Assessing Iran's Air Defense Capability

Recently I discussed the possibility some have raised of what it would take to occupy Iran--or for that matter, fight a ground war with it. The requisite numbers, along with the country's geographical position (any approach to Iran would be far different from an invasion of Iraq from the south) makes a major ground clash appear comparatively implausible.

What does seem more plausible--as highlighted by Iran's downing of a Global Hawk drone last week--is a conflict fought in the air, which has raised the question of the capabilities of Iran's air defenses.

According to most counts, Iran has a couple of hundred fighters, five hundred or so surface-to-air missile launchers, and seventeen hundred anti-aircraft guns. It might be noted that the Iranian systems today are in the main older aircraft--F-4s, F-5s, and MiG-21 variants comprising over half the fleet, with the most advanced of them just some thirty or so export versions of early model MiG-29s (while the country may dispose of another forty or so early model F-14s). And while Iran's purchases of S-300 SAMs from Russia get all the press, the great bulk of its SAM force consists of older and mostly much less capable Hawks, SA-2s and Crotales. The guns are similarly old models (Soviet-made 23 mm, 37 mm, 57 mm and 85 mm cannon).

By contrast in 1991 Iraq had three hundred fighter planes, seven hundred SAM launchers and four thousand guns--more systems, covering a country just a third Iran's size, and of roughly the same types, many already obsolescent or obsolete then, but not so much as they would be a whole three decades later in comparison with America's state-of-the-art. (There were no F-22s or F-35s, no B-1s or B-2s, to say the least of the matter.)

The result was that, if far from a cutting edge force, Iraq's air defense system still utilized a far larger collection of systems, by the standard of the time more technically advanced and deployed rather more densely than is the case with Iran. Moreover, questions unavoidably hang over the serviceability of the still very substantial American and British-made component of these forces (in spite of claims that Iran has been able to keep them operational on the basis of third-party purchases and its indigenous manufacturing resources)--while the fact that, for all the difficulties they pose, Iran keeps them in service bespeaks its limited ability to get large numbers of more modern, more convenient replacements.

Of course, attentiveness to the guns and missile launchers only takes one so far. There is the question of the radar coverage of the country, the command and control systems, the training of crews, the serviceability of all that equipment and its robustness in the face of electronic or cyber-attack--more abstruse matters lending themselves less well to sound bites and tidy quantification and neat tables for side by side comparisons. By and large armed forces tend to skimp on such essentials in favors of the flashy systems, the more so in as they are cash-strapped or developing--and certainly Iran's forces appear to have been in poor condition in these respects just a decade ago.

In short, Iran's capabilities on this score appear less than formidable.

Still, this assessment does not include the possible supplementary role of indigenous Iranian systems. Often not mentioned at all in comprehensive assessments (consult, for example, a recent edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' Military Balance), they got more attention after the report that the missile that downed an American Global Hawk this June was one of its domestically produced models. I have not found much in the way of comprehensive overviews of the types and numbers of these weapons--with the principal exception the Wikipedia page devoted to Iran's Air Defense Force.

When I checked the page in question (on June 27 of this year) it reported that Iran has deployed over a thousand such long-range surface-to-air missile launchers (100 km range or more), citing over four hundred Sayyad-1s; more than a hundred and fifty Sayyad-2 and Sayyad-3 systems; over four hundred locally upgraded S-200s (in contrast with the handful of examples it was supposed to have); and over a dozen Bavar-373 missile batteries which Iran claims have successfully shot down ballistic missiles in tests. Supplementing them in this listing are some five hundred medium-range SAM launchers, of the Raad (150+), Mersad (300+) and Kamin-2 (?) types, and a roughly equal number of short-range types (some two hundred-plus Ya Zahara-3 and Herz-9 missile launchers).

Amounting to some two thousand more launchers in all, this multiplies the number of launchers fivefold, and the number of long-range launchers perhaps twenty-five-fold (such that a few more or less S-300s seem nearly trivial).

Meanwhile, many credit Iran with having made significant progress in improving the deeper functioning of its air defense system in the past several years. At least one assessment from the Washington Institute claims "significant" progress there since 2011, stressing, besides the number of weapons, a comprehensive system of sectoral command centers subordinate to a national center enjoying a "comprehensive threat picture" enabling it to exercise effective control over the whole. Additionally the oft-noted variety of Iranian radar systems, while a "maintenance nightmare" means "any opponent must find a solution for facing multiple radars at once," complicating the defense suppression efforts so key to avoiding U.S. combat losses in past wars, and includes some reputedly high-quality Russian and Chinese systems (such as over-the-horizon radars which may have significant capability against currently cutting edge stealth aircraft).

All of this would potentially be game-changing, making Iranian air defenses much, much tougher than the more restricted listings suggest. However, the Wikipedia article does not provide sources for its grandiose claims--and for that matter, neither does the Washington Institute piece, which is, to be frank, fairly superficial. (It offers some discussion of the structure of Iran's air defense establishment and makes reference to recent exercises--but offers no real clue as to how well all this would work, let alone concrete support for such claims on the basis of those exercises. And the Institute is, of course, a right-wing think tank selling a hawkish line on "the Iranian threat," making vagueness the more suspect.)

Moreover, there is ample reason for skepticism. Many writers seem incapable of telling the difference between a launcher and a battery. (Iran imported 32 S-300 launchers; one item I saw from a relatively reputable think tank claimed it was 32 batteries, a very different thing, with an S-300 battery having up to eight launchers.) This seems all the more problematic given that Western analysts have, with some plausibility, long argued for Iranian claims on behalf of their advanced indigenous weaponry consistently proving shabby hoaxes on close examination. Even assuming that Iran has deployed large numbers of such SAMs, their quality is, as a practical matter, unknown for lack of prior combat use. (A single downing of an unmanned, non-stealth aircraft in unclear circumstances does not necessarily reveal very much about even the system in question, let alone the broader gamut of them.) And of course, the assessment of command and control capabilities and the like is a subtler matter still.

The upshot of this is that there seems wide room for argument. The most well-grounded claims give the impression that Iran would not be much better able than other states the U.S. has faced in recent decades (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya) to counter American air power--with the result that even a large-scale, prolonged campaign may see few or even no losses of manned U.S. combat aircraft to enemy action, especially if it concentrates on strategic and fixed targets rather than forces in the field (where low-altitude operations would entail increased vulnerability to ground fire). However, if one takes seriously the claims made for Iran's deployment of massive numbers of advanced, medium- and long-range SAMs; and considerable upgrading of the system tying them together into a coherent defense of its aerospace; Iran's systems may pose a challenge such as the U.S. has not seen since at least the Vietnam era. Even that, however, appears slight next to the bigger danger of a wider conflict--which, even as the news buzzes with headlines about war with Iran at the very same time that it buzzes about Russian troops in Syria, Russo-American competition over Turkey, and cyber-war against Russia's electrical grid, astonishingly few seem to acknowledge as part of the picture.