As the war with Iran progresses, people are taking a look at Chinese weapons that Iran has and asking if Chinese weapons are supposed to make countries like Iran too dangerous to hit. How have the United States and Israel been able to keep up a sustained air campaign while only losing a few aircraft? Now, before you start declaring that Chinese weapons are junk, we have to back up quite a bit because this is not a simple answer.
It’s important to remember that Iran is a sanctioned state and right now they are using a mixed arsenal whereas China fighting with its own logistics, money, and industrial base may be able to use their weapons a little more effectively. But this war is still giving us a very useful battlefield test because even after years of buying and building missiles, radars, drones, and air defenses, Iran has struggled to keep enemy aircraft out of its airspace.
At the same time, these systems are still dangerous. Iran has shot down an F-15 and an A-10, and they obviously have enough anti-ship missile capability to keep the Strait of Hormuz in crisis. And the US still has not forced Tehran to negotiate on Washington’s terms, at least not yet.
So today, let’s sort out what Chinese link systems Iran actually has, how they performed, and what this war does and does not tell us about a potential future fight with China. A lot of Iran’s so-called Chinese weapons are not brand new systems shipped over in factory wrap. In many cases, they are Iranian-built missiles, drones, or subsystems that trace back to older Chinese designs or depend on Chinese components.
That may sound like a technicality, but we do have to consider this because this is really a story about Chinese influence on Iran’s arsenal, not just a bunch of weapons with Mandarin instruction manuals. When we’re judging them, we have to ask ourselves some simple questions, like, did they help Iran deny airspace? Did they help protect key military sites or did they make the Gulf so dangerous that the United States had to back off? That is the real test.
So now let’s talk a bit about what Chinese link systems Iran has. The most important ones are probably not even the air defenses that people seem to fixate on first. I would argue that they are Iran’s anti-ship missiles. They have missiles like the Noor which is basically an Iranian produced version of the Chinese C802. Then you have the Ghader and the Ghadir, which are just longer range evolutions of that same family.
Iran also fields shorter range anti-ship missiles like the Nasr and the Kosar that also trace back to Chinese designs. So far with these missiles, Iran has made Hormuz scary enough that shipping has basically stopped and foreign governments are starting to sweat as energy prices climb. Not to mention, they’ve also largely kept the US Navy out of the strait.
Then there are the drones and the electronics that keep them in the air. Iran builds a lot of its own drones, but there is evidence that ties parts of that ecosystem to Chinese firms and dual-use components. Much like how Iran supplied Venezuela with dual-use components such as small engines, machine parts, and other things that can be used in civilian and military systems, China is doing the same for Iran.
So again, even when the weapon is Iranian, the supply chain story is not entirely Iranian. And then we get to air defense, which is where people online tend to get a little too confident. You will see a lot of talk about the HQ9 or the export variant FD2000B. There are reports that Iran has received those systems last year, though there is still some skepticism about that being the case.
So we have to treat that carefully. Everything here is alleged, but chances are they have them. Either way, maybe Iran had access to something in that family, and maybe not. But we do know what they do have or had, and that’s Russia’s S300, Iran’s domestic Bavar 373, and a layer of mixed shorter range systems underneath them.
In other words, Iran had a real though hodgepodge air defense network on paper. The question is how real everything looked once the shooting started. And the answer is not that great. Now, that doesn’t mean that every missile battery was useless or that Iranian crews never even got a shot off. It also doesn’t mean that Chinese systems did nothing.
What it really indicates is that the network as a whole did not do the job that it was supposed to do. But then again, maybe Iran figures they’re going to get bombed no matter what they have. So, these systems could be seen more as speed bumps than walls for them, but they probably would have liked to have more shootdowns. But I digress.
General Kaine has said that about 80% of Iran’s air defense systems have been destroyed. And according to numbers released by CENTCOM, more than 1,500 air defense targets were struck. That goes along with huge numbers of ballistic missile, drone, industrial, and naval targets, and we’ve pretty much wiped Iran’s navy off the face of the earth.
But however you slice that, this was not a picture of a successful air denial campaign. At the same time, I do not want to oversell the other direction either because Iran obviously was not helpless. It kept launching missiles and drones and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. And they retained enough surviving air defense capability to produce sporadic fire and shoot down a US F-15E and an A-10.
That alone should kill the lazy idea that the Iranian network simply evaporated on day one or that everything failed. But the F-15 shootdown in particular also shows why we need to be careful publicly. The best idea we have about what was used is when Trump described the weapon as a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile, which we can guess is a MANPADS or a man-portable air defense system like this Stinger missile tube up here, which is not inert.
It doesn’t have all the stuff you need to fire, but that’s a Stinger missile tube. Iran said that: “It’s some new super special anti-air system that they just so happen to have laying around and didn’t think to use in the opening phases of the war.”
But regardless of whatever did the eagle in, the fact is that one did get shot down. And that means that even after the broader network had been hammered, Iran still had dangerous short-range pockets left.
So you can dismantle the architecture and still get hurt by the guy hiding in the weeds with the missile tube. You just got to ask the Soviets about their Afghanistan adventure for more information on that. This is also particularly interesting after reports came out that China was going to send MANPADS to Iran.
They’ve since denied that aggressively, but you just never know because we also denied aggressively when we were sending the Mujahideen MANPADS. Anyway, there isn’t much you can do to protect against these systems besides flying as high as 26,000 ft and controlling the ground for several kilometers around where the planes are flying.
So, no, Iran’s air defenses did not perform well enough to stop the bombing, but they were still dangerous enough to impose costs. And on the maritime side, those Chinese systems, or those Chinese derived systems, arguably performed much better than they did in the air. Because the United States and Israel have wrecked huge portions of Iran’s military infrastructure, but they still have not fully solved the Hormuz problem.
Traffic through the strait collapsed to a tiny fraction of normal levels. And even now, Washington is blockading Iranian ports and still has not simply snapped the waterway back to normal commerce or forced Tehran to accept peace on US terms. If you’re Iran, making Hormuz unsafe and making the global economy sweat is one of your best strategic cards, if not your only one short of unveiling a new nuclear weapon that would almost certainly get you invaded in a big way.
So to be fair and impartial, at least as much as possible, it is more accurate to say that Chinese link systems in Iran have looked weak in air defense and more effective in a maritime environment. They weren’t dominant and they obviously were not war-winning, but they were still enough to complicate life for everybody. And sometimes that’s what you hope for, especially if you’re Iran who seems to really prefer this style of fighting.
So why did they underperform? There are a few explanations and the most important one is that Iran was not fighting on equal terms. Yeah, no duh. But the US and Israel were not rolling into this war hoping to see whether an Iranian battery could hit a jet in a fair duel. They were using stealth aircraft, really good intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber effects, decoys, and long range standoff weapons to break the system before it could really fight as a coherent whole.
That is on purpose obviously and shows that our tactics are working as intended. It is hard to run a successful air defense from the ground if every time you switch on your radar an AGM-88 HARM from an F-35 vaporizes you. Standoff strikes were a major part of this campaign. The US has reportedly burned through an enormous number of Tomahawks and signs are there that the war has also eaten heavily into stocks of JASSM and JASSM-ER which are long range—like up to 575 miles—stealthy cruise missiles specifically built to hit defended targets from outside of the range of most air defense systems.
That sort of a campaign would be difficult for even the US to stop, let alone Iran. And the second explanation is readiness. And this is also where the China angle gets a lot more complicated. Iran is a sanctioned state with a mixed arsenal, uneven maintenance, local substitutes, and every reason to stretch systems far longer than they were supposed to be stretched.
Venezuela, which boasted a Chinese long-range radar and modern Russian air defenses, has a similar problem. In countries like Iran and Venezuela, it is genuinely hard to tell whether a system failed because the hardware was bad or the crews were undertrained or the network was poorly integrated or because half the fleet was being held together with scavenged parts.
China probably does not have that same problem to the same degree. That is one of the biggest caveats in this entire video. Iran and Venezuela are export customer cases. China is the original manufacturer with money, spares, depth, training infrastructure, and the ability to integrate its systems into a much bigger domestic architecture.
So, if Chinese origin gear struggles in Iranian service, that does not automatically mean the PLA’s version will perform the same way. Still, the readiness caveat cuts both ways. If China’s export customers keep getting chewed up, that is not great advertising. And it raises uncomfortable questions about how much of the magic in these systems actually depends on perfect maintenance, strong operators, good networking, and constant support.
Because in war, nobody gets perfect conditions for very long. So the Venezuela case helps here, but only if we use it carefully. During the US operation to grab Maduro, Venezuela’s air defenses did not stop a large sophisticated American raid. And that network was not just Russian. It also included Chinese-made radars, especially the JY-27A, which China has long marketed as useful against stealth aircraft.
Apparently, though, actual experiences may vary. No American fixed-wing aircraft were shot down and US forces got in, got the target, and got out with relatively little problems. Analysts later pointed to poor camouflage, exposed air defense positions, bad integration, and possible interoperability problems between Chinese radars and Russian missile systems.
That sounds familiar, but also Venezuela was posting videos of air defense systems just hanging out on the road next to the beach. So yeah, but again this does not mean the Chinese systems are vaporware or something. We should really avoid underestimating our adversaries, especially now. The more easily defended takeaway from all this is that export architecture and weak hands may fall apart very quickly against a first-rate American operation.
Like the old saying goes: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth by F-35s, B-2s, and cruise missiles fired from hundreds of miles away.”
And real quick, we should talk about Pakistan and the brief spat that they had with India in 2025. This is where the simplistic version of the argument that Chinese weapons just suck starts to fall apart a bit. Because Chinese systems and Pakistani hands did not just sit there and die during that 4-day fight with India back in May of 2025. Pakistan’s Chinese supplied J-10C fighters and PL-15 missiles appear to have scored a very real early success against India including the shootdown of at least one Rafale fighter. That is one of the most important positive data points that Chinese arms exports have gotten in years.
So I would not use Pakistan as evidence that Chinese weapons cannot fight because they clearly can. What Pakistan does show is that even a very good early ambush isn’t enough to decide a conflict. India changed tactics after those first losses and Indian officials later said that they began striking deeper and more precisely and were able to penetrate Pakistani defenses before the ceasefire.
Pakistan disputed a lot of that as you would expect. But the broader lesson still stands and that is that modern warfare is adaptive. One side gets a sharp opening success and the other side studies it, changes the playbook and comes back with a different geometry. Kind of like how Iran shot down an F-15 weeks after the war started.
Modern air war is not just about the missiles and the planes. It is about the whole kill chain, the learning cycle, the targeting picture, the electronic fight, and how fast you adapt once the first assumptions get smashed. So, what does this say about Taiwan? Many are watching Chinese weapons in these conflicts and drawing conclusions about a possible Taiwan invasion, but there really isn’t a clear answer.
Iran’s performance does not prove China would flop in a war over Taiwan. That leap is just too easy. As we mentioned before briefly, China would be fighting with its own full architecture, not a sanctioned partner’s patchwork inventory. It would have far more depth, far better industrial support, much denser sensor coverage, more redundancy, more missile mass, and homefield advantages that Iran simply does not have after being sanctioned for almost 50 years.
It also has the money to maintain its systems in a way that Iran and Venezuela just don’t. But there is still a real warning sign here for Beijing. Modern western strike architecture and tactics still look extremely good at dismantling air defense ecosystems when they get the initiative. Stealth, standoff range, electronic warfare, intelligence fusion, and precision strike are still a brutal combination.
Iran is just the latest reminder that if your network starts breaking, it can break fast and probably forever. And there is also a warning sign here for Washington. Even under heavy bombardment, Iran has remained dangerous. It still forced the US to spend expensive munitions at scale, keep Hormuz choked, and retain enough defensive capability to shoot down an F-15 and an A-10 Warthog.
So, if the US ever ends up fighting China, we shouldn’t expect some easy cartoonish experience, like where Chinese missiles fizzle out or circle back and hit whatever launched them, like they’re Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner.
So, what’s the verdict? The honest answer is Chinese systems performed unevenly and mostly as part of a broader Iranian system that has underperformed in the air but stayed mostly relevant at sea. And we can’t really put all the blame on the weapons. Things like training, maintenance, and logistics—because logistics wins wars—matter just as much if not more.
Pakistan was able to effectively use similar Chinese systems that Venezuela and Iran had but did not effectively use. There’s a lot more that goes into these sophisticated slings and arrows that make them work and we’d be mistaken to dismiss them so easily.
But let us know what you think in the comments because this is going to have a lot of opinions. And just to be honest, a lot of this is based on kind of thinly sourced reporting, intelligence reports that are leaked, things like that. So, what we do know is that Iran does have Chinese support in some way, but we don’t exactly know like how many HQ9s they had or even if they had them for the war or tried to use them.
They might be shoving them in a tunnel somewhere waiting to bring them out. I don’t know. But let us know what you think in the comments.
General Kaine says: “About 80% of Iran’s air defense systems have been destroyed.”
Kyle, your friendly ginger producer, says: “Man, you are all dismissed. Thank you so much for being here.”
