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jjk166 3 hours ago

You can't compare time, you need to compare sorties. There were only 5900 F15 sorties during the gulf war. It's not clear how many of the 8000 combat sorties sorties flown so far in the Iran war are with F15s, but it's almost certainly several thousand. Overall during the gulf war coalition forces suffered 52 fixed wing aircraft lost in combat over approximately 116,000 combat sorties.

Given Iran ought to have far better SAM systems than Iraq 35 years ago, this comparison doesn't seem in any way alarming.

For a more direct comparison, in the first 5 weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia flew approximately 7000 combat sorties and 22 fixed wing aircraft were shot down.

hajile 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Look at the super-precise strike on the E-3 sentry that we have pictures of. We know at least one other was hit.

If Iran can do this with AWACS, they can do even more with the hundreds of fighter jets in Israeli and US bases (it's much easier to cover up the destruction of an F-15 or F-35). Once this war ends, I think we'll see that most of the aircraft kills are going to be on the ground.