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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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