Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
No, we actually train to be tortured and held if caught, but everyone knows the risks before you take off. Captured marines or soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re clear eyed about it.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
I didn’t downvote you, but a terse “well actually it’s prisoner of war” doesn’t really add to the conversation. Imagine doing that in person, you’d annoy everyone around you.
If you explained why it’s distinct and what that might mean for downed crew I think it wouldn’t have been down voted
Prisoner exchanges are a pretty strong motivator for any group, even hardline ones. If the Taliban was up for exchanges I think the IRGC is pretty likely to want to keep prisoners for that too.
I would note ISIS put out some high res, professionally edited video of burning a (Jordanian?) pilot to death while inside a cage. Quite savage, but the propaganda effect is more profound than about anything else I've seen.
There is no if. We've already done that. So yes, we are no better than them. So answer the question. Why would Iran follow conventions it's enemy that started a war of aggression is not following?
First: count the responses to my thread of people suggesting Iran cannot/should not be held to the Geneva convention: 4,5 (I'm counting the Hegseth comment as 0.5)
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
Especially after the double-tap on civilians and first responders the US just did on that bridge. Or the threat for no quarters from the secretary of defense. Or the threats to destroy critical civilian infrastructure for water or power.
The crew of the IRIS Dena were warned twice by the US to abandon ship according to a report from one of the sailor’s father. They refused.
Not sure if it’s possible to treat enemies better than that. And I doubt the Iranians will treat a US pilot well. Look at how they treat their own citizens.
It's pretty normal for planes to go down in a war. They've flown 5000+ sorties, it's a pretty huge accomplishment this is the first one lost over Iran. Especially considering all of the last decade's speculation about how tough attacking Iran would be.
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
The article says this is the first jet that was shot down by enemy fire this war, but this confuses me. Was the F35 that was downed a while back friendly fire or something? Are F35s not fighter jets?
You're talking about a single "dash" on the frame before it goes all white. First question, if it were a laser, would be what exactly are you seeing there? A laser from the side is invisible, there'd need to be dust there, or the air would need to have turned into plasma. I don't think either makes that much sense. Second question/problem would be… it would have failed/be malfunctioning because —
— pretty much all AA munition works by exploding in close proximity to the target and showering it in shrapnel. So this might even have "helped" the missle/shell against malfunction in its fuse. And considering that this is designed to work like that, and it's likely not the greatest quality work on the Iranian side, it's also possible that the thing is already exploding and just ejected some piece of intentional shrapnel (or unintentionally itself) early, ahead of the actual detonation.
Or the Iranians edited that "dash" into that one frame, it's not exactly like it's a reputable source and it's in their interest to confuse things. Maybe they want the US to believe that the countermeasures are malfunctioning and helping their attacks, so they turn it off…
I just looked it up. Those are turboprop (slower) but have a high ceiling of 50k feet. So Iran did have something better than stingers left. Maybe they just got lucky this time.
I didn't downvote, but your post sounds like you're implying some kind of tomfoolery, deception, or other hidden reasons. There are very likely none, it just takes time to adapt to a specific enemy, probability slowly increases while you get more attempts, and then after some time (t) the first shootdown is "properly" successful. And note how this was preceded by that half-successful shootdown where the plane made an emergency landing. And they shot down drones.
You sound like they roll an antiaircraft cannon out of the hangar and immediately successfully down a plane. That's not how that works. The AA was probably there from the beginning, just not successful.
This is the dumbest, most pointless military conflict in American history. There is nothing plausible to win, but we can conceivably lose everything. A pyric victory is among the most favorable outcomes. We are led by corrupt imbeciles. I can only hope the outcome includes regime change for the U.S.
Large, sophisticated, expensive war assets like fighters and carriers are brilliant against literally cavemen like we've been going around fighting lately, but are quite useless against enemies with even slight technological progress. If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
It reminds me of a Age of Empires campaign I played at a LAN from a long while back, where the game went on for 20 hours and ended in a stalemate between an atomic age player and a very primitive age player. The atomic player had total control of the map, they were carpet bombing the entire thing with nuclear weapons. But they could only create them so fast while the primitive player was running around on horses, just surviving enough to prevent the other player from winning. The only reason the game ended was because I tripped over the power cord to one of the computers.
Weapons are designed with an opponent in mind, and guarded against the expected threat models from that opponent. Everything breaks down when the opponent does not what you want them to.
It's only "high tech" to the aforementioned cavemen. To everyone else it's a 707 you can't even get spare tires for any more, equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard. I mean it has a mechanical waveguide for crying out loud.
When the first-tier hostile leadership structure was eliminated in the first day of the war, and only after a month do the surviving enemies finally manage to damage a plane so severely that it can't return to a friendly base to land, is "quite useless" an adequate and accurate description of the technology used to prosecute that war?
It's useful in saving the pilot's life. With less advanced tecnologies, more pilots would have been shoot down. It's useful in targeted attacks, but they have proved themself uneffective (at least for now) as the new leadership is alined with the objective of the replaced one. It's close to useless when it comes to making the war cost-effective, which start being a relevant metric when the conflict start lasting too long. Of course the US has a bigger economy, so all the news about cheaper systems damaging or destroying quite expensive ones may still lead to a US victory, but a costly one for sure
When you decapitate a well organised military, all you achieve is installing a new enemy you know little about you can’t predict their actions and that now know they are fighting for their own survival.
Whether you have specific leadership or not doesn't matter much to (a) having to adapt to the enemy and learn what works, and (b) probability just doing its thing, more chances and so on, and (c) US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
Do they train for a “no quarter“ conflict where injured or surrendered combatants are killed?
No, we actually train to be tortured and held if caught, but everyone knows the risks before you take off. Captured marines or soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re clear eyed about it.
And lied to about the reasons of the war.
Now they even lie about it being a war, while they claim they have already won the war, that isn’t a war.
Every war since Korea, we’re very used to this.
... But conducted by the self proclaimed Department of War.
Hegseth is not in charge of the Iranian military.
But he did publicly declare his intention to commit war crimes.
In case anyone else doubted this, I will save you the time to look it up. Yup, it's sadly true.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/hegseth-no-quarter-interna...
Prisoner of war, not hostage.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
It’s a “well, actually” and counter to the HN guidelines
There's a significant difference between a hostage and a prisoner of war, and in this context that distinction seems highly relevant.
Only for someone breaking the guideline of "Assume good faith".
I didn’t downvote you, but a terse “well actually it’s prisoner of war” doesn’t really add to the conversation. Imagine doing that in person, you’d annoy everyone around you. If you explained why it’s distinct and what that might mean for downed crew I think it wouldn’t have been down voted
...but we aren't at war, according to the President and his secretary of Defense (war).
what a fucking mess.
That is assuming Iran holds itself to the Geneva conventions, which ... seems like an extremely risky bet to make.
We are expecting Iran to honour an International Convention when US and Israel have squarely shat on every convention's face, so to speak.
The person you’re replying to is very explicitly not expecting them to honor the International Convention…
Prisoner exchanges are a pretty strong motivator for any group, even hardline ones. If the Taliban was up for exchanges I think the IRGC is pretty likely to want to keep prisoners for that too.
Does the US have any prisoners to exchange? Wouldn't we need boots-on-the-ground to capture enemy combatants?
I would note ISIS put out some high res, professionally edited video of burning a (Jordanian?) pilot to death while inside a cage. Quite savage, but the propaganda effect is more profound than about anything else I've seen.
They're going back to the stone age, remember? The Geneva convention wasn't around then AFAICR.
What has Iran done to show it would not uphold Geneva conventions?
Hegseth explicitly ordered to give the enemy “no quarter”.
The US doesn't hold itself to the conventions, why should the country it started a war of aggression with?
If you throw away your principles because you are fighting an unprincipled enemy, you are no better than them.
It’s such a shock to the system to realise that “unprincipled enemy” referenced here is the US.
There is no if. We've already done that. So yes, we are no better than them. So answer the question. Why would Iran follow conventions it's enemy that started a war of aggression is not following?
Becaus two wrongs don't make right. If they are smart they will stick to the convention.
Why wouldn't they?
First: count the responses to my thread of people suggesting Iran cannot/should not be held to the Geneva convention: 4,5 (I'm counting the Hegseth comment as 0.5)
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
Especially after the double-tap on civilians and first responders the US just did on that bridge. Or the threat for no quarters from the secretary of defense. Or the threats to destroy critical civilian infrastructure for water or power.
Or Hegseth running his mouth about exactly this issue...
I hope the aviators are OK, and also hope whoever they were bombing are also OK.
I do wonder if Iran finds them first, will they treat them better than the US treated survivors of the ship sunk by a US torpedo in the Indiana Ocean?
The crew of the IRIS Dena were warned twice by the US to abandon ship according to a report from one of the sailor’s father. They refused.
Not sure if it’s possible to treat enemies better than that. And I doubt the Iranians will treat a US pilot well. Look at how they treat their own citizens.
You left out 'unarmed'.
"Flawless victory" is becoming sillier every day.
It's called Operation Epic Fuckup for a reason.
Yep. It's just a lie.
the last time US wanted some country to reset back to Stone Age the same thing happened. turn out those aircrafts are not undefeatable at all.
It's pretty normal for planes to go down in a war. They've flown 5000+ sorties, it's a pretty huge accomplishment this is the first one lost over Iran. Especially considering all of the last decade's speculation about how tough attacking Iran would be.
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
apparently, Iran is claiming that the search and rescue helicopter has also been hit by a projectile.
The article says this is the first jet that was shot down by enemy fire this war, but this confuses me. Was the F35 that was downed a while back friendly fire or something? Are F35s not fighter jets?
The F35 was able to make an emergency landing in a gulf country. This one actually went down in Iran.
I thought the IR video of that showed it made the missile detonate before the missile hit, maybe shrapnel hit the jet
Then again idk the jet exhaust becomes more significant not sure if afterburner or damage
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1ry6ma2/f35_...
That's how anti-aircraft missiles always work.
In that video it seems like something shoots at the missile is what I'm saying from the F35
Someone said maybe a form of DIRCM
You're talking about a single "dash" on the frame before it goes all white. First question, if it were a laser, would be what exactly are you seeing there? A laser from the side is invisible, there'd need to be dust there, or the air would need to have turned into plasma. I don't think either makes that much sense. Second question/problem would be… it would have failed/be malfunctioning because —
— pretty much all AA munition works by exploding in close proximity to the target and showering it in shrapnel. So this might even have "helped" the missle/shell against malfunction in its fuse. And considering that this is designed to work like that, and it's likely not the greatest quality work on the Iranian side, it's also possible that the thing is already exploding and just ejected some piece of intentional shrapnel (or unintentionally itself) early, ahead of the actual detonation.
Or the Iranians edited that "dash" into that one frame, it's not exactly like it's a reputable source and it's in their interest to confuse things. Maybe they want the US to believe that the countermeasures are malfunctioning and helping their attacks, so they turn it off…
Yeah I was also thinking the the dash might be the missile itself
The single exhaust plume does become multiple on the F35 suggesting damage
We have always been at war with Eastasia
That one was damaged and managed to land safely, iirc. Depends on your definition of "shot down" I guess, but the pilot didn't eject, so...
Why didn't Iran use its capability to take down enemy jets for an entire month?
Downvoters, care to explain?
Seriously, it's been sitting on this for entire month and now, all of a sudden, rolled out antiaircraft defense? What's going on?
~15/16 MQ-9 Reapers have been shot down inside Iran. Not jets but still combat(strike and reconnaissance) aircraft.
I just looked it up. Those are turboprop (slower) but have a high ceiling of 50k feet. So Iran did have something better than stingers left. Maybe they just got lucky this time.
I didn't downvote, but your post sounds like you're implying some kind of tomfoolery, deception, or other hidden reasons. There are very likely none, it just takes time to adapt to a specific enemy, probability slowly increases while you get more attempts, and then after some time (t) the first shootdown is "properly" successful. And note how this was preceded by that half-successful shootdown where the plane made an emergency landing. And they shot down drones.
You sound like they roll an antiaircraft cannon out of the hangar and immediately successfully down a plane. That's not how that works. The AA was probably there from the beginning, just not successful.
Because it obviously doesn't have the capability. Similar to how the US has no capability to "win" from the air only.
Maybe it was friendly fire but I did not see that in the news yet.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626347
previous conversation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626347
Seems relevant now: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/18/424169549...
This is the dumbest, most pointless military conflict in American history. There is nothing plausible to win, but we can conceivably lose everything. A pyric victory is among the most favorable outcomes. We are led by corrupt imbeciles. I can only hope the outcome includes regime change for the U.S.
I thought we blew up all their missiles and Navy? Back to the stone ages? Did they shoot it down with rocks? (Eye roll) /s
Fred Flintstone style!
Large, sophisticated, expensive war assets like fighters and carriers are brilliant against literally cavemen like we've been going around fighting lately, but are quite useless against enemies with even slight technological progress. If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
It’s mind boggling how wrong that statement manages to be in only two sentences. It’s like every word manages to be wrong multiple times
Hats off to you sir
OP sentences have issues, but I understood what they meant.
It reminds me of a Age of Empires campaign I played at a LAN from a long while back, where the game went on for 20 hours and ended in a stalemate between an atomic age player and a very primitive age player. The atomic player had total control of the map, they were carpet bombing the entire thing with nuclear weapons. But they could only create them so fast while the primitive player was running around on horses, just surviving enough to prevent the other player from winning. The only reason the game ended was because I tripped over the power cord to one of the computers.
To me, that's what modern warfare looks like.
Ah, you mean Empire Earth. I loved that game, it had a great soundtrack.
Sounds like it indeed. The balance was... interesting, a single tank could not win against a dozen cavemen.
Weapons are designed with an opponent in mind, and guarded against the expected threat models from that opponent. Everything breaks down when the opponent does not what you want them to.
Right right Empire Earth! My memory is a little fuzzy it must have been 20 years ago.
I don't remember Age of Empires having an atomic age?
If I had to guess I think they meant empire earth instead.
It was probably Rise of Nations or one of the other similar games.
> If this conflict continues we're going to see a lot of US assets in fragments.
Yep, Iran recently destroyed a high tech radar plane ("AWACS") at a base in Saudi Arabia: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-war-attack-us-base-s...
It's only "high tech" to the aforementioned cavemen. To everyone else it's a 707 you can't even get spare tires for any more, equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard. I mean it has a mechanical waveguide for crying out loud.
> equipped with some truly obsolete technology aboard.
So I guess the US won't have any issues replacing it at a cheaper cost (as far as I understood that one cost $500 million, give or take).
The prototype E-7 cost $2 billion. It's a 737 with some radios.
"On 22 March 2019, the UK Defence Secretary announced a $1.98 billion contract to purchase five Boeing E-7 Wedgetails"
Prototype price isn't really that meaningful
(Also it's a 767 not a 737, that was the E-3 I think.)
You must be thinking of a different boondoggle, the E-767, which is the obsolete radar package from the E-3 bolted to a 767. The E-7 is a 737.
Ah right, it's a bit confusing between the bunch of these.
Nonetheless the price tag was only $400M/ea E-7 for the UK in 2019 (usual later price shenanigans not included)
When the first-tier hostile leadership structure was eliminated in the first day of the war, and only after a month do the surviving enemies finally manage to damage a plane so severely that it can't return to a friendly base to land, is "quite useless" an adequate and accurate description of the technology used to prosecute that war?
It's useful in saving the pilot's life. With less advanced tecnologies, more pilots would have been shoot down. It's useful in targeted attacks, but they have proved themself uneffective (at least for now) as the new leadership is alined with the objective of the replaced one. It's close to useless when it comes to making the war cost-effective, which start being a relevant metric when the conflict start lasting too long. Of course the US has a bigger economy, so all the news about cheaper systems damaging or destroying quite expensive ones may still lead to a US victory, but a costly one for sure
As the Soviet Union made us learn, you don’t need a big military victory to make your enemy spend themselves into defeat.
When you decapitate a well organised military, all you achieve is installing a new enemy you know little about you can’t predict their actions and that now know they are fighting for their own survival.
Not the best place to be.
Americans seem to underestimate everyone else.
Whether you have specific leadership or not doesn't matter much to (a) having to adapt to the enemy and learn what works, and (b) probability just doing its thing, more chances and so on, and (c) US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
> US leadership descending the oceans of stupidity all the way to the Mariana trench.
And they voted for this not only once, but twice.
A month after the president claims total air superiority over Iran and complete destruction of their anti air capabilities.