Iran doesn't have to shoot down a single jet to win this war. Just move military hardware into caves. Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target. Wait it out until American domestic pressure from perceived war crimes ends the war. They can't afford to fight a land war or garrison over the entire country.

The fact that Israel has leveled much of the 140 square miles of gaza over the past 3 years and still fails to remove Hamas from power. No chance against 636,372 square miles and 93 million people. Worse odds than Vietnam. There isn't even a defined victory condition.

They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.

Maybe they've been taking down jets the entire time and you've simply been lied to and the situation on the ground is different than what you believe.

CENTCOM tweeted that no shootdown occurred only for Iran to show the wreckage and one of the ejection seats. CENTCOM said Iran didn't shoot down the F-35, but it apparently crashed in Saudi Arabia and we sent out a Chinook to run search patterns to find it.

CENTCOM claimed a single Kuwait (ghost of Kuwait?) shot down three different F-15s by accident, but those planes were close enough to Iran that they could have been targeted by Iran (which seems more likely than the massive chain of mistakes required for the Kuwaiti shootdown to happen).

CENTCOM also only talks about US planes shot down and excludes Israeli F-15 that have been hit. CENTCOM also doesn't count all the very expensive drones that have been shot down, but their total value is at least a half-billion dollars.

Finally, CENTCOM is straight-up lying about air superiority. They claimed they'd switched to gravity bombs, but people instantly noticed that all the planes going up were using long-range JASSM stand-off missiles so they don't have to actually go very far inside Iran and can keep their planes in a safer section of the country. CENTCOM loaded up a B-52 with JDAMs and took a couple pictures, but all the pictures after that photo-op still show super-expensive JASSM (costing as much as $1.6M each).

If our planes never enter their airspace, there's nothing for them to shoot down. I'd note they've also shot down a couple of JASSM missiles which is interesting itself as the radar cross-section of a JASSM is believed to be pretty close to an F-35.

Iran is currently using bongo trucks with an IRST and a couple missiles that can even loiter in the air if there's no target. Being electro-optically guided means they are passive and the human element makes them a lot less likely to miss due to chaff.

These little trucks can hide ANYWHERE and because they aren't a massive multi-vehicle setup like a Patriot or S-300, they should be able to relocate often and quickly (they might even be able to stay mobile while in operation). This mobility combined, ability to hide as a normal truck, and completely passive sensors make them almost impossible to find and destroy.

Downvoters, care to explain?

Seriously, it's been sitting on this for entire month and now, all of a sudden, rolled out antiaircraft defense? What's going on?

Speculation.

1. Iran was retarded and didn't preemptively strike US staging who had local overmatch and first mover advantage. Nothing to do but weather hits, chip away at regional basing and wait until US+Israel operation tempo goes down. Can't sustain surge sorties forever, especially with regional logistics wrecked. US pilots tired now, on stims, making mistakes.

2. Iran not remain retarded, was hide and bide, waited for US to get complement, gathering data / building tactics to squeeze out surface-air without getting glassed. Regardless, Iranian capability seems much less degraded than claimed. Who knows how many of the 20k+ targets hit was basically just drawing down highend munition inventory, which now forces flying closer on lower end munitions.

At the end of the day, Iranian mosaic forces are chilling in underground bunkers waiting for US+co to make mistakes. Consider Iraq, a much smaller country by every metric ate 5x more sorties from more carriers and sustained regional air campaign and fell because they hedged on centralized IADs. Granted most Iranian hits are precision munitions (more efficient per sortie), but we simply should not expect Iran doctrine built on distributed survivability to be remotely defeated relative to effort expended.

Probably because their air defenses were too busy getting shot to shit.

There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.

Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.

It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.

I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.