What most countries don't have is, for lack of a better term, the resolve Iran has shown. Venezuela could have built drones and resisted just the same, but it's internally divided enough that it was possible to strike a deal with an inside faction and have a coup from within.
They also have a lot of leverage points in their geography, in the fact that the US is at a historical low point in its military capabilities.
US and Israel strategy seems to be to completely destruct Iran's economy, but the problem is that this is a game where they can also shoot back.
It's meant to avoid conflict altogether, say with China and Taiwan.
That doesn't work when your opponents pray for death and see martyrdom as victory.
This is genuinely how Shia extremists think. They have nothing to lose and will sacrifice everything and everyone for their cause. They don't care about Iran or Iranians or prosperity of the nation.
How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million?
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
IADs not integrated by marginal operators =/= stealth radar didn't work aka, physics of stealth detection is basic, and parsimonious likelihood is US gave up strategic intangibles for VZ and IR side shows. Even if IADs wasn't integrated it would still be worthwhile for PRC to send out stealth radars knowing they'd get glassed because it's rounding error investment to get near F35s without luneburg. At the end of the day, these radars are networked/uplink to beidou3 for a reason, their primary function for PRC is to serve as cheap telemetry gathering nodes that gather strategic US ephemera like stealth profiles, ew, order of battle and beamed it back to CETC.
Lots of smugness about the supposed irrationality of the adversaries considering that backdrop.
But the US has not acted rationally. It hasn't since January 2021.
