It turns out that despite self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s macho claims to the contrary, Iran is not lying down and dying under the overwhelming and merciless assault of the U.S. war machine. In fact, as highlighted by Simplicius in an overnight posting, Iran has been waging a successful campaign against U.S. air defenses that is unprecedented–unprecedented in that the U.S. is on the receiving end of it. In particular, Iran has been targeting deployed TPY-2 radars destroying at least four of them deployed throughout the region.
This matters because the TPY-2 is the primary radar for the THAAD system but it also works with the Patriot system. Only 13 of them have been built at a reported cost of a half-billion to a billion dollars each. The TPY-2 “is a long-range, very high-altitude active digital antenna array surveillance radar designed to add a tier to existing missile and air defence systems. It has a range of up to 3,000 kilometres (1,600 nmi; 1,900 mi), depending on target/mode,” reports Wikipedia.
The destruction of these radars has been verified by major news media reporting, and even pro-U.S. OSINT (open source intelligence) accounts on social media have been forced to acknowledge these Iranian successes. “The shock of the outcome cannot be understated: Iran is literally blinding the U.S. in the region,” Simplicius writes. “And following that, it is launching its most advanced hypersonic Khorramshahr-4—also known as the Kheybar—ballistic missiles at Israel, which are now impervious to interdiction. They are said to release upwards of 80 submunitions in a tight pattern.”
This of course raises questions about how the Iranians are able to do such precise targeting and post-strike assessment, despite the heavy U.S.-Israeli bombardment? Are the Chinese and Russians helping out?