The F-35—Iran Kills the Myth

The Empire may be discovering, in real time, that a determined adversary with less money but more adaptive pressure can still puncture the myth.

When I started looking into the discussion around Iran bringing down an F-35, I had the feeling that this story was becoming bigger in the serious sense, the same way certain events stop being merely military incidents and start forcing you toward more uncomfortable questions: what exactly the U.S. has been selling the world for the last three decades, what the empire really means when it speaks about “technological superiority,” and whether some of the most expensive weapons on earth are not just machines of war, but symbols of a worldview that is now beginning to crack.

The F-35 was never just a fighter jet; Not in the American imagination and certainly not in the imagination of the countries that bought into the U.S. security architecture and were told, implicitly and explicitly, that this aircraft represented the future of war itself. The F-35 was a doctrine. It was a philosophy. It was a flying declaration that the United States could remain invisible while seeing everything, strike first while staying untouchable, and dominate the battlefield not only through firepower, but through information supremacy, stealth, and total situational awareness. So when you hear that Iran has brought one down, the importance is what happens when a symbol like that stops looking invulnerable.

To understand why this matters, we have to understand what Washington built into this program materially and psychologically. This is the most expensive weapons program in human history. The United States poured around $442 billion into its development and procurement, and the projected lifetime cost of sustaining and operating it reaches roughly $1.7 trillion. Those are the numbers of a strategic faith. They tell you that America thought it was producing the architecture of future dominance, one platform capable of serving the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines, and of preserving U.S. military primacy deep into the twenty-first century.

And that is why the F-35 is not mainly about speed in the old sense, nor about dogfights in the sky, the way people imagine air combat from films or older wars. Its real value lies in stealth, sensors, and the ability to function as a node inside a much larger network of warfare. It is designed to operate in environments where older aircraft would struggle to survive. It is designed to evade detection. It is designed to see the battlefield more clearly than the enemy. And it is designed to feed that information across a wider American war machine in real time. In other words, it embodies an entire theory of war: if you can see everything while remaining unseen, then you dictate the terms of battle before the other side even knows which battle it is in.

But here is where the problem starts, and this is the part that interests me most.

Once your doctrine is built on invisibility, detectability becomes more than a technical problem. It becomes a strategic wound. Once your prestige is built on invulnerability, then even one successful engagement can do damage that goes far beyond the battlefield itself. And that is why I think even the possibility that Iran detected, tracked, disrupted, and destroyed an F-35 matters so much, because if stealth begins to look less absolute than advertised, then the platform’s aura begins to erode. And once the aura erodes, allies start asking questions, adversaries start recalculating, and the psychological premium attached to American protection starts to decline.

For years, Washington has lived inside the assumption that technological superiority can solve the political problem of resistance. Not completely, perhaps, but enough to keep the battlefield tilted in its favor. Enough to make the cost of defiance unbearable for everyone else. Enough to persuade clients in the Gulf, in East Asia, and elsewhere that American systems remain not only expensive, but decisive. So if a sanctioned state like Iran, operating under pressure and without the industrial scale of the United States, manages to find ways to contest such a platform, then it tells the world that the cost curve of military power may be shifting. It tells the world that adaptation, asymmetry, and learning can sometimes challenge systems that were marketed as untouchable. And it tells the world that prestige may be more fragile than price tags suggest.

And now we come to the China question, which is interesting precisely because it is the kind of question that tempts people into bad analysis.

The Chinese account “Laohu Talks World” posted a Persian-subtitled tutorial on March 14 explaining in broad terms how Iran could use lower-cost and distributed methods to counter an F-35. Coincidentally (or not), five days later, Iran has struck one. That is obviously the kind of sequence that generates online excitement. It generates theories. It generates the seductive idea that somewhere in China, an engineer uploads a tutorial, Iran watches it, and history changes five days later. But that is exactly the kind of neat storyline one has to be careful with, because reality is usually more serious, more layered, and less cinematic than the internet wants it to be.

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A Chinese video by “Laohu Talks World” is going viral online, breaking down how Iran could try to target the F-35 Lightning II using existing equipment by simplifying the problem step by step. The speaker argues that air combat isn’t realistic given Iran’s aging fleet, including

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What makes the story worth taking seriously is not the childish fantasy version of it, but the profile of the person involved. The account was described as belonging to someone who studied at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, a defense-oriented institution that Washington itself designated as an entity of concern. The speaker in the transcript also makes the fair observation that this did not sound like a random civilian talking nonsense online. The tutorial appeared to come from someone with clear technical competence, someone who understood not only the F-35 in abstract terms but also the realities of Iranian air-defense conditions, the role of lower-cost sensors, the value of distributed systems, and the logic of forcing a stealth aircraft into environments where its advantages can be narrowed. That does not prove state direction. It does not prove formal Chinese involvement. But it does suggest that the person speaking was not a fool.

And this is where I think the more serious interpretation begins.

Is it possible that technically trained Chinese analysts, engineers, or former defense researchers sympathetic to Iran are sharing knowledge online? Of course it is. Is it possible that Iranian officers, engineers, or decentralized units saw some of this material and found parts of it useful, interesting, or confirmatory? Also yes. We live in a world where military knowledge does not remain frozen inside state vaults the way it once did. Ideas circulate. Tutorials circulate. Open-source analysis circulates. Technical people watch each other. States learn from each other. And in war, even public knowledge can become part of the wider battlefield.

But here is the point where I become very firm, because I think it matters politically and intellectually.

None of this justifies taking the credit away from Iran.

In fact, I would go further. The rush to attribute every serious anti-American success to Russia or China reveals something ugly about the imperial mindset itself. We have seen this pattern too many times. If Yemen acts, it must be “Iran-backed.” If Iran succeeds, it must be “China-assisted” or “Russia-enabled.” The non-Western actor is almost never allowed full agency. He is never allowed to be the principal author of his own resistance. Why? Because the imperial imagination still cannot quite accept that sanctioned, demonized, non-Western societies can innovate, build, adapt, and fight seriously on their own terms. It cannot quite accept that military knowledge may exist outside the empire and its approved satellites. So it keeps reaching for hidden tutors, hidden puppeteers, hidden authors. It reaches anything, really, except the possibility that Iran may have earned this capability through years of siege, investment, and strategic learning.

And that is why I think the distinction between assistance and agency is so important here.

Of course, outside assistance exists in the world. Of course, states cooperate. Of course, knowledge moves across borders. But the first and decisive credit belongs where the risk, sacrifice, and accumulated development actually are. It belongs to Iranian engineers. Iranian scientists. Iranian officers. Iranian planners. And to the military-industrial ecosystem Iran built under sanctions precisely because it understood, long before many others did, that a country targeted by the West cannot outsource its survival.

An online tutorial, however sharp, does not create an air-defense network out of thin air. It does not build missiles. It does not build sensors. It does not decentralize command structures. It does not create the culture of adaptation that comes only from years of preparing for precisely this kind of confrontation. At most, it can sharpen thinking that already exists. It can suggest methods. It can confirm lines of reasoning. It can stimulate units already trained to act. But only a country that has done the hard work beforehand can turn such knowledge into a real battlefield effect. And that country, in this case, is Iran.

So perhaps the better question is not, “Did Chinese experts help Iran?” Perhaps the better question is what it means when anti-imperial military knowledge is now diffusing so widely that even public discourse begins to puncture the prestige of systems once treated as unreachable. Because that, to me, is the larger shift hiding inside this story. The empire is losing its monopoly on mystique. It is losing its monopoly on the assumption that advanced war can be understood only in Washington, Tel Aviv, or inside NATO planning rooms. And once that monopoly begins to weaken, a much bigger transformation becomes visible: engineers, analysts, and militaries outside the Western core are not merely enduring the empire anymore; they are studying it, dissecting it, and increasingly contesting it.

This is also why the F-35 story is about perception as much as capability. Modern war is never only material. It is psychological. It is reputational. It is financial. It is civilizational. When a sanctioned state successfully contests the empire’s signature aircraft, the message travels far beyond the immediate battle. It reaches every country that has been told for decades that resistance is futile. It reaches every society that has been told that American supremacy is too advanced to challenge. It reaches every leadership pressured into accommodation, surrender, or managed obedience. And once those actors begin to think differently—once they begin to believe that the myth can be punctured—the balance of world politics begins to shift in ways that no Pentagon press release can easily reverse.

So no, I do not think the real story here is that some Chinese video “won the war” for Iran. That would be just another myth, and I am not interested in replacing one mythology with another. I think the real story is more important than that. The empire built a flying theology of invisibility. It invested staggering sums into it. It sold it to allies as the future of dominance. And now it may be discovering, in real time, that a determined adversary with less money but more adaptive pressure can still puncture the myth.

And when that happens, what falls is not only an aircraft.

The myth falls with it.

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—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.