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Comment by johnsmith1840 | Hacker News Reader

So none of them lost on ground in Iran.

No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.

Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.

This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.

The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.

There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.

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> So none of them lost on ground in Iran.

Do we really need to play these semantic games?

An F-35 was confirmed successfully targeted and hit by Iranian Air Defenses.

The pilot was confirmed (by the DoW) to have been injured.

The plane in question seems to have been able to make its way back to friendly territory.

Every other detail about this incident is cloaked in fog of war with Vietnam-era narrative stealth technology and semantic evasive maneuvering. Since it didn't crash in enemy territory the Americans claim it wasn't 'downed' by the enemy. But did the F-35 actually land? like on its own wheels on an actual runway or was it a 'hard landing' (i.e. crash) as NPR's sources claim. Did the pilot eject? What is his condition? What is the condition of the airframe?

>No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.

Again if one was, would we every know? Would we be told? The f-35 incident has been broadly emblematic of this entire war. Lot of bluster and downplaying and covering up losses. Its like Russia in the Ukraine War; Frequently having to check with Iranian sources to corroborate claims made by the Americans. Whether it is with satellite imagery, or on the true status of the Hormuz or control of Iranian airspace.

https://www.twz.com/air/usaf-f-35-makes-emergency-landing-af...

https://x.com/gbrumfiel/status/2034972525222838351

US lost more planes to friendly fire and accidents than the enemy.

We've killed more senior leadership than total US deaths in the war.

Iran has not killed a single pilot or sailor.

That's a generational ass whooping.

The triumphant US have succeeded in reversing the pre-War Iranian offer to give up HEU and the pre-War state of the Strait being open to traffic.

They have also very possibly succeeded in upending the strength of petro dollar that has been bouying up US economic dominance for much of the past 50 years.

USA! FTW!

Talk about muddled goals.

Somehow Iran is still in control of the strait. This sounds a lot like Russia declaring victory after three days in Ukraine.

Funnily that's all utterly irrelevant.

Like Vietnam showed, it doesn't matter how much better numbers than the enemy you have, because kill counts don't win wars.

Iran is still the one closer to achieving its objectives (survival for the regime), because they don't need to do much for that to happen. Apply pressure to the Gulf states and global energy and fertiliser markets and at some point, the US will cave. The American public will not tolerate high gas and everything related prices for long, and especially with an election coming up, there will be significant pressure.

US/Israel's war goals are basically unachievable. They can't enforce regime change on a regime backed by millions of fanatical loyal men, with defence and terrain on their side. They can certainly try a land invasion, but that would take years and cost a lot in casualties.

So, hypothetical.

If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen?

Think 20 years down the line what that would do.

> If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen?

Israel would go in and bomb the country to shit, since Israel is much more brutal than USA is.

The Iranian regime still has the millions of fanatically loyal men, so they'll still retain control, probably. Just over a much poorer country.

> US lost more planes to friendly fire and accidents than the enemy

Truly a force to be reckoned with.

The US blockade of the strait does not affect Iran's ability to blockade the strait.

And the latter hurts the US (and the rest of the world) way more that the blockade by the US hurts Iran.

No amount of F35s will change that. Iran has no reason to try to attack US military vessels or aircraft.

Surprisingly (actually unsurprisingly) relevant: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

Especially the part about who blinks first ...

You are missing the point above - the F35 has enabled complete air dominance over Iran, and ability to perform any operation with impunity over Iran's land.

Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhere in Iran.

Eventually, defense capabilities against drones may catch up and change the equation, but this is all research at this point.

Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.

If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.

No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.

I think the accepted term is "air supremacy" which is a completely different set of words (and meaning) from "complete dominance"

"Air supremacy" would be dominance of the air such that enemy cannot effectively interfere. "Air superiority" is the lesser level (enemy interference is not prohibitive).

At least in NATO lingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy

I can't tell if this comment chain is a factual disagreement (ability to interference) or a linguistic one (supremacy vs superiority).

Kinda both, really.

Air supremacy (using your useful NATO definition) is not stopping Iran from flying drones and missiles. I don't know if that therefore contradicts the US/Israeli forces having Air Supremacy, or if Air Supremacy itself is an outdated term because it doesn't allow for the kind of drone bombardment we see now.

Either way, it's not "complete dominance" which is where we started from ;)

Maybe re-read the last sentence of parent which my reply was to?

Your presumably Ai-generated reply missed that, unsurprisingly, because you probably just copypasta'd parent and my reply in there?

P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.

> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.

It's meaningless now.

If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would be nothing the Iranians would be able to do about it.

That's not the case because of the currently scattered nature of US leadership, but it is a possible contingency that the Iranian government has to take into account. There's a reason they're not actively targeting US warships in the region.

Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.

If you ignore Japan and Germany, this is absolutely true.

Japan was nuked, different thing.

Germany was not bombed into submission. Millions of Russian soldiers invaded their capital city and forced them to surrender.

Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?

Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.

Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.

As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.

Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.

That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.

But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.

So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.

But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.

So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.

You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).

My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.

Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?

Japan and Germany.

Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.

I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.

If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.

Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.

The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).

Japan?

sure, if you think kicking off a nuclear war is a viable option ;)

If US destroys Iran it will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 100 years. Iran will be in shambles for 50 years.

If Iran surrenders US will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 30 years. Iran will be in shambles for 10 years.

The former would cause a worldwide depression but the clear winner of that is the US by a very large margin. If Iran wants to destroy itself and its neighbors US would be happy with the untold billions that would flow into the country and its energy infra investments in venezuela. All the wealth of middle east would leave and not be reinvested as now it's risky to invest in the ME.

Iran has the choice of a deal US likes or to make the middle east a wasteland for Israel to dominate for generations while US grows to a power that is hard to comprehend.

The only thing that has to happen for US to win is not surrender to a country with no military whose only threat they can make is to harm everyone else in the world but the US.

It is almost like you think it is 1965.

Orange man seems to think so.

You completely oversell Iran capability, I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China.

Iran never invested in such technology, they put all their money in drones and ballistic missiles which were extremely effective, we are a month in and the strait is still close.

Their strategy was never to try to sink us ships, it was disruption in the region to extend the conflict which was again very successful.

Pretty sure Iran didn't plan on being obliterated.

Why did they have a navy if this was their only plan?

Also blocking the straight is funny because the only people it hurts is everyone in the world but the US.

I'm sure Americans are finding it funny to pay for $3+ a gallon. The entire economy suffers from it.

$3 a gallon is less than a dollar per liter. Do you live in Saudi Arabia or a gulf state?

Here are historical real (inflation adjusted) gas prices for the US. You can decide how terrible this is:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1UWwx

I can’t decide if the economy has bifurcated or if these inflation stats are totally bogus.

Diesel is almost $7/gallon here. All the stuff we buy (food, services, electronics) are up 30-100% since the beginning of last year, but federal inflation stats claim 3%.

Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices.

Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Texas to CA, there would be less bifurcation.

In terms of food being bifurcated, that too is happening, but to a smaller degree.

Basically the entire West coast is suffering from high inflation.

For the national 3% average to hold, for the low end of my range (30%) to hold on the west coast, the rest of the country would have to be suffering from deflation.

There is not 30% inflation in any region. Not even 15%.

I think you have to go back to the civil war era and greenback inflation to find numbers like that in any region.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Whose the largest oil exporter in the world?

US about to be scroogemcducking in oil money

> I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China

How many F-35s went down due to the Russian and Chinese anti-air systems in Venezuela and Iran?

They did not have any.

> If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done.

Ukraine is doing something. It has to, because this is what it faces from Russia.

The blockade is like a nuclear bomb detonated on all countries. 30% of World's oil supply is at risk. Not to mention critical elements needed for semiconductor production. Even the US is suffering passively because of this. Only saving grace for US is to restore navigation in the straits. Quicker it does it the quicker we can stop hell that'll be unleashed on the World. You really don't want to be responsible for 30% of Earth starving and dying of hunger because critical fertilizers never reached the masses for food production.

The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.

If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/20/us-spending-on...

To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.

I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.

Sounds like mass famine in the global South would be a feature to them, not a bug.

IIRC Israeli special forces knocked out almost all of Iran's advanced radar systems last summer right before the nuclear program strikes so to say the F35 dominated is somewhat disingenuous.

So we should expect the Strait of Hormuz to be open tomorrow, then?

You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence.

Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.

Nothing in the world would have stopped iran launching cheap drones at civilian ships. Article is trying to say F35 is a problem when clearly it's not.

Don't be silly. There's a third option, neither side gives up for a while.

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