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Well, I agree the US is flying into Iran now and they lost 5+ aircraft, including another mq9, in a 24 hour period the moment evidence exists which proves they're entering Iranian territory. Great job everyone! This isn't what air superiority looks like. It's not even close.
and I highly doubt many, if any, of the majority of the people here arguing otherwise will ever admit they were just wrong about it and clean their information space so they're no so easily duped... again... in yet another war
in all honesty, do you seriously think a B-52 is in Iranian airspace even now let alone 5 days ago?
No, this already existed, both the cluster bomb evidence that I provided to you and pictures published by an Iranian news outlet showing a JDAM hitting the B1 bridge should pretty much have put an end to any doubt that the US was operating over Iran against targets well inland even before the F-15 got tagged.
Yes, it is. Remember the definition of air superiority?
US helicopters (and transport aircraft) were in fact photographed prowling Iranian territory over the course of a couple of days to pull this op off, thus demonstrating by your own criteria localized US air superiority deep inside of Iranian airspace.
Of course, that's not the actual definition of air superiority used by actual war planners. (However it does suggest that I may have underestimated how leaky the supposed Iranian internet blackout was, heh.) Here's the actual definition:
The United States definitely had this over a portion of Iran (remember, in US doctrine air superiority can be created temporarily, it's not necessarily a persistent thing for any given geographic region/mission because both sides can shift or regenerate assets). If the United States had not had air superiority, they would not have been able to conduct air operations deep inside of Iranian soil successfully.
And in fact they did this operation with such an insane degree of success that it appears they lost more aircraft to the fiendish Iranian desert (at least three, two C-130s and at least one Little Bird) than they did to Iranian surface-to-air fire (two, the MQ-9 and an A-10, although it sounds to me like a Saudi drone may also have been shot down in the AO, several US aircraft were damaged by ground fire, and it seems plausible that at least one more Little Bird was also left behind and destroyed by US forces inside Iran, so I'd happily revise my statement to "Iranian ground fire was no more dangerous to this operation than planning mistakes by US SOCCOM intel officers desperately trying to get Eagle Claw right this time (Challenge level: impossible.)"
(Note: I think there was another A-10 that got shot down around the same time as the Strike Eagle - I'm not counting either of those aircraft as casualties in "Operation Top Gun 2 For Real," which is why the mud ties with Iran for this specific op.)
But at this point counting all total, yes, the Iranian air defenses have destroyed more coalition aircraft than either the Iranian soil or our Kuwaiti allies. They are still well behind were Iraq was at this point in Desert Storm, which was considered a successful air campaign. They are also, from what I can tell, well behind the Ukrainian air defenses at an equivalent point in this time of the war.
If you want to argue that the US has not achieved "risk free operations over Iran" I would agree with you. If you are arguing that we do not have permanent air superiority over all of Iran, you might be right. But if you're citing a successful mission as evidence that the US does not have the ability to carry out missions without prohibitive interference from the Iranians, then...I don't think that makes sense.
We can also look at conflicts where the air war went well for the US and see that losses continued to occur, even when the US was able to conduct a bombing campaign essentially at will. I already mentioned Iraq as a comparative, but note that the US lost aircraft over Kosovo (traditionally seen as a successful use of air power, although I think that might be overblown), and even over Japan after dropping the first atomic bomb, for instance). And if it's true that the Mudhen was tagged by a MANPADS, then consider any definition of air superiority that is "remove all risk of getting hit by a MANPADS" is ~an impossible bar, it's practically impossible to completely sanitize an operating theater of the risk of shoulder-fired missiles.
What I would say is that I think it is more probable than not that B-52s have performed operations with gravity bombs against Iranian targets during this operation.
I don't disagree with this...
Your claim is that because I defined air superiority over Ukraine as Russian planes and helicopters constantly being in Ukrainian airspace, therefore a single mission with US planes in Iranian airspace resulting in the downing over 5+ manned aircraft demonstrates "localized air superiority"?
You think this is a contradiction? Uh, okay. Well that's enough of that.
This is all incorrect, or at least very sloppy. It was a single operation but it was not a single mission in the sense that it was not a single CSAR mission; there were at least three (one to recover the pilot, one to recover the WSO, one to recover the team that went to recover the WSO) and each one of those single missions involved multiple airframes.
Similarly, 1 manned aircraft was "downed" by Iranian air defenses during this operation. Three or four were abandoned on the ground and destroyed in US airstrikes.
Finally, I provided you with other evidence that US aircraft were over Iranian airspace in other options, dropping mines and JDAMs. I don't know that that is enough to establish that US aircraft are over Iranian soil "constantly" any more than pictures of Russian birds are but it does suggest that they are over parts of Iranian soil consistently.
I mean – you wanted video footage, you got video footage? Either way, I think it demonstrates localized air superiority (if we grant that air superiority includes superiority over ground assets and not just the enemy air force; see my digression above!) that they were able to do it and succeed in their mission, yes.
I think it would be better to use the real definition of air superiority, but you've been avoiding that. I'd be happy to find another working definition we can agree on. Or for you to present a historical analogue (including in Ukraine) where air superiority has been achieved in a war with another comparable power that shows the present operations of the US in an unflattering light (you've mentioned the Russian war in Ukraine but the Russians lost aircraft constantly in the first month of the war and even Hostomel, which I honestly think was very impressive and almost worked, still resulted in more Russian manned aircraft losses to air defenses than this rescue operation).
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