Can Turkey's 'Steel Dome' deter Israel in Syria?

New government in Damascus could be seeking advanced Turkish military defences amid ongoing Israeli strikes

Debris scattered at the site of an Israeli strike on a military airbase near Hama in Syria this week. AP

Unconfirmed news reports this week claim Israel’s strikes on Syria’s Tiyas airbase are an attempt to stop Turkey deploying air-defence systems to the site, to protect Syrian airspace. These systems are part of what Turkey calls its "Steel Dome" project, a layered air-defence system currently under development.

There has been widespread speculation that Ankara and Damascus, which have re-established ties since the fall of Bashar Al Assad in December, are expanding military co-operation.

Tiyas, better known as T4, was the largest airbase in Syria under the Assad regime and was frequently bombed by the Israelis, who claimed Iran was using the site to house drone operations and advisers co-ordinating weapons smuggling for Iran-backed groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Turkey's defence boom

According to analysis by the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a US think tank, Turkey could deploy its indigenous Hisar-O and Hisar-U medium-range air-defence systems, as well as the long-range Siper air-defence system, which can reportedly target enemy aircraft up to 200 kilometres away.

Such a deployment could complicate continuing Israeli strikes against what it says are significant Assad-era arms stockpiles that could one day pose a strategic threat. Israel has hit suspected arms depots and bases in Syria hundreds of times since December.

Like Israel, Nato member Turkey has an advanced home-grown defence industry and is a rising exporter of modern systems – a stark contrast to the ageing and mostly obsolete weapons of the former Syrian regime.

Syria once boasted a dense air-defence network of Soviet (and later Russian) radar and missiles that western defence planners worried could disrupt a proposed “no-fly zone” to halt Assad regime air attacks on civilian areas in the early years of the civil war that broke out in 2011.

The no-fly zone never materialised, although there was a massive Nato strike on the Syrian regime in April 2018. Syria’s air-defence network was instead rapidly degraded by the civil war and almost entirely destroyed in repeated Israeli raids, mostly aimed at intercepting Iranian arms supplies.

Even augmented by powerful Russian-supplied S-300 systems, Syria’s air-defence protection proved limited because the S-300s could not be used against the Israelis without Moscow’s permission – something that is rumoured to have happened only once, in 2016. Israel proved its ability to seriously damage S-300s in Iran in air strikes in October, suggesting the system is highly vulnerable to Israeli weapons, which were never used against it in Syria. Russia pulled the S-300s out of Syria in 2022 to support its war in Ukraine.

Turkey has far more modern systems, which could make the Israelis wary of conducting air operations, such as the Koral mobile electronic warfare system. According to Turkish analyst Ali Baker, the system proved effective in conflicts such as the Azerbaijan-Armenia war in 2020 and Turkey’s deadly intervention against Syria the same year, by jamming enemy communications and radar, leaving ground forces at the mercy of a massed drone attack.

Aesa advantage

Israel also possesses powerful electronic warfare capabilities and has pioneered tactics in battle, such as cyber-attacking Syria’s air-defence network as long ago as 2007. With an eye on major air operations over Iran, Israel recently upgraded its fleet of F-16Is with a series of electronic warfare and early-warning additions and missile countermeasures.

Israeli also possesses advanced pods that can be integrated on to numerous aircraft in its inventory, such as the F-15I and F-16I, including the Scorpius pod, which can rapidly detect and jam enemy radar signals using its Active Electronically Scanned Array (Aesa) radar.

Aesa radar provide far more agility than conventional radar beams and can blast targeted pulses of energy to thwart enemy systems. They have become increasingly vital in modern warfare, being difficult to detect due to rapid frequency changing and possessing significant jamming power, and the ability to identify and track many targets at once.

Israeli F-15I combat jets at an air show outside Beersheva, in southern Israel, in 2013. EPA

Despite rumoured Turkish deployments, there has been no mention of Ankara’s lorry-mounted ALP-300G radar system, which entered production in 2024 and also comes with Aesa capability. Like the Koral, the ALP-300G is a mobile system that can be rapidly set up and moved, complicating Israeli targeting efforts.

Paired with Turkey’s Siper air-defence system, the ALP-300G could present the most serious threat to the Israeli air force for many decades. According to Turkish defence firms Aselsan and Roketsan, a Siper battery can fire 20 missiles in an engagement, simultaneously targeting 10 enemy aircraft.

That could provide the system with the kind of missile saturation tactics used by Syria to shoot down an Israeli F-16I in 2018, but with more capable missiles. Together, these systems form part of Turkey’s multi-layered Steel Dome, which is still in development, said to be inspired by Israel’s own Iron Dome concept – although the Iron Dome covers only short-range threats.

To counter such systems, Israel also has stealth aircraft, such as the F-35I that poses a major threat to Russian-designed systems, with many experts claiming it could perform well against the S-400, a capable system purchased by Turkey in 2017 and delivered in 2019. Some claim the system could be sent to Syria.

Israel has also pioneered the use of air-launched ballistic missiles to defeat advanced systems like the S-300, taking advantage of the powerful thrust of the weapons combined with the speed and altitude of the launching aircraft, providing extremely high velocity and range.

But while aeroballistic missiles have defeated S-300s in Iran, the tactic is untested against ground-based air-defence networks using Aesa radars.

While the extent to which Turkey and Israel wish to avoid a major clash is unknown, both sides could harass and interfere with military operations through their advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and there is precedent for this in Syria.

During US air operations in Syria against ISIS, US commanders said Russian forces frequently disrupted communications and air operations using an array of electronic warfare systems.