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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.
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The US did it all the time in Vietnam.
…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.
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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.
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It'll probably come in the form of permanent $5+/gal gas.
We got through it in 2022. We can get through it again. Though unfortunately Americans will learn the wrong lesson from this which should be to reduce dependency on oil for every day life. We should be aiming to have fewer cars and abandon car-only transportation as policy, and more sidewalks, trams, bike lanes, and better medium density mixed-use development. But if folks want to have Ford F-250s and drive 15 miles…
They're also just as much of a CO2 solution as electric trains are, i.e. it depends on the fuel source for the local electric grid (which today is overwhelmingly solar in most of the places where EVs are popular).
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.
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?
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.
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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 oblitera…
> 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...
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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