US forces that executed a raid in Venezuela to capture its now-former leader walked away with no aircraft lost to the country’s Russian-made air-defense systems and Chinese-made radars.
In the aftermath, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that it “seems those Russian air defenses didn’t quite work so well, did they?” He didn’t elaborate any further, but in briefings, the top US general spoke about how US forces dismantled and destroyed enemy air defenses.
While the US can draw a certain degree of confidence in its capabilities from the success of the mission, there’s a risk of reading too much into that success, especially when it comes to weapons made by American rivals in the hands of other militaries.
Some of the failures of the Venezuelan-operated foreign air defenses, for example, have been attributed to issues like inactivity, incompetence, and a dearth of functional cohesion between different systems.
Wins in Venezuela during Operation Absolute Resolve or in operations against Iranian-operated Russian-made air defenses may not translate the same in fight with Russia or China.
Venezuelan air defense failures
US Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Isabel Tanner
The US operation in Venezuela to capture former president Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this month was a large, complex undertaking involving over 150 aircraft, including a mix of F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters, F/A-18 jets, EA-18 electronic attack jets, E-2 airborne early warning planes, bombers, and other aircraft, including drones.
As the apprehension forces approached the fortified target facility at Fuerte Tiuna, a military installation in the capital Caracas, US aircraft began striking Venezuelan air defenses to open a corridor for helicopters flying at low altitudes along a preset path. Planners expected significant resistance, but the air defense network capitulated under overwhelming US pressure.
The US used a mix of tools to knock out the air defenses, including AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles that home in on radar systems and electronic jamming. Victory may not have come solely from American combat power though.
“The Venezuelan crews were apparently unprepared as they located many air defense positions in the middle of fields rather than under camouflage,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider. Those systems were vulnerable to US forces.
There were other problems, as well. After Operation Absolute Resolve, some reports suggested Venezuela didn’t have some systems connected to radars when US air power arrived for the operation. “That’s stunning fecklessness,” Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said.
Long-standing issues within Venezuela’s air defense network, particularly regarding maintenance and sustainment of its Russian air defenses and Chinese radars, has been noted by experts and analysts, revealing serious shortcomings with regard to the condition of its defense technologies.
Cautious insights
Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/REUTERS
So what exactly can Western militaries discern from the performance of Russian and Chinese systems in Venezuela? It is difficult to say with certainty, at least with the information presently available in the public discourse.
Before the US assault operation, the Venezuelan military was assessed to have Russian S-300VM batteries, Buk-M2 systems, S-125 Pechora-2M launchers, and Chinese YJ-27 radars. Last November, a Russian lawmaker said that Moscow had delivered new Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2E systems to Venezuela. It’s unclear which systems were operational at the time of the US raid.
Venezuela also possessed Chinese-made YJ-27 radars, which are used to detect and determine engagement procedures for hostile air targets. Beijing has touted these systems as state-of-the-art, asserting that they can detect stealth assets like the F-22 and F-35 from over 150 miles away and are resistant to jamming.
Sobolik told Business Insider that what matters more than these claims is how systems perform in a real conflict. The radars, like the Russian-made defenses, appear to have been of little use.
The US and its partners have thwarted Russian-made air defense systems in other conflicts as well. Israeli airpower, for instance, defeated Russian air defenses in Iran. The US did the same when it launched Operation Midnight Hammer and struck Iranian nuclear facilities.
Like the Venezuela mission, these were extensively planned operations involving significant force against weaker export variants operated by potentially insufficiently trained operators. Russian air defenses have been more effective in Ukraine, though there have still been combat losses, even for advanced systems like the S-400.
“The emerging picture is that these systems can handle low and medium threats but not the most challenging attacks represented by the United States and Israel,” Cancian said. That said, US and allied airpower have not been tested against the full capabilities of Russian and Chinese integrated air defense networks.
The US advantage
US Air Force Photo
Facing these considerations, Houston Cantwell, a retired US Air Force brigadier general and expert at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Business Insider that maintaining the technological advantage and preserving combat readiness are essential to securing the upper hand.
A key example, he said, is the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which “has proven time and time again that it gives its warfighters an advantage in the air” and “lowers the risk to the warfighter while providing more options to the political decision makers.”
Continued proficiency in maintaining and operating advanced aircraft like the F-35 is expected to give the US an airpower advantage over adversary air defenses. To what extent the Venezuela mission reflects that edge, though, is unclear.
