321–330 of 1001 posts
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.
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> 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/
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> 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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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.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627182
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 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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
As an added benefit, enlisted air crew have no restrictions on mustache length or on professional wear of the uniform.
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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.
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…
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.