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| Putin and Netanyahu in Jerusalem last year and an AP file photo of the Russian S-300 |
The
S-300 air defense system Netanyahu is urging Putin not to sell to Syria is the “ultimate”
in protection, says top Israeli missile
expert Uzi Rubin. But it’s still only a part of
the wider problem of Russia’s unwavering support for Assad
By
Mitch Ginsburg, writing today for The Times of Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, only just back from China, was back overseas on Tuesday, meeting
with President Vladimir Putin to ensure –- or more accurately to plead — that
Russia refrain from sending Syria four S-300 batteries, a $900-million,
long-range aerial defense system that, Israeli experts say, would change the
calculus of Israeli and U.S. involvement in Syria.
Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov struck a defiant tone in advance of the meeting. “Russia
is not planning to sell,” he told reporters in Warsaw, without specifying which
systems he was referring to. “Russia already sold them a long time ago. It has
signed the contracts and is completing deliveries, in line with the agreed
contracts, of equipment that is anti-aircraft technology.”
Russian state TV was
even more explicit. “After the S-300s are put into service, a repeat of the
Libyan scenario — the imposition of a no-fly zone over the country — would be
extremely difficult,” the Wall Street
Journal reported (Russia news channel) Vesti-24
as saying.
Israeli experts largely
agree with this assessment. The S-300, which can intercept fighter jets and
cruise missiles, “is the ultimate system,” said Uzi Rubin, the former head of
missile defense at Israel’s Defense Ministry and a senior researcher at the
Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “It covers enormous surfaces and is
so potent that when the Cypriots bought the system the Turks threatened them
with war because it endangered Turkish aircraft flying over Turkey.”
Nonetheless, Rubin
said, it is the fact of Russian unstinting involvement on Bashar Assad’s behalf
in Syria, more than the precise nature of that role, which dictates the course
of events.
A review of Assad’s air
defenses, their capacity and their performance in recent years — including
after a 2007 upgrade — underlines the importance of the S-300 amid what thus
far has been unwavering Russian support.
In 1967 Israel
destroyed Syria’s air force on the first day of the war. By 1973 the situation
had changed. The Russian SA-6 system downed more than 20 IAF planes over Syria.
Yet air defense
systems, Rubin explained, are a lot like locks. Some are old and feeble. They
can be cut with a pair of pliers and tossed aside. Some are familiar. An
experienced thief knows how to extract the combination with relative ease. And
some are state-of-the-art and keep all but the best at bay.
By 1982, Israel,
unbeknown to Syria, had cracked the combination to Russian air defense. On June
9, the fourth day of the Lebanon War, after Syria had moved 19 SA-6
surface-to-air missile batteries southwest into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in order
to protect PLO forces there, Israel launched an attack. Using a combination of
radar-jamming electronic warfare, radiation-seeking missiles and, according to
international reports, early unmanned aircraft, the IAF destroyed 17 of the 19
batteries and downed 29 Syrian jets without suffering any losses of its own.
“That’s how it is,”
said Rubin. “Air defense is always a game of cops and robbers, and once you
know a system for some time, you get to know its strong points and its weak
points.”
In September 2007,
Israel reportedly exploited its technological advances to blind Syrian air
defenses and strike and destroy Syria’s plutonium reactor in the far northeast
of the country.
Subsequently, Syria set
out to further modernize its aging defenses. That same year, Assad signed
contracts with Russia for the Pantsir-S1 mobile air defense units. Prime
minister Ehud Olmert reportedly met with then Prime Minister Putin to bar the
sale, said Yiftah Shapir, head of the Middle East Military Balance assessment
at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “But by 2009 it had
arrived.”
The Pantsir batteries
were the newest layer of defense, complimenting the old Russian systems from
the seventies and eighties. The Israeli news site Walla recently reported that Syria now has eight such batteries.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting U.S.
intelligence officials, put the number at 36.
The discrepancy may be
part of the public battle over the quality of Syrian air defenses, which began
in earnest in late April when an Israeli general revealed what most Western
intelligence agencies apparently already knew: Assad’s soldiers had used sarin
gas against rebel troops. This revelation, a clear crossing of President Barack
Obama’s red line, pushed the U.S. closer to action in Syria and triggered a
flood of leaks from the Pentagon.
When briefing the
president or his staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, frequently singles out Syria’s air defenses as the single greatest
obstacle to U.S. involvement in the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported several days after the Israeli
statement.
The paper quoted U.S.
intelligence and defense officials as saying Assad’s air defense network was
the most advanced and concentrated on the planet.
Rubin and Shapir agree
that cumulative effect of the systems means Syria’s skies are densely protected
but said that today, before the arrival of the S-300, the coverage is more
tactical than strategic.
“The Pantsir units
provide pinpoint coverage,” Shapir said, meaning the batteries defend only
small swaths of the sky and only from close range.
Technologically, the
Pantsir is state of the art. In June 2012, a Pantsir battery shot down an
American-made Turkish Phantom F-4 jet somewhere near the countries’ borderline.
Yet judging by the airstrikes,
reportedly by the IAF, in and around Damascus in January and earlier this
month, their lock is easily picked. Many precision-guided strikes, said Shapir,
appear to offer a path around the Pantsir.
This reportedly served
Israel’s purpose of attacking specific weapons shipments. Establishing a no-fly
zone – a constant blanket of air cover – is another story, as the Pantsir units
are highly mobile and hard to track and could inflict losses on NATO aircraft.
Four
units of the S-300 would further change the calculus. “They would cover all of
Syrian airspace,” Rubin said, and “would be like a new lock on the safe.”
Rubin
stressed that all locks can be picked and Israel and the U.S. possess the
technological means to address such weapons systems, but he said they have yet
to be tested on the S-300.
Al-Quds al-Arabi
newspaper claimed Tuesday that Assad’s army actually already possesses the
S-300 system, but that it is under Russian control. This cuts to the heart of
the matter: the extent of Russian-Syrian cooperation. More than the
technological ability of each weapons system, the very fact of Russian
involvement on the ground – in terms of technical support and strategic backing
– is pivotal.
“The
surface-to-air missiles are a small problem,” Rubin said, with varying degrees
of severity. “The big problem is Russia itself.”
