It was possible in 1960s:
View attachment 181258
Mach 4+
Up to 90,000 altitude
3000 miles range
Was used in surveillance back then
I’m not saying Iran should have built a B-2 bomber or some extragvant large bomber. I am saying they should have focused on a single drone program that had the capability of dropping a small amount of PGMs on HVTs (air defenses, radars, fuel depots at air bases, etc) to help make the BM force a force multiplier.
Iran’s attack vector is very 1D today. Missiles. No AirPower. No true drone threat. No true Navy threat.
We had a couple of users from the old forum well versed in this field and said that there were retired former engineers who worked on US/European aeronautical systems that live in Iran and weren’t even being contacted by the government.
The reason was simple: Iran didn’t believe in air power and didn’t believe it cutting edge systems.
Instead we got MALE drone after MALE drone after MALE. We have 4 different predator drone designs! For what purpose? Why do we need all these different sub sonic drones that are useless against Israel or U.S.? Why did they spend useless dollars trying to reverse engineer the F-5 for 25 years?! For what purpose?
The problem with Iran’s philosophy is it got so obsessed with low cost designs, and quantity vs quality that at the time of war it became a liability for large scale use against a high tech adversary.
Cost conscious warfare has its place. But there is a reason China spends 200B+ on its military and attempts to achieve cutting edge arms rather than just building millions of missiles and $20K drones. It has the industrial capacity to build 50x whatever Iran can build in missile production, if it wanted to. This is a country that builds 4 destroyers at once in a single shipyard.
But obviously China realizes missile power and quantity over quality of weapons may be enough to fight India or Japan, but it’s not enough for its true enemy: U.S.