Despite Israeli strikes, US wary of Syria air defenses

Israeli missiles breached Syria’s vaunted air defense system over the weekend, but that offered little comfort to US military planners weighing the risks of any intervention against President Bashar Assad’s forces.
With some of the possible US military options in Syria involving a need for air power, the Pentagon remains concerned about Assad’s ability to shoot down enemy aircraft with surface-to-air missiles, particularly in a sustained campaign.
President Barack Obama has resisted pressure to deepen involvement in Syria’s civil war and has stopped short of even limited steps like arming the anti-government rebels.
If the United States did become more embroiled in Syria — perhaps in reaction to Damascus using chemical weapons — and wanted to wage a large air campaign there it would likely first need to take out Syria’s Russian-made air shield.
While the effectiveness of Syria’s aging air force is unclear, most experts believe its air-defense missile system, considerably upgraded after a 2007 Israeli strike on a suspected nuclear site, remains more potent than any the United States has faced since it bombed Serbian forces in 1999.
“These recent events have not changed our assessment of the sophistication of the Syrian air defense system,” said a senior US official. That said, the United States does indeed have the power to wipe out Syria’s air defenses.
Syria has little or no protection against hard-to-stop weapons in the US arsenal like B-2 stealth bombers or ship- and submarine-launched cruise missiles. Still, it would require a huge assault involving cruise missiles, and jets possibly flying either from aircraft carriers or bases in neighboring countries.
Israeli jets managed to avoid Syrian defenses twice again in recent days, but the raids were surprise strikes that experts said would have been difficult to defend against. US officials said last week the Israelis did not even enter Syrian airspace in Friday’s bombing, firing missiles instead from the skies over neighboring Lebanon. US jets would be far more at risk if they tried to impose a no-fly zone over Syria or to protect “safe zones” on the ground, which would almost certainly require operations over the country for long periods of time.
The Pentagon estimates than Syria has five times more air defenses than those that existed in Libya, where the United States helped establish a no-fly zone in 2011. They are also far more densely packed and sophisticated.
In Libya, there were no Western casualties. But the risks are higher in Syria and it’s unclear whether the war-weary American public — exhausted by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan — would tolerate US casualties.
Before the Syrian civil war began, Western analysts estimated that Assad had around 25 air-defense brigades with some 150 surface-to-air missile launchers.
Many of Syria’s anti-aircraft missiles are mobile, which means Assad’s forces could choose to locate them near schools or apartment buildings, hoping US forces might avoid targeting them for fear of causing civilian casualties. The density of the defenses raises the risk of civilian deaths.
The shooting down of a Turkish F4 Phantom reconnaissance jet as it neared the Syrian coast last year demonstrated Syria’s quick-reaction air defenses. But the United States and its allies have options that could make such action safer.
Given the large number of casualties in Syria that are caused by artillery, US forces might need also to strike government artillery if they wanted genuinely to protect any opposition-held “safe zones” on the ground.
General Martin Dempsey, the top US military officer, told the Senate last month: "The safe zone is only safe if you ensure its safety." "You have to control the terrain at some distance beyond it in order to do that." The Predator, Reaper and Global Hawk-type drones on which Washington has come to rely in Afghanistan — where US air power is virtually unchallenged —would be of little use until Syrian air defenses were neutralized. Those aircraft were not designed to defend themselves from attack.