When Caracas cracked: How the US broke through Venezuela's Iranian, Russian, and Chinese defenses

Operation Absolute Resolve also offered a harsh real-world test of the military hardware Venezuela had accumulated over the years from Iran, Russia, and China – a mix of air defenses, fast boats, drones, and small arms that, in theory, was meant to deter, or at least complicate any foreign intervention.

In practice, though, it did not stop a meticulously planned US strike package backed by cyber operations, electronic warfare, and precision targeting.

Social media was full of videos showing explosions in the capital and large fireballs in the night sky as air defenses attempted to respond.

By the time the raid ended, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been captured by the United States and flown out of the country to a US warship, then on to New York City to face a range of federal charges, including narcoterrorism.

“Last night and early today, at my direction, the United States armed forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. … It was an operation against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of  Caracas to bring outlaw dictator Nicolás Maduro to justice,” US President Donald Trump said during a news conference from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday.

As part of a broader defense partnership, Caracas had bought Russian air defense systems, combat aircraft, armored vehicles, and small arms; while China supplied radars, communications gear, and other dual-use technologies. Iran supported Venezuela’s development of unmanned aerial systems like the Mohajer and other asymmetric capabilities.

These systems were marketed domestically as a way to raise the cost of any American intervention and give Venezuela the ability to respond through both conventional and unconventional means.

But the American raid exposed the limits of that approach.

According to US accounts in the media, the operation followed months of preparation that included building a replica of Maduro’s compound and studying his daily habits in detail, a level of mission rehearsal that dramatically reduces the advantage of static defenses.

When the strike commenced, special operations helicopters flew at low altitudes into the heart of Caracas while US jets and bombers hit pre-selected targets, including air defense sites and other key nodes across the capital and three coastal states.

Cyber operators and intelligence agencies disrupted the city’s power supply, plunging large parts of Caracas into darkness and further degrading command and control.

In this combat environment, Venezuelan systems, regardless of origin, faced clear disadvantages. Air defenses that depend on radar and centralized command networks are highly vulnerable to coordinated kinetic and cyber strikes.

Even capable systems can be blinded or suppressed if their sensors are jammed, their power cut, and their nodes attacked simultaneously. Photos shared on social media showed the destruction of various air defense systems, including at least two Russian-made Buk-M2E belonging to Venezuela’s Air Defense Command.

“And then, we saw three nights ago in downtown Caracas in Venezuela, as nearly 200 of our greatest Americans went downtown in Caracas. Seems those Russian air defenses didn’t quite work so well, did they?” Hegseth said during a visit to Newport News Shipyard.

US Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it “an audacious operation that only the United States could do.”

“What I witnessed last night was sheer guts and grit, gallantry and glory of the American warrior,” said US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. “This is about the safety, security, freedom, and prosperity of the American people. This is America first; this is peace through strength – and the United States War Department is proud to help deliver it.”

According to some reports, one of the UAVs that played a role in the operation was the RQ-170, a low-observable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drone manufactured by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs, or Skunk Works.

According to a press release by the US Treasury Department, “Since 2006, Iran and Venezuela have coordinated Iran’s provision of Qods Aviation Industries’ (QAI) Mohajer-series UAVs for Venezuela, which are re-branded in Venezuela as ANSU-series UAVs.”

Iranian Mohajer-6 strike drones, also used by Russia in Ukraine since 2022, were reportedly deployed at the El Libertador airbase near the city of Maracay. The airbase, outside the capital, is also home to the country’s remaining American-made F-16 fighter jets.

These unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – assembled in Venezuela using Iranian designs – are best suited for surveillance, harassment, or extended campaigns against adversaries that have to operate in exposed or predictable ways.

According to the US Army’s Operational Environment Data Integration Network (ODIN) training portal, the Mohajer-6 was Iran’s first drone to enter series production and was first used during the Iran-Iraq war. There have been several variants developed since it was first unveiled.

The Qods Mohajer-6 is a persistent Intelligence Surveillance Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) UAV capable of carrying a multispectral surveillance payload and/or up to two precision-guided munitions. It has a wingspan of 10 m., a maximum range of 200 km. with an endurance of up to 12 hours, a maximum flight altitude of about 5.5 km., and has a maximum take-off weight of about 600 kg.

However, they are far less useful against a short, concentrated, surprise operation where the attacker controls the timing, tempo, and electronic environment, similar to what took place in Caracas.

Last week, the US government announced sanctions on Venezuela’s Empresa Aeronautica Nacional SA (EANSA), which locally manufactures the Mohajer UAVs and known locally as Arpia or ANSU-100.

“Treasury is holding Iran and Venezuela accountable for their aggressive and reckless proliferation of deadly weapons around the world,” said US Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) John K. Hurley.

“We will continue to take swift action to deprive those who enable Iran’s military-industrial complex access to the US financial system,” he clarified.

In his statement, Hurley also said, “Iran’s ongoing provision of conventional weapons to Caracas constitutes a threat to US interests in the Western Hemisphere, including the Homeland, and the United States will use all available measures to prevent this trade.”

While Iran has been selling weaponry to Venezuela for at least two decades, The Jerusalem Post has learnt that Israeli intelligence in the IDF never really dealt with the issue of Iranian weapons transfers to Venezuela.

“That was never part of our operational reality,” one former officer said, but “I wouldn’t be surprised if drones were involved. We’ve already seen Iran export drones to Russia.”

Another senior industry source, who spent decades in the Israeli military, said that Iranian weaponry should not be belittled.

Operation Absolute Resolve was also a reminder of how Iranian systems were unable to identify and prevent Israeli fighter jets and UAVs from striking deep within the Islamic Republic during the 12-Day War in June, known in Israel as Operation Rising Lion.

Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the board of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, told the Post in an earlier interview that the war between the two arch-enemies “was a clear demonstration of advanced technology that gave Israel an edge.

“Technology doesn’t only give an advantage, but the utmost supremacy over our enemies,” he said.

“In the first 20 seconds, top Iranian officials were all killed. And within 48 hours, Israel gained complete air supremacy over Iran. While we are a little country, we showed superpower capabilities,” Steinitz explained.

According to a senior defense industry source, in both operations, air superiority allowed troops to carry out quick, successful missions. Both Israel and the US also targeted senior commanders, with the IAF targeting senior military Islamic regime command, while the Americans targeted Maduro.

Neither Israel nor Iran deployed a significant amount of ground troops, and absolutely no traditional battlefield engagements; rather, the war was carried out with long-range ballistic missiles, precision air-to-ground munitions, cyber attacks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and more autonomous systems.

“Even when all the signs point to an attack, you can still achieve tactical surprise,” the first senior defense industry source told the Post.

“The goal of an opening strike is to knock the other side off balance for hours or even days, creating the window needed to continue the mission,” said the defense industry source. “Because the Americans had to fly special forces in – on V-22s, and none were fired upon, it’s clear they first secured air superiority, just as Israel did in its opening strikes.”

“The difference is that Israel targeted both air-defense systems and senior military command structures simultaneously. That’s what gave us air superiority for the entire duration of the conflict.

“The Americans didn’t do that here,” the source said. “Washington wanted to minimize damage and preserve the functioning of Venezuelan institutions for the day after. The real question is: Who will govern Venezuela once Maduro is removed? The US didn’t want to dismantle the military, only to conduct a surgical extraction strike against Maduro himself.”

According to the second senior defense industry source, the electronic-warfare and spectrum-dominance aspects were very similar in the two operations, six months apart.

“When you’re flying helicopters and V-22s, you can never be certain every air-defense system is down. You saturate the air with EW to protect your platforms.”

The heavy use of electronic warfare and spectrum dominance provided superiority in limited areas for a limited amount of time. That allowed aerial platforms to fly into hostile environments without too many threats, the second source explained.

Israel, he said, needs to keep investing in air superiority in order to protect warfighters in future battlefields.

Comparing the operation in Caracas and the attack on Iran, the first source explained, “Israel didn’t need helicopters or special-forces insertions. We flew fighter aircraft because we weren’t extracting anyone. The Americans deliberately created localized chaos around Maduro’s removal to reduce friction for their special-forces teams.”

Israel has “operated in extremely dense air-defense environments, relying on EW, spectrum dominance, and exploiting system limitations,” he added, pointing to Russian systems in Syria and other neighboring countries.

According to the source, while there haven’t been many Chinese systems in the Middle East, this will likely change as “Russia doesn’t have the budget or bandwidth to keep supplying Iran. Much of Iran’s air-defense arsenal is based on Russian and Chinese systems, or on Iranian versions cannibalized from them. These systems have been widely proliferated across the Middle East.”

A senior defense industry source said, “In Venezuela, assuming the systems were Russian or Chinese, there were strong EW capabilities, but most were destroyed by American Standoff missiles before they posed any real threat.”

Venezuela is said to have at least two Russian S-300VM long-range surface-to-air missile systems: the S-400, and several Buk-M2E SA-17 medium-range surface-to-air missile systems.

Russian and Chinese platforms suffered from another critical disadvantage – they were embedded in a military that had been hollowed out by years of economic collapse, corruption, and politicization.

Even sophisticated hardware requires rigorous maintenance, training, spare parts, and realistic exercises to remain effective, and in Venezuela’s case, much of the Russian-supplied equipment reportedly suffered from poor readiness and limited pilot and crew proficiency, factors that no amount of foreign hardware can easily fix.

When the US operation began, Venezuelan forces faced simultaneous shocks, loss of power in key areas, attacks on air defenses, the sudden appearance of helicopters over the capital, and strikes across multiple states that would challenge even a well-maintained and well-trained military.

The US side, by contrast, leveraged its advantages in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, cyber capabilities, and precision airpower. Around 150 jets took off from 20 airbases as part of the broader operation, underscoring the scale of the US effort and the intensity of the opening blows against Venezuelan defenses.

In such conditions, individual weapons systems, whether purchased from Russia or China or provided with Iranian assistance, are less decisive than the overall ability of a state to absorb shock, maintain situational awareness, and coordinate a coherent defense.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the foreign-supplied weapons were useless, but they were ultimately ineffective in fulfilling their most important political purpose: protecting the regime and its leadership from forcible removal.

The fact that American forces were able to penetrate deep into Caracas, fly through defenses, reach Maduro’s heavily guarded presidential compound, and extract him by helicopter, all in a few hours in the middle of the night, is the clearest possible measure of their failure in strategic terms.

The operation in South America that took place less than a year after Israel’s Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer that targeted Iran’s nuclear project, also made it clear that the technology so vaunted by the Iranian regime could not match the superiority of Western technologies.

The operation in Caracas underscored a reality that both the United States and Israel demonstrated in their recent campaigns: Modern conflict is decided less by the volume of hardware a state acquires and more by the sophistication, integration, and readiness of the forces that employ it.

For the customers buying weaponry from Iran, Russia, and China, this event is yet another cautionary tale about how their exported systems are subpar when they come up against top-tier adversaries.

Venezuela’s reliance on foreign-supplied systems proved no match for a coordinated, multi-domain assault built on advanced US technologies that fused cyber operations, electronic warfare, and precision airpower, much as Iran’s defenses collapsed under Israel’s technologically driven campaign months earlier.