[energy123]

There's been zero sorties over Iran in the last two months because the war aims in the current round of fighting are narrowly scoped to Hormuz. That's not a commentary on the capability of the F-35.

You mention MANPADs as if it is a significant vulnerability, but there's been only one or two shootdowns of jets by Iran during the previous two rounds of fighting. I encourage you to look at the number of jets shot down in the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War to understand how insane this is.

One way attack drones are not a solution in any conflict with significant strategic depth and against an opponent with air superiority. You cannot protect your industrial base if you sacrifice air superiority due to the opponent possessing F-35s. Which means you cannot pump the volumes required to achieve the kind of attentional effects we see in Russia-Ukraine. This is the reason why it's analytically flawed to bundle air parity wars with air superiority wars in analysis.

[cloudie78]

“Narrowly scoped to Hormuz” yeah because anything more than that apparently is too great of a scope for the US military. Check the latest reports on stocks in Washington Post.

What air superiority? In the Middle East? With what, let me guess F-35? With 25% operational readiness and 13h of maintenance for every 1h of flight? With gym plates in the nose instead of actual radars?

And don’t quote Vietnam as some sort of a success story, especially when the US lost that one fighting against farmers in flip flops armed with AK-47, so of course nothing got shot down.

[budman1]

US lost a lot of aircraft to the soviet provided air defense network. SAM's were all over the country.