I am not an expert, I am an enthusiast. However I know enough to question the claims with these points.
1) if the Iranians had a lock why did they not shoot? The Iranians have no qualms about shooting at Israel and there actions of the last couple years are more than enough for a war. So might as well shoot. But we know that didn’t make any kills despite taking losses themselves.
2) The claim is that the F35s dropped their weapons prematurely due to the threat. Did they? Because it seems they hit their targets. The whole point of air defenses is to prevent just that from happening. So if F35s landed kills on targets then even if the Iranians did see them coming it wasn’t a successful deterrence of the attack.
3) On if they saw them or not we come to the “anti stealth kill chain”. The Russians and Chinese have been trying to sell “anti stealth” for decades now. At the heart of that is these long wavelength radar systems. These are often compared to ww2 radars that operated on similar bandwidth. What the Fanboi who promote these as the Silver bullets against stealth forget is they were abandoned for use in air defenses for a reason. They can see something but that can’t tell what it is with the resolution to target it. It’s at best an Early Warning System but it can’t tell what it’s looking at. Be it a Flock of birds, a formation of F35 or the last son of Krypton.
It’s like having Mr. Magoo as your spotter.
That’s why the systems still have to move to X band radars, the same X band radars in the nose of fighters and the attack radars of SAM Systems. Those however are the same radars that F35 is optimized against. In hopes that the LWB can direct the X band into the right position to make a track. But even if that happens a track isn’t a target lock.
The single case where an actual Stealth was shot down was the F117 Vega 31. That aircraft was tracked for dozens of miles but the SAM system wasn’t able to lock until the missile door opened and jammed with the Night Hawk at less than a dozen miles from the launcher. And that’s the absolute truth.
F35 is far, far more advanced than F117 and farther includes features F117 wished it had like its own Passive and active electronic warfare systems that map and warn pilots of threats specifically to prevent a repeat of Vega 31. Where F117 was a void in the air blind and deaf to any threats on a mission plan that was fundamentally flawed by reused entry and egress . F35 has all the data one could possibly want save for next week’s Powerball numbers.
Frankly this seems copium from the usual suspects of Eurasian times and proKremlin media echoing in to western media primarily via the whole Military Industrial Complex theorists community.
