Within hours, the myth of "Bolivarian military power" faded away. The first wave of bombings and drone strikes not only targeted key installations but also revealed an uncomfortable truth for chavismo: Venezuela entered the night of the attack practically blind, without effective air defense, and its combat aviation unable to respond. What had been showcased for years as a strategic deterrent turned out, at the decisive moment, to be a degraded, fragmented defense more akin to propaganda than to real warfare
A blinded and degraded anti-aircraft shield
Venezuela had bet on a mixed system of S-300, Buk, Tunguska missiles, and short-range batteries of Russian manufacture to deny airspace rather than dominate it with fighter jets.
More than half of the long-range radars were inoperable even before the attack, due to lack of maintenance, sanctions, and corruption, which diminished detection and coordination capabilities.
How the air defense was neutralized
The early morning attack on January 3 combined drones and missiles against ports, air bases (La Carlota, Maracay), Fuerte Tiuna, and command nodes; this SEAD/DEAD tactic aims to disable radars and control centers from the outset.
With damaged or interfered radars and communications under electronic warfare, many anti-aircraft batteries were left “blind” or isolated, without a clear situational picture or orders to engage in coordinated fire
The true situation of the hunters
On paper, the Bolivarian Military Aviation had American F-16s and around 20-24 Russian Sukhoi Su-30s as the backbone of its air defense
In practice, defense studies estimated that only 3-4 F-16s were truly ready for combat and that just over half of the Su-30s were capable of flying, far from sustaining a serious air campaign against the U.S.
Why they hardly took off
The bombing focused on runways, hangars, fuel depots, and command centers, leaving many aircraft at risk of being destroyed on the ground or as soon as they attempted to take off.
Sanctions, lack of spare parts, pilots with limited flight hours, and highly politicized command structures had reduced Maduro's air force to a symbolic capacity: parades, occasional interceptions, and propaganda, but little real response in a high-intensity war
The silence of the Chavista sky
Official statements refer to "military aggression" and "heroic resistance," but no verifiable evidence of shootdowns or aerial combat is presented—only homemade videos of explosions and planes flying at low altitude, which are attributed to the U.S
The result is a stark contrast between the narrative of "Bolivarian military might" and the image left by the night of the attack: anti-air defenses nullified in the early hours and fighter jets that, with few exceptions, did not appear to defend Maduro's skies.
What has happened in Venezuela is not an anomaly; it is a pattern. Regimes that turn propaganda into a substitute for maintenance, loyalty into a replacement for preparedness, and parades into a simulation of power ultimately discover, too late, that their defenses exist only in narrative. The questions left tonight do not require specific names: how many radar systems are actually operational? How many batteries can fire today? How many planes would take off before being destroyed on the ground? Because when the moment of truth arrives, the sky cannot be protected with slogans. It is protected with real capabilities… or it remains, simply, defenseless.
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