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Notes -
I think the main factor is the ability to do strikes. I don't mean as firing a missile from plane, that's just the culmination of the strike, but to have such a good understanding of the situation and the available materiel to plan and execute. The US is not sending a multirole fighter with a mix of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles with a goal of "go kill this person, we believe he's hiding in this building and he's behind several layers of air defences and the might have some fighters in the area. Good luck and godspeed!". The actual mission involves clockwork removal of all known obstacles and contingencies for the unknowns. So the mission will be more like "launch at 0400, at 0600 tomahawks will destroy the air defenses in grid yyy, you will then destroy the marked target between 0615 and 0700, the airfield close will be the target of another strike in the morning, in case some of the jets manage to scramble before you will have an escort of F-22s."
Planning everything like that requires time, and these strike plans can expire as targets and defenses are moved, so if you are the US you plan as many strikes as you can for the opening of the war, start with an orgy of destruction to remove as many defenses as you can so that when you run out of pre-planned strikes you don't need to be as fastidious in your planning. If you're Iran, you can't do much to stop the strikes or cause much damage to the strike forces, so you shuffle your defenses and targets around and hope that by the time the US run out of preplanned strikes, they still don't have uncontested air superiority or achieved their objectives, then the US will either have to accept more risk in their operations or slow the cadence of strikes.
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