Following up on an item that I shared as part of yesterday’s Venezuela post, ESR expands on the notion that China (among other potentially hostile nations) will be having a lot of time to rethink due to the noted failure of Russian SAM-300s, Chinese anti-air radar, and other high tech items fielded by the Venezuelan military:
I’ve been contemplating the reactions to this post and I realized there is an important point about which I should have been clearer. There are several different ways in which Chinese radars can just NOT FUCKING WORK. My point was intended to be that almost all of them create huge operational uncertainty for the Chinese.
I gather a lot of people thought that “not fucking work” means they’re intrinsically shitty and would fail to do their job even in the absence of countermeasures. I think this is possible, but unlikely.
There are other values of not fucking work. Including:
* Easily neutralized by ECM.
* Easily taken out by cheap anti-rad missiles or drones.
* Easily fried by some kind of monster secret HERF gun.
* U.S. anti-radar stealth is good. I mean, really, mind-bogglingly good. Better than anybody without a top-secret security clearance knows.
Out of all the possibilities, the only scenario that does not threaten the sphincter control of Chinese military planners is “Venezuelan air defense had stand-down orders”. And if that were true, I’m pretty sure it would already have leaked.
