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Well, can you? The closest we have seen to an attempt to get it over a country with a modern multi-layered air defense system was in fact Russia over Ukraine, and it failed. Of course, the question is to what extent the conclusion should be "Russia sucks" and to what extent it should be "this is a hard problem", but it's not like Ukraine can fly manned planes close to Russian-held territory either. I imagine the US is actually not convinced that it could pull it off either, and is more interested in maintaining the strategic ambiguity (that maybe it could) than risking rolling the dice and establishing that the answer is no for all to see. (Of course, the possibility that the answer being yes leads to nukes is also a factor.)
I can only say I am looking forward to the day China goes for Taiwan, as it will finally re-peg some of the nationalist hypothesizing about who could win if they really tried to reality.
Does Iran not count as having a modern multi-layered air defense system? They had S-300s, so second-tier Russian tech, which is mostly Ukraine had when the war started.
Russia does suck quite a lot. But it's not proven how well say the F-35 et al can do against the S-400 by either the US or Israel with top-tier SEAD. But since, somehow, the fucking Turks have a couple of batteries I'm guessing we have a pretty good idea of how to take 'em out at low risk.
Does Ukraine have even a smidgen of the air combat power e.g. the US Marines have?
Per this page, Iran had 4 batteries, and their radar system got disabled by hackers before Israel attacked (surely a unique mistake enabled only by Israel's complete intelligence penetration of it) - Ukraine, it says, had 100. And still, from what I gather, Israel did not do manned overflights but just launched ATGMs over Iraq. The Americans did one overflight, but that was using rare bombers that don't scale and might well have been preceded by a backchannel "let us bomb you unopposed once for the symbolism, or shoot back and we will go all in" threat.
Good thing the Russians were not competent at their intelligence preparation of the battlefield.
Think about what you just said. They "just" "launched" "ATGMs." How did that turn out for the IAF? For Iran?
Israel did manned overflights once they had obliterated Iran's air defenses in a matter of hours.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-air-superiority-iran-cannot-compared-russia-ukraine
Iran also had a lot more than merely four S-300 batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Air_Defense_Force
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