The real air supremacy story
Legacy media is doing what it does best – spread misinformation and confusion – in regard to Friday’s downing of a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle in western Iran.
J.R. Dunn | April 4, 2026
Legacy media is doing what it does best -- spread misinformation and confusion -- in regard to Friday’s downing of a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle in western Iran. According to the usual suspects, this means that America has lost “air supremacy” and marks the moment when the tide turns completely in Iran’s favor and, sweeping all before them, enables them to achieve absolute victory by Sunday. Monday at the latest.
In truth, air supremacy (sometimes called “air dominance”) has nothing to do with anti-aircraft fire or the losses that it can incur. The USAF considers air supremacy to be the highest level of air superiority, when air assets can operate without meaningful opposition from enemy air forces. What this means is that the enemy will choose not to confront your air assets at all and will instead run like the wind, as has currently occurred in Iran. (With air superiority, while enemy aviation may attack, they can be easily dealt with and chased back where they came from.)
This does not mean that the enemy is totally helpless. If they possess anti-aircraft cannon and missiles, as the Iranians do, they can shoot down attacking aircraft, as we saw on Friday. But what does this have to do with air supremacy? Absolutely nothing. There is no way that flak (as the Germans called it) can dispute air dominance by a superior air force. In late 1944, when the U.S. achieved air superiority over Hitler’s Luftwaffe (apart from a handful of Me-262 jets), German flak was still taking down hundreds of Allied aircraft. In response, the USAAF assigned several wings of heavy bombers to attack the flak sites themselves, which they did with considerable success. But at no point did the German anti-aircraft guns, though powerful and expertly handled, come anywhere near to overcoming Allied air dominance. (Neither did those Me-262s.)
Will we see further U.S. aircraft shot down? It’s possible, even likely. The downing of the F-15E will temper the cockiness of pilots -- endemic in the military air community -- and assure that missions are planned and carried out with more care and thoroughness than might otherwise have been the case. It will also assure some very bad days for Iranian anti-aircraft personnel. But any implication that the mullahs can recover the initiative in the air war is nonsense, despite what Heather or Troy want you to believe.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/the_real_air_supremacy_story.html
