Russian and Chinese air defences: what did we learn from Venezuela?

Tuesday 3 February 2026

The United States strike on Caracas on 3 January 2026, culminating in the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, was immediately framed by Washington’s supporters as proof that Russian and Chinese air defences can be brushed aside by American military technology and operational art. For Moscow and Beijing, the same episode has been treated as a warning about the vulnerability of export-model systems, the fragility of peacetime readiness and the dangers of political theatre masquerading as deterrence. 

Yet the event is a poor measuring stick if used carelessly. A short, surprise raid against a country with uneven training standards and uncertain readiness cannot be equated with the problem the United States would face in a major conflict against Russia or China, where air defence is not merely a set of missile batteries but a living, layered system of sensors, command networks, fighter aircraft, electronic warfare, camouflage and decoys, sustained by doctrine and repetition. Even so, Caracas offers a useful lens because it invites a specific question: what, precisely, do Russian and Chinese air defences do well, what do they do badly and which parts of American capability matter most when the target’s airspace is meant to be lethal?

What Caracas actually shows and what she does not

If reporting is broadly accurate, Venezuela fielded an assortment of Russian-made systems, including legacy and modern elements, and nevertheless failed to shoot down American aircraft during the raid. Analysts cited factors that are mundane but decisive: readiness levels, maintenance, crew proficiency, command and control, surprise and the possibility that radars were blinded or confused by electronic and cyber effects. 

Those “mundane” factors are the heart of the matter. Air defence is not a single weapon. It is a daily discipline. The most sophisticated radar is reduced to scrap if it is not powered, networked, calibrated and defended, and if the crew is not drilled to interpret uncertainty at speed. Caracas therefore hints less at the inherent weakness of Russian or Chinese design, and more at the common weakness of air defence as an organisational endeavour, especially in states that buy prestige systems without building the institutions that make them bite.

This distinction matters because Russia and China do not treat air defence as decorative. They treat it as a strategic instrument, one of the foundations of their ability to deny an opponent the airspace needed for close support, reconnaissance, rapid logistics and political signalling. A raid against Venezuela is, at most, a demonstration of what the United States can do to a smaller state’s imperfectly sustained shield. It is not proof that America can glide through Russia’s or China’s home networks at will.

The Russian model: a thick shield, not an invincible one

Russian air defence is formidable in concept because it is designed for a particular strategic aim: to make airspace costly enough that a technologically superior opponent hesitates, slows or fights on unfavourable terms. The Russian integrated air defence system combines long-range surface-to-air missiles, medium-range systems, short-range point defence, early warning radars, fighter aviation and electronic warfare into a layered architecture intended to create overlapping engagement zones. RUSI’s assessment, written with NATO’s problem in mind, is blunt: the question is not whether the Russian system can be degraded, but whether an opponent can do so fast enough to avoid being strategically paralysed in the early phase of a conflict. 

The system’s strength is density and variety. If one radar is suppressed, another may still contribute. If one missile type is defeated by a particular countermeasure, another may have a different seeker or engagement profile. If a strike package chooses standoff weapons to avoid the inner rings, then the campaign becomes a contest of magazines, logistics and tempo. In other words Russia does not need perfect interception rates. She needs to deny certainty.

But Russia’s performance in Ukraine has revealed limits that matter when judging her system against the United States. Modern war has become saturated with small drones, decoys, mixed salvos and rapid adaptation. Ukraine’s evolving air defence architecture has been pressured by enormous volumes of Russian drones and missiles, and in that contest both sides have had to accept that no system is flawless, only more or less resilient.  A layered network can be tactically successful while still being strategically strained if it must defend too many targets, too often, against too many cheap threats.

For Russia the uncomfortable lesson is that air defence cannot escape attrition. Radars are targeted. Launchers are hunted. Crews are exhausted. Command nodes become predictable. The “shield” remains dangerous, but it is not a force field. If a smaller air force can sometimes expose seams, the United States, with stealth aircraft, stand-off munitions, electronic attack and specialised suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD) doctrine, is built to widen those seams into corridors, at least temporarily.

The Chinese model: industrial depth and a system built for a theatre

China’s air defence problem is different from Russia’s. Beijing is preparing for a theatre in which the United States would fight far from home bases, across oceanic distances, under intense surveillance and missile threat, and under political constraints imposed by escalation risks. China’s air defence therefore sits inside a broader anti-access and area denial design, where long-range sensors, fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles and the ability to strike airfields, tankers and command nodes all reinforce one another. RAND’s long-running work on the balance in the Western Pacific has consistently emphasised the advantage of proximity for China in plausible contingencies. 

A crucial difference from Venezuela is industrial and organisational scale. China does not merely purchase radars; she manufactures them, iterates them and integrates them into joint structures. The United States Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute has mapped the breadth of China’s air defence radar industrial base and the ways in which radar data sharing lowers barriers to joint integration. This matters because, in a high-end fight, resilience is not just the performance of a single radar or missile, but the ability to reconstitute, redeploy, replace and relearn faster than the attacker can dismantle.

That said, China’s confidence in “anti-stealth” marketing should be treated with caution. Meter-wave and VHF radars can sometimes detect the presence of low-observable aircraft, but detection is not the same as fire control. Turning a faint indication into a track, and a track into a missile-quality solution, is the hard part, especially under electronic attack. Caracas, if anything, is a reminder that export narratives and operational truth can diverge sharply, particularly when systems are operated by partners without China’s training pipeline and command culture.

What American technology actually changes

The temptation is to attribute success to a secret weapon, or a single breakthrough. The more persuasive explanation is less dramatic: the United States is still the world’s most mature practitioner of multi-domain strike, where aircraft, cyber effects, electronic warfare, space-based support and stand-off munitions are planned as one design rather than separate gestures.

In modern SEAD, stealth is not merely invisibility. It is time and geometry. A stealth aircraft can approach closer, see more, classify threats faster and launch weapons from positions that complicate an air defender’s decision cycle. Electronic attack can deny confidence, forcing operators to choose between emitting and surviving. Cyber operations can disrupt data flows or create delays at the moment when seconds matter. And stand-off weapons can dismantle key nodes without exposing pilots to the innermost rings.

Recent United States discussions of SEAD highlight the continued development of anti-radiation weapons such as the AGM-88E and the extended-range AARGM-ER, alongside the operational idea of stealth aircraft “kicking down the door” for the strike package. The point is not that Russia’s or China’s systems are obsolete. The point is that the American approach is designed to manufacture temporary local superiority inside contested airspace, often long enough to achieve a specific objective, even if holding that superiority indefinitely would be far harder.

How strong are Russian and Chinese air defences against the United States?

If “strong” means “capable of making American air operations dangerous and expensive”, then both are strong, and China may be the more consequential problem because she combines air defence with theatre-wide strike and industrial replenishment, while the United States must project power across distance. If “strong” means “able to prevent American penetration under all circumstances,” then neither is strong, because no air defence can guarantee that, especially against an opponent built around stealth, electronic warfare, intelligence and specialised suppression.

Caracas, taken at face value, suggests three practical conclusions.

First, export systems do not equal home systems. The same model of missile battery can perform very differently depending on training, maintenance, readiness, command integration and political willingness to keep radars emitting in peacetime. Venezuela’s failure to register kills, if accurately reported, is as much an institutional judgement as a technological one. 

Second, Russian and Chinese air defences remain potent chiefly as systems, not as individual launchers. Their most dangerous feature is the uncertainty they impose, the way they slow an attacker’s tempo and force costly choices. That is why serious Western analysis treats their integrated networks as major operational obstacles rather than mere targets. 

Third, the United States advantage is not a single aircraft or missile but the ability to combine effects and to do so repeatedly. A spectacular raid can be executed once. The harder test is sustaining pressure day after day while the defender adapts, disperses, deceives and replenishes. That is where China’s industrial depth, and Russia’s experience of operating under fire, become more relevant than the drama of a single night in Caracas.

For European readers the strategic implication is uncomfortable. If the United States can puncture a smaller state’s Russian-supplied air defences, that should not breed complacency about Russia herself. Nor should it encourage the fantasy that air defence is a solved problem for any side. Air defence is a contest of learning speed, organisational competence and the willingness to absorb losses. Caracas may have provided Washington with a morale-boosting story, but it also provided Moscow and Beijing with a live demonstration of what they must assume the United States will attempt first: to blind, confuse and dismember the system, not to duel with it fairly.