המכ"מים תוצרת סין כשלו לחלוטין בעת המבצע האמריקני בוונצואלה | פרשנות

Global implications following the U.S. operation in Venezuela. Reports say Chinese-made defense radars in the country failed during the operation. What does this say about China's military readiness, implications for Taiwan, and how the U.S. should perceive the CCP? Joining us to unpack all of this is former U.S. Department of Defense Senior Director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, Tony Hu. Tony Hu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you on the show. Thank you, Tiffany. The world is still watching after Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela and the capture of Maduro. There's more and more reporting that Chinese-made radars actually failed in Venezuela during that operation. First, what's your reaction to that? We know for a fact that the Venezuelan air defense was unable to counter a U.S. strike. The reason why they failed could be due to many factors. Of course, one of the reasons might be the failure of those Chinese-made air defense radar and missiles. They did not perform as advertised. So we also don't know how well those systems were maintained. Did the Chinese just sell them for stuff and not teach them how to repair and maintain radars? And it could also be human factors where the training and proficiency of the operator. Did the Chinese teach them how to properly operate the system? So it could be an entire package problem where they sold the hardware and they didn't really give them the warfighting capability. Without the training and maintenance capability, those hardware is just nice to look at. And there also might be a breakdown between the radar and the missiles. They couldn't complete the kill process. Well, the radar might have seen a target, but they couldn't pass the information to the shooter, the missile. So it could be caused by electronic warfare by the U.S. forces. We do that, and we always use that technique to protect our forces going in. So there could be many factors. Certainly, the Chinese hardware might be one of the primary factors that caused the Venezuelans to not be able to defend against the U.S. forces. Digging into the equipment specifically, though, it seems that China advertised these, the JY-278 anti-stealth radar systems as capable of spotting and stopping U.S. stealth aircraft, saying it was either on par or even more advanced than Western capabilities. At least in terms of this operation, it looks like that failed and the world saw that. When it comes to the technology itself, what does this tell you about China's capabilities here? Yeah, China has claimed that JY-278 was developed by China, but in fact, it is a copy of the Russian NEBO-M radar that was part of the S-400 missile system cell that Russians sold to China. So it uses a VHF frequency. I don't want to get into the actual details. This frequency does not have the accuracy of a high-band radar, so it might be able to detect a target far away, but it couldn't tell the actual distance and location. So it's not as capable as the Chinese claim it to be. But that's expected because culturally, when China and Russia release their weapon performance data, it is usually much better than the actual performance. They just say, hey, we can do all this. The United States usually does the exactly opposite. When we release performance data of a weapon system, usually it's less than the actual performance. So we keep the actual performance more classified, but tell people, oh, we can only do this for 150 miles, but actually the system might reach out to 200, where the Chinese and the Russian tend to do the reverse. If the system can do 150 miles, they say, oh, we can do 250 miles. So obviously there could be some of that. And many of the users might be thinking, wow, I have this capability, but actually they don't.