Russian media: Israel jamming Syrian aerial defense systems due to poor missile success rates
The Russian site Avia.pro claims to have learned that the actual success rate of Israeli attacks on targets in Syria is only 30-40%.
“In light of this, Israel has begun to jam the Syrian aerial defense systems, in order to somehow improve the effectiveness of the attacks,” the authors write, without specifying their sources.
Israel has not actually commented on its use of electronic warfare systems in an attack on Syria’s Al-Harra province. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to Israel’s involvement in the attack when he said that “we will not allow the enemy to entrench itself in Syria”, but no technical details have been provided by the Israelis.
The imaginations of Russian military columnists have been running wild recently. The same Avia.pro reported previously that the Israeli military had been launching “aerostat decoys” from the Golan Heights in an attempt to identify the location of Syria’s S-300 anti-air systems.
Citing an anonymous expert, the authors claimed that while the IDF’s aerostats were in range of the Israeli missile defense systems, Syria’s radio intelligence division was able to intercept their data transmissions and calculate the friend-or-foe codes.
This story was republished and embellished by other Russian news outlets, which claimed that Israel had nearly lost its Iron Dome system.
This is all far from the truth. The Israeli specialists, unlike anonymous Russian experts, are not stupid enough to let the enemy work out its codes, especially given the crampedness of the region and its accessibility to detectors. In the unlikely scenario of such a compromise, the codes would simply be changed.
Such reports in the pro-Kremlin media demonstrate that Israel’s military successes and the impotence of the Russian aerial defense systems used by Syria are galling to the “patriotic” community in Russia. In keeping with the psychological theory of the “collective unconscious”, the frustration of the Russian military is replaced by fantasies and dreams of Israel failing. These fantasies replace reality in the Russian public consciousness, indicating the onset of a collective delusion.