US wins against Russian and Chinese air defenses in other countries risk teaching the wrong lessons

• The US attack on Venezuela saw forces defeat Russian and Chinese-made air defense systems.

• Operator and maintenance problems appear to play a role in air defense failures.

• The operation offers some insight into the effectiveness of U.S. tactics, but there are potential risks in attaching too much significance to the gains.

US forces that raided Venezuela to capture its former leader left without losing any aircraft to the country’s Russian-made air defense systems and Chinese-made radars.

Afterwards, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “Apparently they are.” Russian air defense They didn’t work very well, did they?” He did not give further details, but in briefings the top US general described how US forces were smashing and destroying enemy air defenses.

While the United States derives a degree of confidence in its capabilities from the success of the mission, there is a risk of reading too much into that success, especially when it comes to weapons produced by American rivals in the hands of other militaries.

Some failures in foreign air defenses operated by Venezuela, for example, are attributed to problems such as inactivity, incompetence, and lack of functional compatibility between different systems.

victory in venezuela Operation Absolute Determination The same may not be true in combating Russia or China in operations against Russian-made air defense systems operated by Iran.

Venezuelan air defense failures

US capture operation in Venezuela former president Nicolás Maduro and its consort earlier this month was a massive, complex undertaking involving more than 150 aircraft, including F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters, F/A-18 jets, EA-18 electronic attack jets, E-2 airborne early warning planes, bombers and a mix of other aircraft, including drones.

As the capture forces approached the fortified target facility at Fuerte Tiuna, a military facility in the capital Caracas, US aircraft began attacking. Venezuelan air defense opening a corridor for helicopters flying at low altitudes along a predetermined path. Planners expected significant resistance, but the air defense network capitulated under overwhelming pressure from the United States.

The US used a variety of means to disable air defenses, including AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles focused on radar systems and electronic jamming. Victory may not come from America’s fighting power alone.

“The Venezuelan crews were apparently unprepared, as they positioned many air defense positions in the middle of the fields rather than under camouflage,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider. These systems were vulnerable to US forces.

There were other problems too. After Operation Absolute Resolve, some reports suggested that Venezuela was missing some systems linked to radars when the US air force arrived for the operation. “This is astounding incompetence,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute.

Experts and analysts noted that long-standing problems within Venezuela’s air defense network, especially with the maintenance and maintenance of Russian air defenses and Chinese radars, reveal serious deficiencies in the state of defense technologies.

Cautious opinions

So what exactly can Western militaries understand from the performance of Russian and Chinese systems in Venezuela? It’s hard to say for sure, at least with the information currently publicly available.

Before the US attack operation, it was assessed that the Venezuelan army had Russian S-300VM batteries, Buk-M2 systems, S-125 Pechora-2M launchers and Chinese YJ-27 radars. Last November, a Russian MP said that Moscow had delivered new Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2E systems to Venezuela. It is unclear which systems were operational at the time of the US raid.

captured in Venezuela Chinese-made YJ-27 radars, Used to detect and determine engagement procedures for enemy air targets. Beijing has praised these systems as state-of-the-art, claiming they can detect stealth assets like the F-22 and F-35 from more than 150 miles away and are resistant to jamming.

More important than these claims, Sobolik told Business Insider, is how the systems perform in an actual conflict situation. Like Russian-made defense systems, radars appear to be of little use.

The United States and its partners have also thwarted Russian-made air defense systems in other conflicts. Israeli air powerfor example, defeated Russian air defenses in Iran. The United States did the same when it launched Operation Midnight Hammer and struck Iran’s nuclear facilities.

like Venezuela missionThese were extensively planned operations involving significant force against weaker export variants, carried out by potentially poorly trained operators. Although Russia’s air defense is more effective in Ukraine, there are still combat losses. S-400.

“The emerging picture is that these systems can deal with low- and medium-level threats, but not the most formidable attacks represented by the United States and Israel,” Cancian said. However, the air power of the United States and its allies has not been tested to the full capabilities of Russian and Chinese integrated air defense networks.

US advantage

Faced with these considerations, retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General and Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies expert Houston Cantwell told Business Insider that maintaining technological advantage and maintaining combat readiness is essential to maintaining superiority.

A key example, he said, is the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which “has proven time and again to give its warfighters an advantage in the air” and “reduces risk to the warfighter while providing political decision-makers with more options.”

Continued proficiency in the maintenance and operation of advanced aircraft such as the F-35 is expected to provide the United States with an air power advantage against enemy air defenses. But it is unclear to what extent the Venezuelan mission reflects this superiority.

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