Missile Mystery.

The article explores Georgia's relative success against the Russian air force and the failure of Syria's Russian-made air defenses against the Israeli air force. U.S. analysts suggest that the simplicity of the Georgian air defenses, with far less dependence on networking, made it tougher to knock out or blind major parts of the system. The exploitability of Russian-designed and -built defenses was demonstrated in 2007 when the Israeli air force totally shut down Syrian air defenses prior to bombing a suspected nuclear site.