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I was speaking more generally regarding the whole war, but in this specific instance "losses greater than zero" very quickly complicate things and expand the operation. Unless the HEU is secretly stored closer to the border than publicly indicated, you're looking at 200+ miles of contested airspace, transporting in and out. Every piece of essential equipment or personnel you lose now needs a backup, which balloons the size of the operation, makes it harder to transport and protect, and increases the number of targets that can be hit. So you need more protection, which increases the footprint to be transported and protected, etc.
The US has air superiority. But yes, it would be a big operation. I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.
And if the recent public speculation that the material was moved to Ishafan is true, the stuff is just in intact tunnels covered with soil and not really deeply buried.
no, the US doesn't have air superiority over Iran and rarely, if ever, flies into Iranian territory due to the risk of their planes being shot down
if it had air superiority, you would see the US regularly flying into Iranian territory to use far cheaper and more destructive bombs, but they rarely if ever do that because they would lose even more planes than their 1 plane loss every day and a half or so
Iranians are complaining that the US is dropping mines in Shiraz, about a hundred miles inland. As far as I can tell, these air-dropped mines don't even have wing kits so their range is very limited. Here's pictures of Israeli F-16s (not stealthy!) kitted out with cluster bombs, which likewise are not short ranged weapons. Here's the DVIDS link to images from Epic Fury, and here's a B-52, an F-18, an F-16, and an F-15 loaded up with gravity bombs.
You can of course wave away the DVIDS photos as head-fakes but when combined with the mines it seems pretty reasonable to believe that the US is doing strikes inland.
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LOL.
You know better.
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I think it's really telling that the US has achieved air superiority over Iran instantly, while Russia has as of yet never achieved that level of superiority over Ukraine.
It's probably not impossible, I'm just saying that when considering scale redundancies and protection need to be included in that calculus.
Huh? Russia flies over Ukraine far more than the US flies in Iranian territory probably by orders of magnitude given they regularly use glide bombs with a range of only 50mi. Russia flies helicopters, regularly, in Ukrainian territory and uses attack helicopters regularly inside Ukraine. This has been the case for years at this point. The US doesn't do either of these things with the overwhelming vast majority of sorties using stand-off munitions and not entering Iranian territory, if ever.
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