[Sinéad Baker: Business Insider Africa]
By comparison, Iran’s air force looks a lot like a plane museum
Israel swiftly seized air superiority over parts of Iran during the latest fight, showing that it’s still possible in modern, higher-end warfare to heavily dominate an enemy’s skies.
Military officials and experts warn that air superiority may not be possible in modern warfare.
Israel, however, was able to quickly achieve it against Iran.
Iran, though capable, isn’t bringing the same fight that a foe like Russia or China could.
But there’s a risk in taking the wrong lesson from that win. Iran isn’t Russia or China, and as the West readies for potential near-peer conflict, it really can’t afford to forget that, officials and experts have cautioned.
Western military officials and warfare experts have repeatedly warned in recent years that achieving air superiority against those countries would be a daunting task.
Russia and China, especially the latter, boast sophisticated, integrated air defense networks with ground-based interceptors well supported by capable air forces, electronic warfare, and reliable space-based and airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
Air superiority in a limited theater is not the same as breaking through a complex anti-access, area-denial setup.
Israel’s victory in the air war over Iran shows that air superiority is “not impossible” in modern warfare, former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, a warfare strategist, explained.
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That said, he continued, a Western conflict with Russia or China would be “very different.”
A victory in the air for Israel
Israel attacked nuclear and military sites in Iran in bombing runs and eliminated dozens of Iranian air defense batteries.
Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said it “highlights what you can do with a modern air force against some, on paper, fairly impressive defenses.”
Iran maintained a capable layered air defense network featuring domestic systems, foreign-supplied defenses, and some modernized older systems. Though only semi-integrated compared to fully networked air defenses, it presented an obstacle.
Israel dismantled Iranian defenses over multiple engagements through extensive planning, detailed intelligence, and the employment of combat-proven airpower, specifically fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighters built for penetration and suppression of enemy air defenses and fourth-generation F-15s and F-16s, which can also support that mission.
Important to Israel’s success in the latest fight with Iran were the engagements last year that substantially weakened Iranian air defense capabilities, as well as Israel’s skills in this mission.
Failures and aircraft losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War led it to reevaluate how it approached enemy air defenses, in many ways leading to the emergence of the kind of missions used against Iran.
Ed Arnold, a security expert at RUSI, said that Israel reporting no aircraft losses “was significant, and it just showed that, yeah, you can get air supremacy very quickly.” The caveat there is that doing so requires the right tactics, weapons, and intelligence, but even then, it is not guaranteed.
Retired Air Commodore Andrew Curtis, an airfare expert with a 35-year career in the Royal Air Force, told BI “the situation that everybody’s been used to over the last 30 years is air supremacy,” but when it comes to high-intensity war against a near-peer adverary, realistically, “those days are long gone.”
Iran had air defenses, but not airpower. It’s air force is largely made up of obsolete Western, Soviet, and Chinese aircraft.
The ground-based surface-to-air missile batteries are more capable, but that’s only one part of the defensive picture.
Curtis explained that Iran has “very little in the way of air defense aircraft, whereas of course Russia, and especially China, has stacks of them.” Both Russia and China field fourth-generation-plus aircraft, as well as fifth-generation fighters.
China, in particular, has multiple fifth-gen fighters in various stages of development, and there are indications it’s working on sixth-generation prototypes. By comparison, Iran’s air force looks a lot like a plane museum.
But they also boast more advanced and more effective air defenses. Bronk said Russia’s defenses are “better networked, more capable, more numerous, and more densely layered than Iran’s.”
He said that if the West rolled back the SAM threat, it would likely be able to overcome Russia’s air force, but China is a different story.
China has a complex integrated air defense network supported by ground-based air defenses, naval air defenses, and what Bronk characterized as “an increasingly very capable modern air force,” among other capabilities. And China also has a “far greater and more sophisticated missile arsenal for striking bases” to hamstring an enemy’s airpower.
Additionally, it holds a strong economic position with an industrial base that is turning out high-end weapons.
China has also been tremendously increasing its number of interceptors without really expending any, unlike the US, which has been burning through interceptors in Middle Eastern conflicts.
Not all of China has the same protections, but breaking through defenses would likely represent a substantial challenge in a conflict, especially in something like a Taiwan contingency.
A conflict between the West and China could look like “a more traditional air war” — something not seen in a long time, Curtis said, explaining that air-to-air combat could make a comeback, with pilots again shooting down enemy planes. “In a peer-on-peer conflict, certainly with China, you would see a lot of that, because China has got a lot of air assets.”
Achieving air superiority, as Israel did recently and as the US did in the Gulf War in the 1990s and in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, has been crucial to the Western way of war, often serving as a tool to enable ground maneuvers.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which failed to knock out Ukraine’s air defenses, now far more robust than at the start of the war, has shown what a conflict looks like when it isn’t achieved. Aircrafts are shot out of the sky, and ground forces are locked in grinding slogs.
Devastating long-range attacks are still possible, but quick victory is generally not.
It has resulted in some stark warnings for future warfare.
Speaking on air superiority, Gen. James Hecker, the commander of NATO’s air command, warned last year that “it’s not a given.” He added that “if we can’t get air superiority, we’re going to be doing the fight that’s going on in Russia and Ukraine right now.”
Other military leaders have said that air superiority may only be achieved in short bursts. War is full of surprises, but evidence indicates that’s a real possibility.
Curtis said air planners now have to focus on specific priorities, like protecting air bases, and figuring out how to achieve a “localized time-bound air superiority or air supremacy in support of a short-term mission or operation.”
“It’s a different mindset,” he said.
The key in future wars will be to seize control of as much of the aerial battlespace as possible to do what’s necessary in the moment, all while holding firm defensively, as Israel did against Iran’s retaliatory ballistic missile strikes, experts said.
That means maintaining a strong air force and strong air defenses.
“Nothing in Ukraine or Israel has shown that air superiority isn’t needed in the future,” Ryan shared. “I think they’ve both shown that having air superiority is an extraordinarily important part of warfare and remains so.
[Sinéad Baker: Business Insider Africa]
