Iranian AA didn't show itself adept at denying anything.
Ambushes happened when operator doesn't expect hit, not in target area.
I never said Iranian AA would be able to deny airspace from the Americans, but what they can do is extract a high price for American air power to operate in that region.
And Iranian AA can exact a high price because unlike the rest of the war, where they have the problem of having short ranged passive sensors and weapons trying to defend a vast airspace against cunning attackers, in the case of a island assault, the Iranians will know exactly where American tac air needs to come to provide air support for the ground invasion and can pre-position to lay in wait.
I.e. it's quite possible to have armed overwatch of the narrow strait, with DEAD CAP loitering behind. Yes, at current pace, maybe that'll cost a few MALE drones, it's inconsequential. And it's a certain stretch too, because one of the effects of landings will be small drone ops all over the place.
I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of achieving DEAD against a totally passive SAM system that is also very small and designed for concealment, especially in the ME climate.
There are interviews where Apache pilots shared first hand accounts of how easy and effectively insurgents have been able to evade modern sensors. An example that really stuck with me was one pilot saying how he watched in amazement at how an insurgent literally disappeared from his thermals by jumping into a pre-prepared shallow depression and pulling a rug over it. Had he not seen the guy jump in, he would never have suspected there was someone hiding there.
Given the size, it’s completely feasible for Iran to basically pull this same trick with their IR loitering SAMs. All that needs to stick out on the surface is the thermal camera turret to scan for targets, which would be camouflaged and have killflash applied to the lenses. Good luck trying to spot that from 30k feet.
This won't prevent heavy drone logistics, but does Iran actually have those at scale?
A certain superpower can give them that ability basically overnight should it wish it.
This is general problem. Iran made solid preparations in most cases, but continuing disastrous failure of their AD to perform makes any positive assessment of any direct engagement very risky.
Iranian AD performance has been unfairly judged against performance they were never intended to deliver.
It now seems clear that Iranian leadership has never had any delusions about its ability to mount a conventional air denial campaign against the Americans. That is why they showed little interest in acquiring high end ‘proper’ SAMs from Russia or China when they had the chance. They judged those systems as too expensive to purchase in sufficient quantities to achieve critical mass needed to effectively defence their vast territories. And piecemeal purchases of such systems would have provided minimal effective defences and most likely just resulted in a huge amount of their budget getting taken out in the opening strikes of the war.
Instead they just focused on making their assets hard to find and hit even when opfor had uncontested control of the skies, and instead focused on doing ambush attacks to try and extract a price for said enemy air superiority.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, as evidenced by Iranian ability to continue to hit targets across the region at scale despite all the American and Israeli bombings.
If Iran’s inability to mount a conventional defence of its skies was indeed as disastrous as you suggest, then they would be hurting far more in terms of degraded ability to hit back.
Iranian resistance is asymmetric, and without significant external technical help (which still fails to materialize), it's moot.
Does it look like the Iranians are loosing this fight?
