the primitive player was running around on horses, just surviving enough to prevent the other player from winning. The only reason the game ended was because I tripped over the power cord to one of the computers.
To me, that's what modern warfare looks like.
Ah, you mean Empire Earth. I loved that game, it had a great soundtrack.
Empire earth slapped so hard. Both 1 and 2. Honestly now that I’m thinking about it, going to set aside some time this weekend and play it again!
Sounds like it indeed. The balance was... interesting, a single tank could not win against a dozen cavemen.
I don't see how a single tank could win against 12 cavemen, but I digress. It's a video game.
Weapons are designed with an opponent in mind, and guarded against the expected threat models from that opponent. Everything breaks down when the opponent does not what you want them to.
Right right Empire Earth! My memory is a little fuzzy it must have been 20 years ago.
I don't remember Age of Empires having an atomic age?
If I had to guess I think they meant empire earth instead.
It was probably Rise of Nations or one of the other similar games.
> If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
Yep, Iran recently destroyed a high tech radar plane ("AWACS") at a base in Saudi Arabia: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-war-attack-us-base-s...
It's only "high tech" to the aforementioned cavemen. To everyone else it's a 707 you can't even get spare tires for any more, equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard. I mean it has a mechanical waveguide for crying out loud.
> equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard.
So I guess the US won't have any issues replacing it at a cheaper cost (as far as I understood that one cost $500 million, give or take).
The prototype E-7 cost $2 billion. It's a 737 with some radios.
"On 22 March 2019, the UK Defence Secretary announced a $1.98 billion contract to purchase five Boeing E-7 Wedgetails"
Prototype price isn't really that meaningful
(Also it's a 767 not a 737, that was the E-3 I think.)
You must be thinking of a different boondoggle, the E-767, which is the obsolete radar package from the E-3 bolted to a 767. The E-7 is a 737.
Ah right, it's a bit confusing between the bunch of these.
Nonetheless the price tag was only $400M/ea E-7 for the UK in 2019 (usual later price shenanigans not included)