Iran spent 47 years building an air force it believed could defend its skies. In just 24 hours, that illusion collapsed. Coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes destroyed aircraft on the ground, crippled air defenses, and left Iran’s pilots unable to even take off. Aging jets, sanctions, and overwhelming airpower sealed its fate. The footage tells the story of an air force erased almost overnight. But how did Iran’s defenses fail so completely?
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00:00Iran spent 47 years building its air force.
00:03It didn't build a very good force, but it built something that it thought would at least allow it to
00:07maintain small pockets of air superiority over its own territory.
00:11But that didn't happen.
00:12In just 24 hours, the US wiped out Iran's entire air force.
00:16It's gone. Evaporated.
00:18A shock and awe campaign has made even the prospect of an Iranian pilot taken to the sky suicidal.
00:24And there isn't a thing that Iran can do about any of it.
00:27The footage reveals everything.
00:30Shared by Max Afterburner, a video released by US Central Command shows just one of the multitude of strikes that
00:35the US conducted against Iran's aging fleet of aircraft.
00:38Sitting sullen and alone on an airfield, the Iranian jet is destroyed in a heartbeat.
00:44And this has been happening over and over across Iran.
00:46Every airbase that the US strikes results in Iranian airframes going up in flames.
00:51And it's gotten to the point where Iran basically has no options in the skies.
00:55It can't send aircraft to fight against America's overwhelming force.
00:58The few that it had that might be able to put up a fight are gone.
01:02And what is left are the dregs of an air force that is decades behind the curve.
01:06We'll explain why in just a few minutes.
01:08But before we do, Afterburner explains what is happening to Iran's air force right now.
01:13They've completely dismantled Iran's air force, hitting bases like Tabriz.
01:17Afterburner explains.
01:18Looks like destroying even more F-4 Phantoms, Su-22 attack aircraft, ground attack aircraft mainly are being vaporized, F
01:25-14 Tomcats, F-5 Tigers, and drone sights before anything can turn a wheel.
01:30Literally nothing is getting airborne at this point.
01:33Aero Time adds that Israeli's air force has confirmed that it destroyed an Iranian F-4 along with an F
01:39-5 at the Tabriz base as each of the aircraft prepared for takeoff.
01:42So even the Iranian pilots who were willing to attempt the suicide mission of taking on the U.S. and
01:47Israel didn't get very far.
01:49Both the U.S. and Israel have also been targeting the support facilities that enable airframes to take off.
01:54Satellite images revealed destroyed storage bunkers at the Conorak base and a shattered radar system at Zahadar.
02:01These weren't random strikes.
02:03The U.S. and Israel coordinated to cripple Iranian air power before it ever had a chance to make itself
02:08known.
02:09You'll have already noticed that the aircraft that the U.S. is taking out would be considered old by any
02:13modern military standards.
02:14But these airframes are the best that Iran has.
02:17And they're being systematically destroyed by an American and Israeli bombing campaign that has already achieved the most important goal
02:23for the joint Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion achieve complete air superiority.
02:29That's according to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Kane, who has confirmed that the U
02:34.S. followed Israel's lead when it came to striking Iran just a few days ago, and that the scale of
02:39these strikes has devastated Iran's air force.
02:42The U.S. strikes have resulted in the establishment of local air superiority.
02:46This air superiority will not only enhance the protection of our forces, but also allow them to continue the work
02:51over Iran, Kane declares.
02:54For that to have happened, the U.S. not only had to have ruined Iran's airframes, but also destroyed the
02:58country's air defenses.
03:00That's a little hint.
03:01The U.S. has already done both.
03:03We'll be getting to Iran's air defense situation a little later.
03:06On the aircraft front, the U.S. bombardments of Iran's air bases have been so effective that not a single
03:11one of Iran's pilots has taken off.
03:14Iran hasn't attempted any manned sorties during the four-day war so far, and frankly, any pilot who does try
03:19to take to the skies now will be engaging in a suicide mission,
03:23given both the age of their aircraft and the sheer level of air superiority that the U.S. has attained.
03:28Iranian fighter pilots also know that it's suicidal to go up against an F-15 Strike Eagle, F-16, F
03:34-18, or F-35, Afterburner explains.
03:37America's bombing campaign has been so successful over a 24-hour period that what was once a fleet of about
03:42400 Iranian aircraft has been whittled down to about 200.
03:46In other words, what little aerial threat that Iran could have posed in the sky has been halved before a
03:51single one of its airframes could get off the ground.
03:53And it seems likely that the U.S. has focused most of its fire on the aircraft that could have
03:58presented something resembling a threat,
04:00which leaves Iran with an air force that is little more than a collection of poorly maintained airframes that were
04:05built decades ago.
04:06This is what aerial domination looks like, and the U.S. planned it all well in advance.
04:11That's according to Business Insider, which reveals that the U.S. and Israel did far more than fling missiles and
04:16bombs at Iran from its fighter jets during the opening hours of the war.
04:19Both were much smarter than that.
04:21They knew that for as little threat as Iran's fighter jets posed, flying in without being prepared would still make
04:27their superior aircraft vulnerable.
04:28The outlet reports on more comments made by Cain, who said that the U.S. campaign against Iran, which began
04:34on February 28th,
04:35was kicked off with the layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran's ability to see, communicate and
04:41respond.
04:42What this translates to is that the U.S. and Israel launched cyber attacks and even space commands that crippled
04:47Iran's air force hours before the first U.S. fighter jets took off in the direction of Tehran.
04:52Cain says that the initial non-kinetic U.S. approach targeted everything from Iran's command and control facilities,
04:58through to its ballistic missile sites and intelligence infrastructure, in an operation that was designed to daze and confuse them.
05:04It worked.
05:05Before Iran even knew what was happening, up to half of its airframes were destroyed, and the air defenses that
05:10were supposed to protect them,
05:11along with other key military nodes, had completely failed to take down even a single American or Israeli jet.
05:17U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that the U.S.
05:20went proactively in a defensive way with its initial round of strikes, and that Iran has to get ready because
05:25the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.
05:28That's the last thing that Iran's regime wants to hear.
05:31As it sifts through the wreckage of its destroyed fighter jets and other aircraft,
05:35the prospect of more coming when Iran is basically defenseless in the skies is terrifying.
05:39Iran will be wondering how all of this happened.
05:42How did its carefully laid plans for defeating the U.S. fall apart so quickly?
05:46There are two answers to that question, one covering Iran's air defenses,
05:50and the other that dives into the detail about the state of that air force that the country had built.
05:54We'll come to the second answer a little later in the video,
05:56but on the air defense front, there's no way to sugarcoat things for Iran.
06:00Its entire air defense network has utterly failed to do anything about the combined U.S. and Israeli strikes,
06:06and that's why dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Iran's airframes are just craters in the ground right now.
06:12U.S. President Donald Trump has already declared that Iran's air defenses are gone,
06:16along with its navy, air force, and most of its leadership structure.
06:19Trump also claims that Iran's missile capability is being diminished,
06:23which presumably also accounts for missiles that would have been fired by the country's air defense systems.
06:28We've had a very powerful impact.
06:30Virtually everything they had has been knocked out now.
06:32Their missile count is going down, Trump said on March 3rd.
06:36Dan Kane has emphasized this point when discussing the U.S. and its air superiority,
06:40noting that Iran's air defenses have been degraded to the point
06:43where American pilots can fly with near impunity over Iranian territory.
06:47We're starting to see this in the nature of the U.S. airframes that are flying into Iran right now.
06:51For instance, Asia Times reports that the U.S. has started sending B-1 Lancer bombers into Iran to conduct
06:57airstrikes,
06:58rather than the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers that America sent earlier in the conflict.
07:02This indicates a high level of confidence that Iran's long-range surface-to-air missile, SAM, systems,
07:07are no longer a primary threat to non-stealth aircraft in certain corridors, the outlet reports.
07:12Adding that the U.S. and Israel are now focused on destroying as many of Iran's transporter-erector launchers
07:17to take out even more of its air defense capabilities.
07:20And naturally, weaker air defenses create more opportunities for American bombers and fighter jets to do their business,
07:26which will almost inevitably lead to the loss of yet more Iranian airframes,
07:30beyond those that the U.S. destroyed in just 24 hours.
07:33The question has to be asked,
07:35how did Iran's air defenses fail so catastrophically in the first place?
07:39We'll get to that in a second, but before we do, you are watching The Military Show.
07:43If you haven't subscribed yet, now is the perfect time to hit that button.
07:48Back to Iran's failed air defenses.
07:50We've already discussed how the U.S. launched a non-kinetic campaign as a precursor to its early strikes,
07:55which likely took many of Iran's air defenses offline.
07:58However, Army Technology reveals that there are more reasons why those defenses utterly failed to do the one thing they
08:04were designed to do.
08:04The outlet reports on the aggressive electromagnetic spectrum operations that the U.S. and Israel deployed,
08:10which would have shut down Iranian air defense radars so they couldn't see airframes and projectiles coming.
08:15However, this approach was combined with a more kinetic approach that saw the U.S. and Israel divide their responsibilities.
08:21Specifically, the U.S. took charge of strikes against Iran's air defenses, control centers,
08:26and much of the country's military and logistics infrastructure.
08:28Israel went after ballistic missile launchers and Iran's leadership.
08:32This was made a lot easier on the air defense front because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC,
08:38had retained about 100 air defense systems, but likely didn't have many of the missiles needed to use those systems
08:44to their fullest.
08:45Another of Iran's air defense problems comes from the fact that it's deployed copycat systems throughout much of its network.
08:51Yes, Iran has some Russian and Chinese air defense systems,
08:54but most of what it has are reverse-engineered versions of those systems, Army Technology reports.
08:59For instance, Iran's Bavar 373 is just a cheap knockoff of the S-300 systems that Ukraine has been destroying
09:06in massive quantities in its war with Russia.
09:08Iran's Yazar is just a reverse-engineered version of China's HQ-7,
09:13and something similar can be said of Iran's Zubin system.
09:15What we see here is that Iran tried to go up against two of the world's strongest air forces
09:20with an air defense network filled with garbage copies of other countries' tech.
09:24That went about as well as you would expect.
09:26Right now, Afterburner says, the U.S. has achieved air superiority in Iran due to these many air defense failures.
09:32Now America's goal has to switch to keep that superiority,
09:35because there are certain surface-to-air missile systems that are still alive and well, Afterburner claims.
09:40They'll pop out from a hiding spot and then launch a missile,
09:42so the U.S. still has to take care in the skies.
09:45Iran's air defenses are crippled, but they're not quite dead.
09:48Still, they were useless enough to not be able to do a thing about America's 24-hour shock and awe
09:52campaign
09:53unleashed against the Iranian air force.
09:55And neither could Iran's airframes, which brings us back to the second reason why all of this happened to Iran.
10:00The simple fact is that Iran's air force was too weak to stack up to what the U.S. brought
10:05to the table from the start.
10:06This was Mike Tyson delivering a haymaker to an old man with no arm,
10:10and you'll have seen that in the age of the airframes that we talked about right at the beginning.
10:13Aero time goes into more detail, noting that Iran's beleaguered air force had zero chance right from the start.
10:20The very best of its fighter jets include a fleet of 65 F-4s, 41 F-14s, 35 F-5s,
10:27and an assortment of Soviet-era Russian platforms, such as the Su-24 and MiG-29.
10:33Add a few tankers and special mission aircraft into the mix, and that's all Iran had.
10:37The country also has no airborne early warning fleet, which, when combined with the utter failure of its air defenses,
10:43means that the Mike Tyson haymaker ended up being a sucker punch delivered right to the back of Iran's head.
10:48An ancient air force isn't a good start when you're going up against the U.S.
10:52But an old air force that isn't even being maintained is an even bigger problem.
10:56There are roughly 400 or so aging aircraft that have been crippled by sanctions,
11:00and they lack modern capabilities, after Berner says.
11:02At least there were 400 aircraft in Iran's air force.
11:06There are a lot fewer now, but that sums it up because even if Iran's pilots were foolish enough
11:10to try to take to the skies in their older fighter jets,
11:13they wouldn't even be able to trust those airframes to fulfill the limited capabilities that they're supposed to have.
11:18There were plenty of hints that this would be the case long before the U.S. unleashed its firestorm against
11:23Iran's air force.
11:24Back in May 2022, Iran International reported that the volume of sanctions leveled against Iran
11:30was behind a spate of air force accidents that had resulted in several deaths.
11:33A pair of Iran's pilots had died at Iran's Desfoul air base in June 2021,
11:38both due to sudden glitches in their ejector seats that happened before they even got the aircraft off the ground.
11:44Retired pilot Brigadier General Kiyumars Haideriyan,
11:47who trained in the U.S. and flew for the Iranian air force both before and after the 1979 revolution
11:52in the country,
11:53made it clear why this happened.
11:55Accidents happen everywhere, and no one in the world has managed to decrease the number of accidents to zero,
12:00but if the equipment is complete, it's natural that the number of accidents will be fewer, he said.
12:04In other words, ejector seats explode on their own when you don't have the parts to maintain them.
12:09By June 2025, the national interest was calling Iran's air force a mess,
12:14as it noted that Iran had gone to extreme lengths to keep a handful of its ancient aircraft airworthy,
12:19but even those weren't ever going to be effective against a modern air force.
12:22Again, sanctions were to blame, as Iran has to deal with the one-two punch of having an old fleet
12:27and the complete inability to maintain the majority of the aircraft that were in that fleet.
12:31So the fight was always going to play out in America's favor.
12:34The reasons why Iran's pilots aren't flying is that they don't have the equipment.
12:38They didn't have it even before the bombs and missiles flew,
12:41and they'll never have it again now that the few airframes that might have been viable for Iran have been
12:45destroyed.
12:45Even before the US struck, the national interest claimed that only 50-60% of Iran's 400 airframes were even
12:52flyable,
12:53with the rest being set aside for the spare parts that the sanctions prevent Iran from buying elsewhere.
12:58This was an unfair fight right from the start.
13:00But that's what happens when you have a fleet composed of predominantly old Western airframes
13:05and a regime that hates the West.
13:06Rod meet Iran's back, built by the very regime that is now crumbling.
13:10Talk about biting the hand that feeds.
13:13With its air force practically gone, Iran only has a handful of aerial options left,
13:17and almost all of them are unmanned.
13:19Which means that Iran has not only lost millions of dollars of airframes to the US strikes,
13:23but it also has to deal with the sunk cost of training a bunch of pilots who aren't ever going
13:27to fly.
13:29Still, Iran's drones are doing more than its airframes ever did.
13:31Al Jazeera reports that hundreds of Iran's drones have targeted bases and military nodes in several Gulf countries,
13:38including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
13:42The Russian news agency TASS carries comments by a supposed unmanned aircraft expert named Dmitry Kuziakin,
13:48who claims that,
13:56That feels like a stretch.
13:59Granted, the US spends a lot more than the cost of building a drone on air defense missiles like those
14:03used in its Patriot systems.
14:05But if we're talking economy,
14:07combining existing sanctions with the US and Israel wrecking the Iranian means of drone production with their expensive missiles,
14:12suggests that Iran's drone-reliance strategy may have a shorter shelf life than the Russian analyst suggests.
14:18Oh, and it's not like the US doesn't have drones of its own.
14:21If Iran's regime somehow manages to survive the blitz that it's absorbing right now,
14:25the US can easily rush one-way and interceptor drones into manufacturing to engage in a tip-for-tap battle
14:31if needed.
14:31The reality that Iran has to face is that time is running out on its defense.
14:35All it has left are drones and depleting supplies of missiles,
14:39as its air force, along with every other facet of the asymmetrical strategy intended to launch against the US, lies
14:45in ruins.
14:45Iran is still trying to maintain some sort of threat, of course.
14:49As fighter jets burn on the tarmac,
14:51Iran was vowing to strike European countries if they dared join the war on America's side.
14:56But the US, and likely Europe, know that these threats are starting to ring increasingly hollow.
15:01Iran is in no position to start throwing them around.
15:03And if Trump is to be believed,
15:05whatever off-ramps that the US might have been offering a few days ago have been withdrawn.
15:09They want to talk, Trump claimed of Iran.
15:12I said, too late.
15:13But having said that,
15:14Trump is scheduled to speak with the remnants of Iran's regime on March 8th,
15:18reportedly at the request of the regime itself.
15:20A white flag will likely be present.
15:22Whether the US chooses to accept Iran's surrender,
15:25and whether Iran's regime is collectively pig-headed enough to believe
15:28that it will still be able to bargain for anything,
15:31will only be seen over the weekend.
15:32In the meantime, Iran will continue to make threats.
15:35But with what force?
15:37Certainly not an air force, that's for sure.
15:39With half its fleet gone and the rest unlikely to be flyable,
15:42Iran has surrendered its skies to the US and Israel.
15:44And all it took was 24 hours.
15:47Iran can't even console itself with the thought that the US unleashed the one missile
15:51that changed air combat forever against its jets.
15:53How could it?
15:54Iran's fighters never got off the ground.
15:57Still, that missile is worth learning about.
15:59So if you want to find out more about something that the US could have unleashed on Iran,
16:02and may yet do,
16:03check out our video.
16:04And if you enjoyed this video,
16:06make sure you subscribe to The Military Show
16:08as we track every development in the Iran war.
16:10And thank you for watching.
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