Israel claims to have destroyed two Iranian F-14s on the ground

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dubber09 said:
Thing is each side is accusing the other of being lunatics. And following your logic you'd prefer a country where gov is installed by their foreign enemy.
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I would prefer to live where I have the most freedom.

History has proven that people who have more freedom are more happy.

There isn’t freedom in Iran.

I don’t support any regime change stuff by another country, never have.

I don’t let the media install bad thinking in my head.
 
I’d like to get back to discussion on tactical operations between IRAF and IDAF.

@Astro14 I remember you mentioning in past discussions that Iran had probably been able to reverse engineer the Phoenix.

How big of a threat would one of Iran’s F-14s be with a functioning homegrown version of the phoenix vs. one of Israel’s F-35s or F-16s?

I know the Israelis’ avionics in those jets would be vastly superior. Would they be able to see and neutralize an Iranian F-14 long before it was able to fire a Phoenix?
 
john_pifer said:
I’d like to get back to discussion on tactical operations between IRAF and IDAF.

@Astro14 I remember you mentioning in past discussions that Iran had probably been able to reverse engineer the Phoenix.

How big of a threat would one of Iran’s F-14s be with a functioning homegrown version of the phoenix vs. one of Israel’s F-35s or F-16s?

I know the Israelis’ avionics in those jets would be vastly superior. Would they be able to see and neutralize an Iranian F-14 long before it was able to fire a Phoenix?
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Just a guess, but I'm thinking a Phoenix couldn't possibly get a lock on an F-35 without a Luneberg lens.
 
john_pifer said:
Again, that’s not going to happen.

If anyone, the Iranian people (who Bibi has said Israel has no beef with) will rise up and take control of their own destiny.
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I fear that'd lead to a long civil war, most recent example is Ukraine, gov was uprooted with foreign help, civil war for 8 years.
Country's citizens and country as a whole don't benefit from it.
 
dubber09 said:
...civil war for 8 years...
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With the right external investment and input - a civil war can last 80 or 800 years. And this one surely got good sponsorship, if we call it a civil war at all, and not the destabilization op that it is.

dubber09 said:
Country's citizens and country as a whole don't benefit from it.
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Yeah, about that...
Not becoming Russian by force, giving the local bully a bloody nose day in and day out, proving to the World that you can fight for what's yours, proving that the king has no clothes, keeping your country when it was set to no longer exist within a week, proving to a world that used to ignore you that you exist and that you matter - REALLY no benefit, whatsoever.
 
dubber09 said:
I fear that'd lead to a long civil war, most recent example is Ukraine, gov was uprooted with foreign help, civil war for 8 years.
Country's citizens and country as a whole don't benefit from it.
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Civil war might just be in the interest of the IDF.

As long as the country is destabilized (insert made up boogeyman acronyms) a superior power can take control via proxy factions and have their way behind the scenes.

"By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War" - Mossad
 
dubber09 said:
I tend to agree, if the statement further above claiming Iranians live to destroy Israel is true, then attack on Iran will make them more motivated.
As far as Benny, there is already dislike of him growing amongst Israelites and there was an attempt to get him out of PM seat. He knows, just like Zelensky, his only chance to avoid prosecution is to continue with war, may be he will cancel elections too.
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But do the Iranians live to destroy Israel, or is it mostly their leadership and hardcore prelates? I suspect it is the latter and Israel is acting with that in mind as part of a greater strategy. Outside of the extremes how truly popular is that leadership within Iran?
 
wings&wheels said:
...Outside of the extremes how truly popular is that leadership within Iran?
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It doesn't matter much. To this day, kids in ex-communist countries born in 2000 babble about how it was better under the regime that fell in 1989. And that's with the West actually supporting them and having never bombed them.
Once you get bombed, unity kicks in.

Iran's regime can fall tomorrow, whatever replaces it will have to show at least some token hostility to Israel on the frontend, even if they are pals on the backend.

Hate ingrained at the state level for two generations will need a generation just to get down to normal dislike.

And that's for the young ones. The ones past middle age will never get over it. For them the good times are the times when they could still run up 10 flights of stairs to meet their beloved, and everything from that era will have some glitter, and carry the whole baggage as a package

And baggage there is. The ones who fought with Iraq in the eighties remember how the West was looking at them being gassed and bombed and supported Saddam. The ones remembering the fifties remember electing Mossadegh and seeing him deposed with western helo. The ones remembering the Shah remember he was a western pal completely out of touch. And it goes on.
 
Folks - If you want to know more about “How” things get done, and “why” things are targeted, I recommend this bit of light reading. Joint Pub 3-30.

In particular, look at the “strategy to task” chain of III-1.

Granted, this is US doctrine, but we do Air Operations very well. The Israeli Doctrine, as well as NATO doctrine, are quite similar in determine commander’s intent, defining strategic objectives, then developing subordinate operational objectives, and then the tactical tasks that support those objectives, and the missions that execute those tactical tasks.

This was a mission. It had a tactical tasks that it was designed to carry out. That task supported an operational objective with a strategic goal.

https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp3_30.pdf
 
y_p_w said:
Just a guess, but I'm thinking a Phoenix couldn't possibly get a lock on an F-35 without a Luneberg lens.
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john_pifer said:
I’d like to get back to discussion on tactical operations between IRAF and IDAF.

@Astro14 I remember you mentioning in past discussions that Iran had probably been able to reverse engineer the Phoenix.

How big of a threat would one of Iran’s F-14s be with a functioning homegrown version of the phoenix vs. one of Israel’s F-35s or F-16s?

I know the Israelis’ avionics in those jets would be vastly superior. Would they be able to see and neutralize an Iranian F-14 long before it was able to fire a Phoenix?
Click to expand...
OK - let’s get back to the tactical discussion. At the root of this decision by the IAF was the capability posed by the F-14 against their forces, should they choose to act in Iran.

The F-4 (and Iran has many of them) is also a Mach 2 fighter. The IAF didn’t go after the F-4. It’s a 3rd generation airplane.

So, it is more than just speed that determines capability, and therefore, threat. The F-14 was used with great success in the Iran-Iraq war, dozens of confirmed kills.

The airplane is a peer to the F-15 in performance and that includes radar detection. The way the Iranians employed them previously, was to keep them airborne as long range detection and kill.

You don’t “Send them up” like the Battle of Britain when your air search radars are under threat, you put them up there, on station, getting refueled, and let them find, track, target and kill what they can. Your search radars may not survive the first day or two of a shooting war, so, you, Iran, won’t know they enemy is coming in order to “send them up.”

A key part of this employment tactic is the refueling. The Israelis knew it, that’s why they went after the tankers.

Even unrefueled, the F-14 has a long loiter time. It has a powerful radar (more powerful than the F15, and far more powerful than the F-16 before either of them got AESA) and carries long range air-air weapons.

A single F-14 can ruin your strike effectiveness by threatening to kill a couple of your F-16 bombers, or the F-15 escorts, or, and this is important, by forcing the F-35s into stealth mode, with a much smaller internal payload (about 1/4 of what it can carry externally).

Facing a 4th gen threat forces a change in tactics - more risk is present, so, you design more defense in depth, you adjust the strike package appropriately, so that you can counter that threat, but your strike package is carrying a much smaller “bomb” load in favor of Air-Air weapons in order to counter the Air-Air threat.

Stripping your enemy of its crown jewel of air defense makes any subsequent operations easier to plan and more effective in execution.

Stripping your enemy of its crown jewel* of air defense also makes a political/psychological impact.

Both matter, but make no mistake - the F-14 remains a formidable threat to any air operation, so, killing them on the ground makes sense.


*The F-14 was genuinely the crown jewel of the Shah’s military. It was bought when the Shah saw Russian MiG-25 “Foxbat” overfly Israel in the early 1970s. Israel’s F-4 were unable to catch them or to shoot at them, and the Russians overfly their country with impunity.

At the time, the F-14/AIM-54 was the only system able to threaten the Foxbat, so the Shah chose the F-14 over the F-15. After the Revolution, the Iranian Air Force used the airplane with great success against its Iraqi neighbors, who were flying 2nd and 3rd gen airplanes. The kill ratio was something on the order of 25:1. Not perfect, but I sure wouldn’t want to be an Iraqi MiG pilot against those odds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fighter_generations

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/b...mericas-stealth-jet-becomes-bomb-truck-207837
 
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