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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

That’s what I was doing, because I don’t think assertions like “CENTCOM is blind” should just sit out there without evidence.

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I watched an interview with a retired British military guy who said that the radar destruction does complicate things, but the US still has the other AWACs, so there is still early warning and visibility, just complicates things and reduced range/more risk.

The E3 fleet is aging and difficult to keep airworthy. Of the 32 or so planes the US has, it sounds as though they struggle to keep the operational number above 16, and moving more to the gulf means they have to pull them from other theaters. In short, they simply don't have enough to provide coverage of all the areas they want them.

This was completely foreseeable and is a situation that appears to have arisen entirely due to vest interests stifling procurement of a suitable replacement in order to spruik up business for their own competing, but unfinished offering. Prior to the war in Iran, total cancellation of the procurement of E7's had been announced.

https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/01/e-3-awacs-loss-saudi-a...

It seems like demoralization propaganda.

Then go get some! It adds nothing but spam when you to take time from your busy day to tell us what to do

Usually it’s on the person posting assertions to justify them, and looks like they’ve edited in a NYT link since then.

that's true about assertions, but blindly saying "Fact check!" is still an attempt to offload a wished-for effort onto other people while simultaneously sowing seeds of discernment and distrust into the topic.

What happens when someone yells "Fact check!" at absolutely true things constantly? It erodes confidence. That's why "Person yelling fact check" isn't a typical or generalized role in normal discourse.

Yes, it's good to correct the incorrect. How does one do that typically? A rebuttal.

A supposed 'deferment to experts' on the internet is worth next to nothing, just a way to paint yourself a bit more altruistically while producing FUD.

I asked if anyone could rebut it. Normally I'd do the work myself, but I'm not very up to speed on this stuff and I wasn't in a good place to do a bunch of research, and someone who's been following it more closely could probably do a better job pretty quickly. The comment smelled like a possible propaganda account to me, making what I thought were some pretty wild claims, and the commenters that were there were piling on because tribalism, so I was trying to act like an antibody in HN's immune system against nonsense, and flag it. Sorry if it sounded like a demand, it was probably too terse.

But look at the account's comment history since registration a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bijowo1676

I lit up at sorry (so rare), then, had to chuckle at "but..."

Haha the “but” wasn’t meant as an excuse for the terseness.

Am I wrong about the comment history? Might be biased.

And it's worse than spam when someone is posting incorrect things and people are downvoting people questioning it. As another user has already posted, the Iron Dome does not use the same radar they are talking about and is not "blind"

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