By now most of you have heard
the latest bad news of out Syria: on June 18th a US F/A-18E Super Hornet
(1999) used a AIM-120 AMRAAM (1991) to shoot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22
(1970). Two days later, June 20th, a US F-15E Strike Eagle shot
down an Iranian IRGC Shahed 129 drone. The excuse used each time was that there
was a threat to US and US supported forces. The reality is, of course, that the
US are simply trying to stop the advance of the Syrian army. This was thus a
typical American “show of force”. Except that, of course, shooting a 47 year
old Soviet era Su-22 fighter-bomber is hardly an impressive feat. Neither is
shooting a unmanned drone. There is a pattern here, however, and that pattern
is that all US actions so far have been solely for show: the basically failed
bombing of the Syria military airbase, the bombing of the Syrian army column,
the shooting down of the Syrian fighter-bomber and of the Iranian drone – all
these actions have no real military value. They do, however, have a provocative
value as each time all the eyes turn to Russia to see if the Russians will
respond or not.
Russia did respond this time
again, but in a very ambiguous and misunderstood manner. The Russians
announced, amongst other measure that from now on “any airborne objects,
including aircraft and unmanned vehicles of the [US-led] international
coalition, located to the west of the Euphrates River, will be tracked by
Russian ground and air defense forces as air targets” which I reported as “Russian
MoD declares it will shoot down any aircraft flying west of the Euphrates river”.
While I gave the exact Russian quote, I did not explain why I paraphrased the
Russian words the way I did. Now is a good time to explain this.
First, here is the
exact original Russian
text:
«В районах выполнения боевых
задач российской авиацией в небе Сирии любые воздушные объекты, включая
самолёты и беспилотные аппараты международной коалиции, обнаруженные западнее
реки Евфрат, будут приниматься на сопровождение российскими наземными и
воздушными средствами противовоздушной обороны в качестве воздушных целей»
A literal translation would be:
“In areas of the combat
missions of Russian aviation in the skies of Syria any airborne objects,
including aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicle of the international coalition
discovered to the West of the Euphrates river, will be tracked by Russian
ground based an airborne assets as air targets”
So what does this exactly mean
in technical-military terms?
A quick look inside a US
fighter’s cockpit
When an F/A-18 flies over Syria
the on-board emission detectors (called radar warning receivers or RWR) inform
the pilot of the kind of radar signals the aircraft is detecting. Over Syria
that means that the pilot would see a lot of search radars looking in all
directions trying to get a complete picture of what is happening in the Syrian
skies. The US pilot will be informed that a certain number of Syrian S-300 and
Russian S-400 batteries are scanning the skies and most probably see him. So
far so good. If there are deconfliction zones or any type of bilateral
agreements to warn each other about planned sorties then that kind of radar
emissions are no big deal. Likewise US radars (ground, sea or air based) are
also scanning the skies and “seeing” the Russian Aerospace Forces’ aircraft on
their radars and the Russians know that. In this situation neither side is
treating anybody as “air targets”. When a decision is made to treat an object
as an “air target” a completely different type of radar signal is used and a
much narrower energy beam is directed at the target which can now be tracked
and engaged. The pilot is, of course, immediately informed of this. At this
point the pilot is in a very uncomfortable position: he knows that he is being
tracked, but he has no way of knowing if a missile has already been launched
against him or not. Depending on a number of factors, an AWACS might be able to
detect a missile launch, but this might not be enough and it might also be too
late.
The kind of missiles fired by
S-300/S-400 batteries are extremely fast, over 4,000mph (four thousand miles
per hour) which means that a missile launched as far away as 120 miles will
reach you in 2 minutes or that a missile launched 30 miles away will reach you
in 30 seconds. And just to make things worse, the S-300 can use a special radar
mode called “track via missile” where the radar emits a pulse towards the
target whose reflection is then received not by the ground based radar, but by
the rapidly approaching missile itself, which then sends its reading back to
the ground radar which then sends guidance corrections back to the missile. Why
is that bad for the aircraft? Because there is no way to tell from the
emissions whether a missile has been launched and is already approaching at
over 4,000mph or not. The S-300 and S-400 also have other modes, including the
Seeker Aided Ground Guidance (SAGG) where the missile also computes a guidance
solution (not just the ground radar) and then the two are compared and a Home
On Jam (HOJ) mode when the jammed missile then homes directly on the source of
the jamming (such as an onboard jamming pod). Furthermore, there are other
radar modes available such as the Ground Aided Inertial (GAI) which guides the
missile in the immediate proximity of the target where the missile switches on
its own radar just before hitting the target. Finally, there is some pretty
good evidence that the Russians have perfected a complex datalink system which
allows them to fuse into one all the signals they acquire from their missiles,
airborne aircraft (fighter, interceptor or AWACS) and ground radars and that
means that, in theory, if a US aircraft is outside the flight envelope (reach)
of the ground based missiles the signals acquired by the ground base radars
could be used to fire an air-to-air missile at the US aircraft (we know that
their MiG-31s are capable of such engagements, so I don’t see why their much
more recent Su-30/Su-35 could not). This would serve to further complicate the situational
awareness of the pilot as a missile could be coming from literally any
direction. At this point the only logical reaction would be for the US pilot to
inform his commanders and get out, fast. Sure, in theory, he could simply
continue his mission, but that would be very hard, especially if he suspects
that the Syrians might have other, mobile, air defense on the way to, or near,
his intended target.
Just try to imagine this: you
are flying, in total illegality, over hostile territory and preparing to strike
a target when suddenly your radar warning receiver goes off and tells you “you
got 30 seconds or (much?) less to decide whether there is a 300lbs (150kg)
warhead coming at you at 4000mph (6400kmh) or not”. How would you feel if it
was you sitting in that cockpit? Would you still be thinking about executing
your planned attack?
The normal US strategy is to
achieve what is called “air superiority/supremacy” by completely suppressing
enemy air defenses and taking control of the skies. If I am not mistaken, the
last time the US fighters operated in a meaningfully contested air space was in
Vietnam…
By the way, these technologies
are not uniquely Russian, they are well known in the West, for example the US
Patriot SAM also uses TVM, but the Russians have very nicely integrated them
into one formidable air defense system.
The bottom line is this: once
the US aircraft is “treated like a target” he has no way of knowing if the
Syrians, or the Russians, are just being cheeky or whether has has seconds left
to live. Put differently, “treating like a target” is tantamount to somebody
putting a gun to your head and letting you guess if/when he will pull the trigger.
So yes, the Russian statement
most definitely was a “threat to shoot down”!
Next, a look into the Russian
side of the equation
To understand why the Russians
used the words “treat like an air target” rather than “will shoot down” you
need to remember that Russia is still the weaker party here. There is nothing
worse than not delivering on a threat. If the Russians had said “we will shoot
down” and then had not done so, they would have made an empty threat. Instead,
they said “will treat as an air target” because that leaves them an “out”
should they decided not to pull the trigger. However, for the US Navy or Air
Force pilot, these considerations are all irrelevant once his detectors report
to him that he is being “painted” with the beam of an engagement radar!
So what the Russians did is to
greatly unnerve the US crews without actually having to shoot down anybody. It
is not a coincidence that the Americans almost immediately stopped flying West
of the Euphrates river while the Australians officially decided to bow out from any
further air sorties.
It cannot be overemphasized
that the very last thing Russia needs is to shoot down a US aircraft over Syria
which is exactly what some elements of the Pentagon seem to want. Not only is
Russia the weaker side in this conflict, but the Russians also understand the
wider political consequences of what would happen if they took the dramatic
step to shoot down a US aircraft: a dream come true for the Neocons and a
disaster for everybody else.
A quick look from the US
Neoconistan and the quest for a “tepid war”
The dynamic in Syria is not
fundamentally different from the dynamic in the Ukraine: the Neocons know that
they have failed to achieve their primary objective: to control the entire
country. They also know that their various related financial schemes have
collapsed. Finally, they are fully aware that they owe this defeat to Russia
and, especially, to Vladimir Putin. So they fell back on plan B. Plan B is
almost as good as Plan A (full control) because Plan B has much wider
consequences. Plan B is also very simple: trigger a major crisis with Russia
but stay short from a full-scale war. Ideally, Plan B should revolve around a
“firm” “reaction” to the Russian “aggression” and a “defense” of the US
“allies” in the region. In practical terms this simply means: get the Russians
to openly send forces into Novorussia or get the Russians to take military actions
against the US or its allies in Syria. Once you get this you can easily see
that the latest us attacks in Syria have a minor local purpose – to scare or
slow down the Syrians- and a major global purpose – to bait the Russians into
using forces against the US or an ally. It bears repeating here that what the
Neocons really want is what I call a “tepid” war with Russia: an escalation of
tensions to levels not even seen during the Cold War, but not a full-scale
“hot” WWIII either. A tepid war would finally re-grant NATO at least some kind
of purpose (to protect “our European friends and allies” from the “Russian
threat”): the already terminally spineless EU politicians would all be brought
into an even more advanced state of subservience, the military budgets would go
even higher and Trump would be able to say that he made “America” “great”
again. And, who knows, maybe the Russian people would *finally* rise against
Putin, you never know! (They wouldn’t – but the Neocons have never been
deterred from their goofy theories by such minor and altogether irrelevant
things as facts or logic).
[Sidebar: I noticed this time
again that each time the US tries to bait Russia into some kind of harsh
reaction and Russia declines to take the bait, this triggers in immediate surge
into the number of comments which vehemently complain that Russia is acting
like a pussy, that Putin is a fake, that he is “in cahoots” with the US and/or
Israel and that the Russians are weak or that they have “sold out”. I am
getting a sense that we are dealing with paid US PSYOP operatives whose mission
is to use the social media to try to put the Kremlin under pressure with these
endless accusations of weakness and selling-out. Since I have no interest in
rewarding these folks in any way, I mostly send their recriminations where they
belong: to the trash]
Does the Russian strategy work?
To reply to this, don’t look at
what the Russians do or do not do in the immediate aftermath of a US
provocation. Take a higher level look and just see what happens in the mid to
long term. Just like in a game of chess, taking the Gambit is not always the
correct strategy.
I submit that to evaluate
whether Putin’s policies are effective or not, to see whether he has “sold out”
or “caved in” you need to, for example, look at the situation in Syria (or the
Ukraine, for that matter) as it was 2 years ago and then compare with what it
is today. Or, alternatively, look at the situation as it is today and come back
to re-visit it in 6 months.
One huge difference between the
western culture and the way the Russians (or the Chinese for that matter) look
at geostrategy is that westerners always look at everything in the short term
and tactical level. This is basically the single main reason why both Napoleon
and Hitler lost their wars against Russia: an almost exclusive focus on the
short term and tactical. In contrast, the Russians are the undisputed masters
of operational art (in a purely military sense) and, just like the Chinese,
they tend to always keep their eyes on the long-term horizon. Just look at the
Turkish downing of a Russian Su-24: everybody bemoaned the lack of “forceful”
reaction from Moscow. And then, six months later – what do we have? Exactly.
The modern western culture is
centered on various forms of instant gratification, and that is also true for
geopolitics. If the other guy does something, western leaders always deliver a
“firm” response. They like to “send messages” and they firmly believe that
doing something, no matter how symbolic, is better than even the appearance of
doing nothing. As for the appearance of doing nothing, it is universally
interpreted as a sign of weakness. Russians don’t think that way. They don’t
care about instant gratification, they care only about one thing: victory. And
if that means to look weak, that is fine. From a Russian perspective, sending
“messages” or taking symbolic actions (like all 4 of the recent US attacks in
Syria) are not signs of strength, but signs of weakness. Generally, the
Russians don’t like to use force which they consider inherently dangerous. But
when they do, they never threaten or warn, they take immediate and pragmatic
(non-symbolic) action which gets them closer to a specific goal.
Conclusion
The Russian reaction to the
latest US attack on Syria was not designed to maximize the approval of the many
Internet armchair strategists. It was designed to maximize the discomfort of
the US lead “coalition” in Syria while minimizing the risks for Russia. It is
precisely by using an ambiguous language which civilians would interpret in one
way, and military personnel in another, that the Russians introduced a very
disruptive element of unpredictability into the planning of US air operations
in Syria.
The Russians are not without
their own faults and bad habits and they make mistakes (recognizing the
Ukronazi junta in Kiev after the coup was probably such a mistake), but it is
important to differentiate between their real weaknesses and mistakes and their
very carefully designed strategies. Just because they don’t act in the way
their putative “supporters” in the West would does not mean that they have
“caved in”, “blinked first” or any other such nonsense. The first step towards
understanding how the Russians function is to stop expecting that they would
act just like Americans would.
P.S: By the way, the Syrian
pilot shot down made it out alive.
