Kanal13A joint U.S.–Israel airstrike struck deep into Iran, reportedly killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with several senior military and political officials. The operation has also brought scrutiny over the performance of Iran’s air defense network, an intricate system built from Russian and Chinese imports alongside domestically-developed platforms. According to analysts and experts, the results exposed deep structural weaknesses in Tehran’s defensive architecture.
Russian and Soviet air and missile defense systems in Iran proved unprepared to counter American air strikes, according to Alexander Kovalenko, a military and political observer with the Information Resistance group, speaking on Radio NV. The expert noted that Iran’s defensive weapons were primarily Soviet and Russian air defense systems. “The fact is that they don’t demonstrate high-quality countermeasures against American or Israeli assets—the Tomahawk cruise missiles, fifth-generation F-35 fighters, and other more modern models, which have undergone multiple modernization phases, such as the F-15, F-15E, and F-15EX. And all of this has had its effect.
A backward, sanctions-constrained country like Iran is left without air defense capabilities, and its airspace is now open to attacks,” Kovalenko noted. Therefore, in his opinion, there is a noticeable difference in how American generals plan operations and how they achieve their goals through carrier strike groups. He was also asked how fair it is to say that part of the success of the American-Israeli operation in Iran is that Soviet and Russian air defense systems demonstrated their inadequacy. “It’s fair to say so, because Soviet air defense systems have repeatedly demonstrated relatively low effectiveness in intercepting modern aircraft and modern weapons,” Kovalenko emphasized. He added that this could be seen repeatedly in the example of the war between Ukraine and Russia. “The same applies to aviation. Everything Iran had was outdated, technically and technologically backward. They were already obsolete, both morally and technically. And all of this impacted Iran’s ability to counter US and Israeli strikes,” Kovalenko emphasized.
The observer added that Soviet air defense systems in Iran were merely serviced and repaired, while the Russian air defense systems delivered to Iran were a major upgrade of Soviet systems. These systems are a generation behind Western models. Taiwan’s “Liberty Times” reported that Iran’s air defense network is a hybrid system composed primarily of Russian and Chinese equipment integrated with indigenous systems. China’s HQ-9B air defense systems and related electronic components likewise struggled with data-link integration in live combat. Meanwhile, Iran’s domestically developed Bavar-373 and Ghadir systems demonstrated detection capabilities but proved unstable under sustained electronic warfare interference. Shu Hsiao-huang, a scholar at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, argued that the U.S. military’s suppression of enemy air defenses was highly effective.
He speculated that Washington combined “hard kill” physical destruction, “soft kill” electronic interference, and cyber operations to disable Iranian radar systems. The campaign, he said, validates recent U.S. investments in fifth-generation fighters, long-range precision weapons, and loitering munitions.
