On 14 April, the United States, together with Britain and France, launched a series of pre-dawn strikes on Syria in response to its alleged chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma a week before. The Pentagon said in a subsequent briefing that the joint operation “successfully hit” the three installations targeted, adding that it “significantly crippled” the Bashar Assad government’s ability to use poison gas on its own people.
For the past two weeks, the commentariat has been awash with expert analysis of the geopolitical dimensions of the attack. Its military ones are no less important though. What is striking about the operation from the military perspective is the allies’ exclusive use of precision standoff munitions a la the 2017 Shayrat attack; any future strike on the Assad regime is likely to use the same modus operandi.
The West fired a total of 105 such weapons at Syria on 14 April. The United States contributed 66 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (TLAMs) and 19 joint air-to-surface standoff missiles (JASSMs) to the attack. The Anglo-French effort consisted of eight British Storm Shadow cruise missiles and nine of its French version, the SCALP, as well as three French naval cruise missiles, or MDCNs. The TLAMs and MDCNs were fired from naval platforms with the rest of the munitions being air-launched.
Rationale
All of these weapons are designed to be fired from standoff range so that their launching platforms can stay a safe distance from enemy air defenses. The longest range of the lot, the TLAM, can hit targets some 1,600 kilometers away, while the JASSM has a striking reach of more than 370 km. The European missiles used in the strike are just as capable given that they can hit targets a few hundred kilometers away.
The West’s enduring fear of losing men and materiel is arguably the main reason behind its exclusive use of standoff weapons. Russia has a robust counterair presence in Syria in the form of the much-vaulted S-300/400 long-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), as well as variants of the fourth-generation “Flanker” jet fighter. The S-300 can hit targets up to 150 km away, while the S-400 has a range of 400 km, making it one of the longest-range SAMs in the world. The S-400 also is said to have the ability to detect stealth aircraft such as the American F-35 and B-2.
While Russia was unlikely to fire at Western forces despite its usual rhetoric and “the triple-digit” SAM systems have not been combat tested, the West chose the “better safe than sorry” route with its standoff weapons-only option for the Syria attack. Should any aircraft and its crew be downed because this option was not chosen, there would invariably be significant political implications in theater as well as back home. As a matter of fact, President Donald Trump last month announced that he wanted an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, only to make a U-turn not long after. Any U.S. losses in what many deemed as a war of choice therefore would not be taken to very well.
Trend Likely to Continue
A future strike against the Assad regime likely is to resemble the ones that came before it, with the extensive use of standoff weapons to avert losses. Moscow reportedly said that it would sell the S-300 SAM to Damascus, and this would significantly boost the Assad regime’s air defenses. After all, the best of such systems currently in Syrian hands is the S-200 that was designed in the 1960s, and eight of this weapon fired did not intercept any of the Western missiles during the attack. Indeed, the Pentagon maintained that the entire Syrian air-defense system failed to engage any of the 105 missiles fired by the allies during the strike.
Even if the S-300 sale does not transpire, the continued presence of long-range Russian counterair capabilities in Syria would weigh heavily on the minds of Western military planners. Also noteworthy is that Washington and its allies are not seeking to topple the Assad regime. This means that a sustained air campaign is not required. Under such circumstances, the solitary strike using cruise missiles remains the best option for the United States and its allies during any future Syria military operation.
Limitations
While standoff munitions are effective—witness the precise destruction of the three installations hit on 14 April—they are expensive (and hence limited in quantity) compared to old-fashioned gravity bombs. To illustrate, Tomahawks costs slightly more than a million dollars each. The Storm Shadow and its French variants come with roughly equivalent price tags. In stark contrast, the joint direct attack munition guidance system that is fitted to “dumb” bombs ranging in size from 230 kg to 910 kg is relatively cheap at $22,000 a piece. That said, cruise missiles do not afford users the flexibility found in gravity ordnance. The various munitions employed during the Syria attack all had a warhead weighing some 450 kg, and there will be occasions where raining this amount of explosives on a target is not tactically appropriate.
The finite supply of expensive cruise missiles also means that the West would not be able to launch an operation that is much more sustained than the past two Syrian strikes. While one-off cruise missile-only barrages enable the attacker to be seen to be “doing something,” question marks remain over their combat utility despite the relative success of the attack. It was just more than a year ago that the ineffectiveness of the cruise missile attack on Shayrat air base was laid bare, as Syrian warplanes reportedly were operating from the base hours after it was struck by 59 TLAMs.
Final thoughts
Notwithstanding the limitations of precision standoff munitions, they have been and will remain the choice of weapon for the Western democracies going forward, especially with potential adversaries developing long-range antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) systems apace. It is noteworthy that Pentagon initially announced—wrongly as it turned out—that the extended-range (ER) variant of the JASSM was used against Syria, and its supposed successful debut led some to proclaim that the missile could be a solution to the U.S. Navy’s A2/AD problem. Washington subsequently corrected its earlier statement by saying that the standard variant of the weapon was used instead.
To be sure, the JASSM-ER’s 1,000-odd km range would enable its mother platform to stay farther out of the targeting envelopes of A2/AD-centric nations like Russia and China. However, the notion of a “game-changing” weapons is arguably overstated. Such weapons “trivializes the whole operational art of war,” defense analyst Richard Bitzinger stressed. “It reduces war fighting to just hardware. But war and conflict are more than just equipment – they are tactics and training, leadership and morale, geography, logistics, and just plain luck.” At the end of the day, the utility and promise of standoff munitions cannot be denied, but it would perhaps be a tad premature to draw any firm conclusions from their use during a single and fairly uncontested operation like the tripartite Syria attack of 14 April 2018.
