https://no01.substack.com/p/an-f-35-just-got-damaged-over-iran
No1
Mar 20, 2026

CENTCOM says an F-35 was “damaged” flying over Iranian airspace. Emergency landing. Pilot stable. Moving on.

The footage shows a plume of flame trailing the jet after the strike. Doesn’t look “damaged” to me… More like a Viking funeral with extra steps.

First thing that came to my mind was: did we run out of standoff munitions already? Why do we need to fly our expensive “invisible” plane over Iranian airspace and drop bombs on it like it’s 1944? Did our precision strike doctrine just die and No1 told me about it??

The world’s most advanced aircraft! Costing trillions across its lifetime. Decades in development… Proof of Western technological supremacy… Tooling over a country that’s been under sanctions since before most of its pilots were born.

And they hit it.

“desert nomads in sandals” hit it. (and yes, I’m being deeply sarcastic - I have genuine respect for the Iranian people, who’ve shown extraordinary resilience and remarkable progress even under some of the harshest of sanctions ever imposed.)

As explained by Mike Mihajlovic: Serbia, 1999. The trick is almost embarrassingly simple: stay quiet. No radar, no emissions, nothing for the stealth systems to detect. Passive sensors and thermal cameras only. Wait for the target to enter your optimal range - Mike says that’s 14 to 18 kilometres - then power up, acquire, lock, fire, and go back to standby. The whole active window is counted in seconds. The missile is already in the air before the F-35 knows it’s being targeted.

The stealth works against radar. I doubt they used radar for the initial tracking.

The entire logic of fifth-generation air power - the raison d’être of the F-35, the reason allies spent billions on it, the reason the procurement deck always opened with “undetectable” - rested on one simple assumption. That stealth works. Iran just blew a giant hole into that assumption where you could fly… well… an F-35 through.

CENTCOM, of course, insists it landed safely on a regional base. These are the same people who spent three weeks swearing the Vincennes incident was self-defence, who told us Blackhawk Down was a “successful raid”, who classified the exact circumstances of every embarrassing loss until the paperwork aged out. If that plane went down on Iranian soil, we won’t hear about it for another twenty years - and by then, we will be wondering where it came from.

The F-35 was supposed to define air superiority for the next fifty years.

It may have just done exactly that.

Just not for the west.