Op-Ed

Russia’s Brutally Mediocre Military Performance In Syria

Getty Images/Maxim Marmur, YouTube screenshot/raloydz

Gary Gambill Political Analyst
Font Size:

To hear officials in Moscow talk about the war in Syria, you’d think it was a coming out party for Russia’s armed services and military-industrial complex. The two-and-a-half year military campaign has “demonstrated the power of our army and navy … [and] the tradition of reliability and effectiveness of Russian weapons,” President Vladimir Putin boasted in a recent speech. Customers “are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons,” says Vladimir Shamanov, the head of the Russian Duma’s defense committee.

To be sure, the Kremlin’s first major far-abroad expeditionary campaign is a stark reminder that its inheritance of Soviet military might is not thoroughly spent, and Putin has clearly made good use of a defense budget comprising just 11 percent that of the United States. But Russia’s military performance has underwhelmed most informed observers, and the growth of Russian arms exports has stagnated since Russia’s intervention began in September 2015 (rising only from $14.5 billion that year to $15.3 billion in 2017, after tripling over the previous decade). “We don’t see any tangible effect of the Syria campaign on Russian defense exports,” concluded Sergey Denisentsev of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis and Technology last year.

While Russian officials claim to have combat-tested some 215 advanced weapons systems in Syria, often releasing videos to show them in action, we don’t really know how most of them performed. In contrast to CENTCOM, the Russian military doesn’t release detailed open-source information about airstrikes.

What little information the government makes available is primarily promotional, and often at odds with independent reporting. Four of the 26 cruise missiles fired at targets in Syria from Russian warships in the Caspian Sea in a widely-touted October 7, 2015, launch (timed to commemorate Putin’s birthday) are known to have landed in Iran, but Russian officials adamantly denied it.

Another epic fail they don’t like to talk about in Moscow is the three-month deployment of Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, off the coast of Syria in 2016. The vessel “belched smoke like an old-timey English factory,” in the words of military aviation expert Gary Wetzel, and two aircraft were lost attempting to land on it before Admiral Kuznetsov returned home for a two-and-a-half year refit.

Interestingly, Putin’s praise of Russian weapons usually carries the curious note (e.g. here and here) that any and all defects uncovered during combat trials will be fixed — suggesting keen awareness that too many Russians serving in Syria have experienced equipment failures for unqualified boasts to be taken seriously by the public. Russia has lost of up to thirteen fixed-wing aircraft and five helicopters to hostile fire and accidents.

As impressive as footage of Russia’s cutting-edge Su-34 strike fighter hitting targets with guided missiles may be, the overwhelming majority of sorties have been flown by older-generation Su-24 and Su-25 aircraft dropping unguided munitions from high altitudes. This is partly for practical reasons. The vast majority of these aircraft aren’t fitted with targeting pods for precision attacks. Moreover, “lacking in the ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] assets necessary to conduct information-driven combat operations,” according to a new report on Russia’s military performance by Michael Kofman and Mathew Rojansky, the Russian Air Force couldn’t make very effective use of guided munitions in Syria even if it were so equipped. “Advanced capabilities are superfluous on a routine Russian sortie over Syria, which consists of dropping tons of explosives on hospitals and bakeries,” British journalist Anshel Pfeffer wryly notes.

In fact, the Russian Air Force appears to have deliberately employed the same types of “dumb” bombs in use by its Syrian counterpart so as to confound war crimes investigators. “I suspect they want to use those munitions because it makes attribution more difficult,” said one UN official.

Moscow’s reluctance to operate advanced aircraft in Syria may also reflect security concerns. Putin has insisted on keeping the Russian footprint in Syria small, just 4,000 or so uniformed Russian servicemen — inadequate to guarantee the security of an air base in the middle of a civil war. On December 31, 2017, a rebel mortar attack on Hmeimim air base reportedly damaged or destroyed seven Russian aircraft. A sophisticated rebel drone attack on the base in January miraculously damaged no aircraft.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been benefits to the deployment. Combat testing of new weapons systems is always valuable, even — indeed, especially — when the results leave much to be desired. Moscow has rapidly rotated troops and commanders in and out of Syria, giving a taste of combat experience to a wide pool of both. But it doesn’t take much practice to indiscriminately target civilians.

Gary C. Gambill is a Philadelphia-based policy analyst. Follow him at Twitter and Facebook.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel