691–700 of 1001 posts
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.
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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.
Trump has a loyal hardcore, but he is absolutely bleeding supporters around the edges. If you follow the US right many of them are pledging to vote democrat in the midterms as a protest.
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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.
The videos we've seen match up with what we've seen on the ground. They are all running a custom software we haven't seen elsewhere and don't seem to be traditional MANPADS in any way. We know Iran is driving around bongo trucks with small SAM systems on the back that use passive IRST rather than radar. The missiles themselves have the capability to cruise in the air for some period of time searching for a target bef…
> custom software
Are you referring to screen recordings they've released?
Although Iran is a tenacious nation, the United States is weakening. The United States of the past would not have made such a mistake.
The made the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan
But this is next level. When it started I thought Iran would be crushed. Ignorant, silly me.
There is every chance the USA will have to stop its attacks before achieving any goals.
An education, thus is, that I could do without.
In New Zealand we will probably run out of diesel soon.
This is so stupid, so sadistic and cruel
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With the altitudes they've been flying at, shoulder mounted MANPADs are a viable option.
MANPADS have a range of around 4 miles. Most soldiers aren't carrying around armed MANPADS. They have to fetch the MANPADS, arm it, aim, and fire all before the jet dumps its load and flares before bailing out. Because of this, MANPADS are a much greater threat to helicopters or CAS like the Warthog than they are to jets dumping ordinance. This has been proven pretty decisively in Ukraine. Radar is line-of-sight. A n…
I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.
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.
You can't compare time, you need to compare sorties. There were only 5900 F15 sorties during the gulf war. It's not clear how many of the 8000 combat sorties sorties flown so far in the Iran war are with F15s, but it's almost certainly several thousand. Overall during the gulf war coalition forces suffered 52 fixed wing aircraft lost in combat over approximately 116,000 combat sorties. Given Iran ought to have far be…
If Iran can do this with AWACS, they can do even more with the hundreds of fighter jets in Israeli and US bases (it's much easier to cover up the destruction of an F-15 or F-35). Once this war ends, I think we'll see that most of the aircraft kills are going to be on the ground.
One less to bomb schools with girls. I feel that the current war is by far the most closest to showing to people that this war is waged by the rich. Because they are the primary ones to benefit right now (if we ignore Netanyahu, but Netanyahu's war goals "make sense", e. g. this is done for expansion and/or control; Trump's involvement makes no real sense, except for benefitting some with insider trading and making o…
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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
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
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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…
> 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?
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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 ad…