Probably because their air defenses were too busy getting shot to shit.

There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.

Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.

It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.

I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.

▲

bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's unclear what happened here exactly.

It really isn't. A huge portion of Iran's air defenses are designed for road-mobility and pop-up attacks instead of long-term point defense, encompassing hundreds of launchers total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Islam...

Military strategists long warned that air campaigns flying over South Iran would have to contend with passively-guided SAMs and MANPADS on their way to Tehran. There are hundreds of road-accessible caves in the Zagros range that cannot be inspected via satellite. They inherently present a risk to overflights unless they are occupied on the ground first; it's common knowledge why Kohgiluyeh and Fars are so dangerous.

▲

ACCount37 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Considered that this is the first jet shot down in the entire war? "High mobility SAMs" alone completely fails to explain it.

They had high mobility SAMs for the entire war, with nothing to show for it. Something else must have happened there.

	▲	bigyabai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not the first jet hit, and definitely not the first aircraft downed. The F-35 incident was widely suspected to be a Qaem 118 missile, which fits the bill for road mobile multispectral SAM perfectly. More than a dozen drones were downed too, and even the rescue helicopters are evading air defenses according to CENTCOM. > They had high mobility SAMs for the entire war, with nothing to show for it. This is certainly something to show for it. Iran's air defenses are not like Israel's or Qatar's, they don't have the money or security to build expensive anti-ballistic layers for air defense. These smaller, road-mobile systems are intended to exploit an overextending enemy, and for that purpose they're apparently working quite well.