By Zarak Khan | 2026-01-08

Venezuelan forces' abject inability to thwart the arrest of strongman Nicolás Maduro by US forces has analysts questioning the value of Russian and Chinese arms.

A US special operations team, undeterred by the Venezuelan security system, killed Maduro's bodyguards and flew him and his wife back to the United States to face trial.

The January 3 raid in Caracas humiliatingly spotlighted the shortcomings of a networked air defense architecture built around Chinese sensors and Russian missiles, say defense analysts.

Chinese backing of Venezuela

China's efforts to forge military ties in Latin America, particularly with Venezuela, have included arms sales, training programs and defense exchanges.

Through loans, infrastructure projects and diplomatic backing, Beijing helped Maduro's regime weather US sanctions.

That partnership was elevated in 2023, when Chinese President Xi Jinping and Maduro declared an "all-weather strategic partnership." The rhetoric emphasized Chinese ambitions to build influence in Latin America.

Venezuela became Latin America's top purchaser of Beijing-made hardware after the United States prohibited all commercial arms sales to Caracas beginning in 2006, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report last June.

Venezuela accounted for 85.8% of China's weapon sales in North and South America from 2010–2020, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It appears to be money squandered.

Superior US arms

The Maduro raid "highlighted not only the strength of US intelligence capabilities in Caracas but also the limits, or at least operational effectiveness, of Chinese radar fielded in Venezuela," Newsweek reported January 6.

"As US warplanes approached Venezuelan shores, the United States began layering different effects provided by SPACECOM [US Space Command], CYBERCOM [US Cyber Command] and other members of the interagency [task force] to create a pathway overhead," Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a January 3 news conference in Florida.

The precautions overwhelmed Venezuela's air defenses, which included JY-27A radars, manufactured by the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp, and Russian systems such as S-300VM missiles meant to protect key sites like Caracas.

Beijing has marketed those radars as capable of detecting US stealth aircraft. Venezuela began deploying them in September.

Last October, the Venezuelan regime's defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, claimed the network detected US F-35 stealth fighters 75km from the Venezuelan coastline.

A paralyzed network

The failure of Venezuela's costly imported systems to "detect or intercept US forces" on January 3 has raised questions about the effectiveness of Chinese military technology, according to David Wurmser, a former US government adviser.

"The whole air defense was paralyzed," Wurmser told Nikkei Asia, drawing parallels to ineffectual air defenses in Iran during Israeli and US strikes last year.

"It once again exposes the weakness of Chinese/Russian/Iranian weapons," Wurmser added.

Military analysts view the Caracas episode as a setback for China's defense industry, which already has encountered customer resistance in recent years. Arms industry data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show Chinese weapon exports have stagnated in recent years.

Those weak sales come after client states voiced recurring complaints, ranging from maintenance problems to poor integration with legacy systems.

At least 23 countries, including Venezuela and Pakistan, have acquired Chinese-made air defense radars, according to Eric Hundman, a China analyst.

"Occasional reports about problems with their capabilities and reliability" suggest Chinese manufacturers have struggled to compete effectively in this sector, Hundman wrote in a report last March for the China Aerospace Studies Institute, a US Air Force-affiliated think tank.

Doubts about Chinese hardware's reliability have been compounded by turmoil inside China's own military establishment, including sweeping purges of senior People's Liberation Army officers overseeing procurement and missile forces -- a sign of deeper institutional weaknesses, observers say.

'Out of service'

That said, poor maintenance would doom even the best systems.

A June report by the Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute (MSI²) cited "operational decay and manipulation" within Venezuela's air defense system and warned it had reached "critical condition."

More than 50% of Chinese-manufactured JYL-1 and JY-11B long-range radars were "out of service due to a lack of spare parts," the report said.

It described flights by Russian-made Su-30MK2 fighters as "severely restricted," while the Chinese-made K-8W Karakorum fleet was operating at below 30% availability and "lacks air-to-air radar," it said.