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I agree. My only.assumptiom is that they really wanted ~2 carriers in region to be able to put together big enough strike packages that they could SEAD/DEAD to their hearts content. Which to be fair, seems to be working quite well. I'm not following this war closely but I think three F-15s have been shot down and it's all friendly fire? So American hardware taking down American hardware.
They definitely should have just flown whatever they had around and relied heavily on the IAF stealth jets so they could sieze the moment. But they probably assumed that Iran actually scoring kills on American hardware would be too embarassing. Or the IAF said "yeah, we could, but wouldn't it be nice if you just did it for us? You're so much better at it 😍" and as always, we decided to set billions and billions of dollars on fire for our greatest ally.
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