To win the war another time, I guess ? To be fair, he told us we would get "tired of winning".

On a more serious note : could it be that iranian air defense is being supplemented by an ally ? Someone further east ?

Or, simply, that they kept some reserve to keep the war long, and play with the American customer's never ?

If your enemy loudly proclaims for decades that their strategy is to initially destroy AA capability then roam at will through clear airspace, presumably it doesn't take much imagination to plan to not reveal some proportion of your AA capability initially?

Iran has been preparing for this for decades. I wouldn't be surprised if they held a hidden reserve for air defense and let the USAF 'get comfortable' before redeploying

There was a ("propaganda") video by the Iran Forces some weeks ago showing some underground facilites: If even half of it is true shown there, then they have large capacities.

Even if they don't, US war planners now have to factor the possibility of hidden AA defenses in their risk calculus moving forward. So no matter what, a win for Iran to some degree

Why make up unsubstantiated claims about Chinese support, when it is known that Russia supports Iran with military hardware?

Contrary to popular belief, Iran's most important arms supplier has been China, and not Russia, in the last decade. To preserve its ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia, Russia has sometimes compromised arm shipments to Iran. Historically too, Russia has worked with France and Britain to undermine Iran, through the Shah.

Russia's pretty busy with its own war.

But probably itching to do to the US what the US did to them in Ukraine.

(And doing so is likely to reduce US aid to Ukraine, as a bonus to them. Ukraine's certainly not likely to get Tomahawks and Patriots right now.)

What US aid? Trump's been stonewalling it for them just fine.

I said "did to", not "is currently doing to".

And what better way to support that by making some money selling weapons, especially if it gives you a chance to expand your manufacturing base due to increased demand?

To be honest, I was thinking as much about Russia as about China, but I fumbled my geography by over-easting Moscow. Sorry.

Because arms manufacturers need to sell a lie, "lack of stealth makes everything vulnerable", when it may have applied to symmetric conventional warfare 30 years ago. These days, peer adversaries have multi-modal IRST/EO systems in addition to AESA that make radar-obsessing "stealth" completely lose the plot on other risks and considerations. The F-35 damaged in Iran is just one example of this.

Iran claimed today that they have a new homegrown air defense system in use. I saw another report about a new Chinese system deployed in Iran that was used to hit the F35.

Who knows what’s true, but it’s 100% clear that the administration is lying to us and maybe even to themselves. We lost multiple aircraft yesterday. That F15 would likely only be used in situations where we believe we have air superiority. The fact that it was shot down is a big fuck up and suggests the people in charge don’t actually know what they’re up against.