Russian missile defense systems: you don’t get what you pay for
The Syrians are not happy.
The details are all very hush-hush, but rumor has it in the intelligence community that earlier this month something what very wrong with the shiny new missile defense system they had recently ordered from Russia.
It seems that Israeli air strikes were able to fly over Syria unimpeded and take out what is said to have been a fledgling nuclear facility. This was not supposed to happen; the Syrians paid good money for the state-of-the-art defense system, and yet it failed abysmally.
Why, and how? I certainly have no inside information, and I’m not especially tech-savvy. But it seems to me that it’s in the nature of a graft that has not taken—at least, so far.
Notwithstanding their glorious past, Arab and Muslim cultures have not been science-friendly for many centuries. Technology is imported to these areas and used by them, to be sure, but there is little that is developed or invented there, and the creative habits of mind that would foster scientific inquiry are not only missing but often actively discouraged.
That means that high-tech weaponry is imported rather than organically developed. Training in its use also encounters other built-in barriers to a quick and effective response:
Damascus’s air defenses tend to be rigid in their doctrine and employment; air defense crews depend on higher echelons to identify and assign targets. If those echelons fail–or they’re blinded by enemy countermeasures–they leave individual fire units in an autonomous mode, an environment they’re unprepared for.
A military reflects the culture in which it is embedded. All militaries must be hierarchical, and depend to a great extent on following orders. But societies in which individualism is highly valued find a way to allow members of their armed forces to think for themselves when circumstances permit, and to be flexible, reactive, and somewhat autonomous when needed.
Russia is an interesting case. It has always straddled the line between East and West, between modernism and stagnation. The Soviets emphasized scientific development and threw vast resources into it, achieving no small measure of success.
But it was at a cost. Some say the arms race nearly bankrupted the USSR and helped lead to its downfall. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, it’s become more and more apparent that Russia is not a first world country but occupies some sort of in-between state. Its technology is for sale, but its expertise can sometimes be hard to export.
[NOTE: Some will no doubt use this argument as an excuse to ignore the threat from the Islamic totalitarian world as inconsequential. This is a fallacy, unfortunately. They don’t have to be consistently successful in order to do major damage, if they have the requisite weaponry and are willing to keep trying and correcting when errors are made.]
Some reports that the Iranian hotshot who disappeared to the west–someplace–months ago provided the technical knowledge to make this happen.
In addition, the reports do not put the blame on the lower level firing units and their lack of initiative. Usually, electronic countermeasures include jamming, which is to say, overwhelming the receivers with “noise”. The ECM version of the A6 Intruder has such power that the cockpit is covered in a microscopically thin layer of gold, which is the best interceptor of electromagnetic radiation going, to protect the crew.
If a scope is showing nothing but snow, I suppose the boys could run out and look for enemy aircraft and fire off missiles which would either not guide and possibly get lucky, or perhaps the guidance systems would not be jammed so much.
But in this case, nothing lit up. No warning radars, no area surveillance radars, no fire control radars. All nice and clean like Sunday afternoon.
That’s the scary part, especially for Iran which purchased the same system.
There is an article around entitled “Why Arabs Lose Wars”, which goes into the cultural issues. Much detail.
Why Arabs Lose Wars – original link
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/deatkine_arabs1.html
Well recommended.
This is a story that my military instructor in anti-aircraft defence told me after Six Day War. His friend was a flight instructor and superviser of a group of Syrian pilots trained in USSR. When Israeli jets appeared on radar screen he shouted them: “Go to cockpits! Lift the machines!”. But the pilots were sitting and sipping coffee. “Allah akbar! They will pass by.” The “Phantoms” flew over airfiled, dropping some bombs. No “Migs” were damaged, but there were craters on the landing strip. “Go!” – he shouted again. “They will return for a second approach!” But the pilots were imperturbable. “Allah akbar! They will not return”. Of course, they returned and destroyed all the “Migs” on the ground. I suppose that something in this spirit took place in this episode too.
I remember the front page of the “Look” journal soon after Six Days War. A Soviet tank with an open hatch stands in Sinai desert. From the tank several tracks of footprints on the sand – bare feet footprints – go to horizon. The whole tank armies with empty fuel tanks stood so in the desert.
The article “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” for which Colin provides the link, above, is fascinating.
Are there analogous studies of doing diplomacy with Arabs/Muslims?
How much of the “failure” in Iraq turns on lack of cultural perception, or unwillingness to recognize cultural chasms?
Oz. Diplomacy rarely fails due to misunderstanding. On the other hand, politics might.
For example, many in the US think Iran can be dealt with by, among other things, deterrence, and by appeals to the mullahs’ duty to their people. What the folks have said about being unmoved by the prospect of losing several million people as long as Israel disappears does not count. I expect diplomats understand it, but they can only work within the parameters allowed by their own countries.
The difficulties attending cultural pshrinking listedin the article about Arabs losing wars were the mistakes of the leadership, not the dipplemads.
Problem is, to have really understood the Japanese and Germans, to really understand the North Koreans, the Taliban and al Q, you have to be prepared to accept a degree of savagery that, if you let on you believed it, would have you read out of polite society. Only rednecks would believe that. And warmongers.
Ground-level reports from Iraq indicate the troops are doing a pretty good job of practical anthropology. But there’s a problem with that. One thing you have to do in..ahem–certain places is demonstrate most briskly that you really are the baddest-ass m.f.er on the block. You really have to prove it. Which means killing those who doubt.
Then you can be friends. But you can’t start out trying to be nice.
Said one Marine general to a bunch of tribal leaders. So it’s said.
“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. I’m begging you, with tears in my eyes. If you ***k with me, I’ll kill you all.”
There’s a limit to how much actual cultural understanding is allowed by the cultural understanding proponents. Jarheads know too much.
Yay, X is back, pretending to be an O!
“Are there analogous studies of doing diplomacy with Arabs/Muslims?”
Sure. Arabs always win diplomacy, for much the same reason they always lose wars. They will tell anyone anything they think they want to hear, and then simply do whatever they please, and any diplomatic “partners” stupid enough to think they’ve established some sort of rapport are left with no choice but to cry in the corner and wait to be raped again.
Tat.
IMHO, the response to being hosed is not a learning experience because to say, “We’re not going to do a deal with those people because we can’t trust them.” is to be labeled a racist and xenophobe.
Aubrey said:
“Problem is, to have really understood the Japanese and Germans, to really understand the North Koreans, the Taliban and al Q, you have to be prepared to accept a degree of savagery that, if you let on you believed it, would have you read out of polite society. Only rednecks would believe that. And warmongers.”
Exactly; hyperbole understood.
So, might the problem of “cultural understanding” be with polite society’s? Our polite society?
Oz.
Ayup.
Might even be Russian/American cooperation; draining their money, demoralizing their will to wage war; it would be clever.
The ease with which the Israeli’s penetrated Syrian air space, defeating their Iranian paid for, Russian air defense is a huge indicator. As good as the old gold canopy A6’s; called “Queers” by the Navy; were, the current integrated “Weasel” systems are whole orders of magnitude better. It’s really very simple, they can’t see you and they can’t shoot you and if they go active radar they die from a HARM variant missile.
And, wait for it, these are they same systems used by the Iranians. So, if you can “go downtown” over Iran, a country with no real interceptor aircraft and crap air defense, taking out their “facilities” becomes an exercise in fuel management for whoever decides the time has come.
Neo makes a good point about the culture of the Syrian/Iranian ADEF but the interesting point is that it seems as if these systems were compromised from the git go. Can you say first/second source for integrated circuits? I knew you could.
Remember the communication systems WORM that went into Saddam’s Iraq tucked up safely in a network printer’s integrated circuitry? While the SpecOps boys took out their buried fibre lines the system lost its’ mind. Result? They went to radios until those died too.
What do you want to bet that the ICD’s (In Circuit Debuggers) that came with the hardware are compromised too. They’re going to have to go over evey line of code, every line of firmware micro code and every circuit looking for “the bogeyman”. Liike that’s ever going to happen. A friend of mine said it best, ” When you poke their eyes out, they’re like baby seals on the ice and you own all the baseball bats.” Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
A followup to the WORM infected printer. When it looked like there was a leak regarding this story, editors for major infotech publications got an idea for a April Fools’s article in email. One printed it and the leakers of the actual story got smacked with the “hoax” story and descredited.
This takes me back to my life as an airline pilot. I was transitioning to a new aircraft. The instructor was so happy to have my cockpit partner and me as students. He had just finished a three month period of trying to train several pilots from a ME airline.
He related that when the emergencies and irregularities were introduced to these gents, they did not want to use the prescribed procedures to fix/overcome the problems. It was left to Allah’s will. If Allah willed it, all would be well. If not……it was Allah’s will that the sirplane crash.
At the time I knew nothing of Islam, but thought this sounded too nutso to be true. I now know it is all too true.
Until they can overcome this feature of their culture/religion, they will never be able to be effective in war or commerce.
Neo said, “Russia is not a first world country but occupies some sort of in-between state. Its technology is for sale, but its expertise can sometimes be hard to export.”
So true. I was in Russia last year. I was shocked when I learned that you couldn’t drink the water in St. Petersberg, one of their most modern cities. Much of the country is still in poverty, lacking electricity, modern sanitation equipment or even rudimentary agricultural needs.
I know a missionary who works in a rural area of Russia. He collects donations so farm families can buy chickens for eggs and meat. A very well to do farm family in that area is one that has chickens and a cow to provide milk for personal use and to sell.
After the fall of the Soviet Union I read an account of two American bicyclists who cycled from St. Petersberg to Vladivostok. They found a country that, except for the cities, was still in the 19th century. That account made me realize how wrong our intelligence had been about the vaunted economic ability of the Soviet Union. I have been skeptical of our intelligence since that time.
So, Russia, as you say, falls between what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls the Core and the Gap. Near Core in some ways, but largely a country that belongs in the Gap.
Jimmy J.
Thing about a command economy is that they can’t command everything to work. But they can command something. In the case of the USSR, it was major military forces which, if the quality wasn’t there, referred to the old saying that quantity has a quality all its own.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to demonstrate in the real world that we were better. As Wellington said, riding the dreadful field after Waterloo, “The next saddest thing to a battle lost is a battle won.”
The best way to handle this stuff in the real world is to make sure that even the thought of messing with us acts like a big glass of Mexico City tapwater, only faster.
Then nobody gets hurt.
OverGourd Says:
“October 2nd, 2007 at 4:53 pm
A followup to the WORM infected printer. When it looked like there was a leak regarding this story, editors for major infotech publications got an idea for a April Fools’s article in email.”
I didn’t hear the Iraq version of this story but I’ve long (re: long before the Iraq war) heard a similar story about a virus being in a US network via a reburned printer rom. I always thought that story was true… might not be of course…
Neo:
“NOTE: Some will no doubt use this argument as an excuse to ignore the threat from the Islamic totalitarian world as inconsequential. This is a fallacy, unfortunately. They don’t have to be consistently successful in order to do major damage…”
As 9/11 can attest. In this case the openness of our society help served to defeat our efforts to protect us from an aerial threat.
Richard A,
Very true.
I agree wholeheartedly about the solution. Too bad so many in Congress and other government agencies don’t.
Yeah. Not only is it cheaper to deter war, nobody gets hurt. No wonder Congress and the chattering classes think it’s a bad idea.
No. Nope. Silly me. They don’t like it because it would make us look like meanies.
The Russians are the biggest producers of child porn in the world. If that doesn’t tell you anything about their morals, you need a caretaker. Syrian arrogance plus Russian immorality means crappy products in incompetent hands.
Hi –
Actually, “snowing” the radar screen with energy is a sure give-away that something is going on.
What you really want is that there are no blips on the screens whatsoever, so that the other side has no clue that there actually is anything going on. That appears to be what has happened.
There are (at least) two ways of doing this: one is to analyze electromagnetic energy reaching a plane, calculate what has to be returned to show “nothing” and then to rebroadcast that with more energy than the actual return, all in real time. The other way is to generate a different return, such that the software on the radar thinks it’s an error and suppresses it.
Either way, the entire system is rendered useless (actually worse than useless, since you spent all that money on it that could’ve been spent on something more important, like educating Arab women.
JohnF
J. O.
Snowing a radar screen is an older way of taking care of business. The guys know something is going on but there’s nothing they can do about it unless they are using heatseekers with optical acqusition (eyes), or guns with optical sighting systems (eyes).
To make the system completely oblivious is many times more technically difficult. There are two ways to do this. One is to be inside the system–which is to say have the technical info that allows you to set up your own responses–and the other is to have equipment that will do it, as you put it, in real time.
In the first case, the proud owners of a brand, new IADS can think that their most precious secrets are now common gossip. Great.
In the second, they can think of themselves as being on the wrong side of Belloc’s quatrain regarding the ‘eathen:
Whatever happens,
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they have not.
This is the bigs, guys.
from my son on the front in Afghanistan who wrote in an email this morning:
“We are professional soldiers and I believe that we will
see this endeavor through but I cannot help but to wonder why, if this is such
an important struggle, are so few of us taking part in it. You and I both know
that answer and you sum it up the best, “America is at the mall.”
America would not be at the mall if they for one second set aside their naive
skepticism and paid attention to the brand of zealous hate and bigotry that has
been brewing in parts of this world for the last century. I do hope that the
manifestation of this hate is not what brings people out of the proverbial mall
but I have an ominous feeling that things will get worse before they get any
better. You must think beyond our typical short sighted, instant gratification
4-year election cycle, and look at things in the long-term, like our
adversaries, who are laying the seeds for the future pan-islamic caliphate of
their grandchildren. It sounds tin-foil hat crazy, I know, but if even only a
small percentage of millions hold these extremist beliefs, and another small
percentage are sympathetic to the beliefs…. you get the point. Dar al Harb
and Dar al Islam. Research those words and their meanings. It is frightening,
and it is not going away any time soon.”
This sobering assessment of what he sees day in and out on now this fourth deployment is a reminded that this is an issue to be with us for generations. Sadly.
“So, Russia, as you say, falls between what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls the Core and the Gap. Near Core in some ways, but largely a country that belongs in the Gap.”
Actually, there are two Russia’s: the rural one, which truly belongs to 19 century, and the urban one, which is as modern as you can wish. And this second Russia with its world-class universities and technoparks, manned by the brightest scientists and engineers, can produce amazing jet fighters, rocket systems and nuclear submarines. Do not underestimate it. Sputnik was not an accident, it was a product of a very efficient system, that still works.
Laura, not all America has been at the mall. Some of us saw our current troubles coming for some time.
However, whenever we criticized, say, the Palestinians (the iconic victims of the moment), Moslem leaders, (such as the Ayatollah) or even mentioned some of the negative aspects of Islam, we were told that we just said such things because we were knee-jerk supporters of Israel (it was strongly hinted we’d been brainwashed by Zionists), McCarthyites and bigots who just hated Moslems because they were poor, brown-skinned, third-world people.
Just as a side-note, the number of ordinary people who seemed to think that Israel was the entire problem, and if it just went away all would be swell, was truly amazing—and frightening.
A lot of us gave up and went to the mall—or conentrated on just living our lives—because, quite bluntly, nobody was listening to us, and we got tired of being called bigots, or Zionist tools.
The problem isn’t that America’s gone to the mall; the problem is that our elites are feeding us unrealistic fairy tales about the state of the world, and shouting down anybody who doesn’t buy them. And they were all set and prepared after 9/11, with the “Why do they hate us?” and, “It was all America’s fault!” memes.
Some of us go to the mall to pick up stuff for care packages. And some of us don’t go in order to save money to send to Fisher House.
Many of us have updated various skills such as unarmed combat, first aid, shooting. We have gamed out our responses to various possibilities.
We have, in the words of Rebecca West writing during the beginning of WW II, picked up our fathers’ courage and found it familiar to our hands.
Some of us think we have a set of moves left.
One, at least.
And we make an occasional point to others. So they don’t think they are alone in their/our view.
“But societies in which individualism is highly valued find a way to allow members of their armed forces to think for themselves when circumstances permit, and to be flexible, reactive, and somewhat autonomous when needed”…this seems very logical, but it would be dangerous to assume that anti-individualist societies cannot permit autonomy in some circumstances.
Based on what I’ve read, German military units *at the lower levels* were very effective in evaluating circumstances and thinking/acting on their own. (This was less true at the higher levels, where Hitler’s influence was more direct.) The German force that conducted the blitzkrieg against France was more decentralized than the French force that opposed it.
It is possible for a society in which individualism is generally devalued to offer a certain field as an outlet for individual initiative.
The German Army in WW II, especially in the beginning, was the outgrowth of the Weimar Wehrmacht, in which every man of the allowed 100,000 was selected and trained for a slot two ranks above his own.
Thus, when the training camps started turning out privates, there was a competent cadre for vast increases in the size.
Other armies were merely small armies whose, say, corporals, were pretty good corporals, some of whom were likely to be promoted. In the von Seeckt army, the corporal didn’t get to be corporal if he didn’t seem a likely platoon sergeant.
And Blitzkrieg didn’t take advantage of some inborn ability to think and act independently, although that would have been useful. The thing was designed and the troops trained that way. “Right. You’ve lost commo with the company. This is the situation. What do you do?”
The last big German offensive of WW I included small unit initiative. The plan was to flow around resistance, not stop and assault it. Damn’ near succeeded.
But nobody’s like us. There is a kind of permanent murmur around US military installations. It’s a dozen or a hundred commanders saying, “I know it was a good idea. But, dammit, next time tell me first.”
“German military units at the lower levels,..”
Because they were trained to. Sergeants and Lieutenants would discuss tactical situations with the soldiers, then ask individuals for their “solutions” and wargame them to see which ideas worked or not. Over time, individuals gained confidence to take initiative without appealing to higher authority. Also, each soldier was given a sense of their mission, or what needed to be accomplished, so they weren’t in the dark about what they were doing in the moment.
Surprisingly, the German model is the one used by Israel. They also have a maxim: “When in doubt, attack”. Our forces use a similar model for training. It was epitomized in The Dirty Dozen.
Franco: “I thought Mayonnaise was the only one who had to climb the rope!”
Reisman: “But suppose Jimenez gets killed before he gets to the top of the chateau? Everyone checks out on the rope.”
Had Germany been successful in acquiring Great Britain as an ally, it would have increased the chances of a Grand Alliance of formidable powers. GB, US, Germany against France and Russia at a minimum.
The world would have shook under the combination of the best of Europe and the best of the New World.
Germany was weakened 3 times, and eventually neutralized. Once in WWI where their entire system fell apart and social revolution came about one way or another. Second, in WWII when they were defeated by Hitler’s suicide tactics for Germany. And again, a third time, in the Cold War in which their cities and the nation itself was divided between the victors.
Now Germany is a shadow of their former glory and military efficiency. They still retain the great loyalty to law and order, their preference for making bureacracy and trains run on time, and their exceptional engineering abilities. But their Prussian warrior heart has been cut out. A nation without their warriors won’t be a nation for long.
A simple question to see for yourself how fall Germany has fallen to the winds of fate and defeat. How many terrorists has Germany released in exchange for deals beneficial to them, while harmful to the American citizens that were slaughtered by those same terrorists?
Can they even be counted?
From my military experience and civilian experience in technical pursuits, it is very difficult to practice a top down field operation. I have heard stories where tanks’ and other equipment’s tech manuals were taken and held by officers. They did not want the enlisted personnel to know as much or more than they did. Awful hard to maintain and operate a tank or any other piece of equipment during peace time under that regime, much less during a conflict or an emergency. I have said many times that in the US military when the officer is killed, the sergeant takes over, then the corporal and then who the men respect. That is one of our strengths. Our military runs on the shoulders of the sergeants and enlisted men and women. From what I have been told that is not the case in the Arab ME or for that matter in the old USSR’s military. So did the men manning the radar know enough to operate it properly? Just asking.
It’s been said (by Jim Dunnigan on StrategyPage.com among others) that developing sergeants takes at least five years, and is one of the biggest obstacle the Iraqi army faces. (Dunnigan’s page is a great and educating read.)
Word is that the strike also took out numerous Syrian scientists & Techs plus the N Korean scientists & Techs who were turning the plant over to the Syrians…..