Five Years Ago Russian Media Proposed an Enhanced MiG-23 to Help Syria Counter Turkey’s F-16 Attacks

Five years before the fall of the Syrian government in December 2024, the Syrian Arab Army launched its last major offensive operations in January 2020 aiming to eliminate Al Qaeda linked jihadist militant groups in the country’s Idlib governate that were sponsored and actively supported by the Turkish state. Syrian advances ended after Turkey launched a large scale military intervention to provide air and artillery support to jihadist paramilitaries, which were revealed to have Turkish personnel including officers and special forces embedded within their ranks. Following multiple aerial clashes, Russian media on March 6, 2020 published a pitch for a major upgrade program for the MiG-23ML/MLD fighters that made up the backbone of the Syrian fleet – under the title: “The unique MiG-23-98 is capable of putting the Turkish Air Force in its place.” The upgrade program entailed “the re-equipment of standard MiG-23ML/MF with advanced onboard radars… with an increased energy potential of the transmitting path, as well as software and hardware adaptation of the weapons control systems (of the MiG-23ML family of fighters to the use of modern medium-range air combat guided missiles RVV-AE (R-77), equipped with active radar homing heads of the 9B-1348E type.”

The primary goal of the MiG-23-98 upgrade package was to allow Syrian MiG-23s to restore their former significant advantage over Turkish F-16s. While the MiG-23ML/MLD was significantly more capable than the F-16 when first procured by Syria in 1982, with a more powerful sensor suite and a beyond visual range targeting capability which the U.S.-supplied aircraft lacked, much greater investment in modernisation of the F-16 had by the early 2020s long since reversed this. Integration of new sensors on the MiG-23 was seen to be able to provide an effective 70-75 kilometre radar engagement range against F-16s in a jam-free environment, and 50-55 km in a more complex jamming environment. The R-77 would meanwhile provide a comparable range and ‘fire and forget’ capability to the AIM-120 used by the Turkish Air Force. New data links would also allow MiG-23s to operate effectively as part of a network, including using targeting data from ground based air defence systems, as most fighters in the world were able to by the early 2020s.

“The MiG-23-98 could give a serious rebuff to the Turkish F-16C Block 50+,” the article noted, lamenting: “Unfortunately, neither the expert circles of the Russian Defense Ministry, nor the high-ranking representatives of JSC RSK MiG and the Fazotron-NIIR corporation have ever proposed an initiative to provide the Syrian Air Force with such a ‘package’ of military-technical support, and our key Middle Eastern ally can use the MiG-23ML fighters, which have a huge modernisation reserve, only as carriers of high-explosive fragmentation ‘blanks’.” Although Syria was far more heavily invested in the MiG-23 than any other country, and fielded more of the aircraft than all other operators combined, the immense strain on the country’s economy from over a decade of Western, Turkish and Israeli backed insurgency, and from U.S. and Turkish appropriation of its oil and occupation of its oil and agricultural heartlands, quickly drained possible funds for modernisation of the air force.

Preceding the outbreak of the insurgency in 2011, Syrian efforts to procure more advanced combat aircraft from Russia, namely MiG-29M fighters and MiG-31BM interceptors, had consistently been rebuffed as a result of Western and Israeli pressure on Moscow, as were Syrian efforts to acquire more modern air defence systems such as S-300 and S-400 systems. This left the country with only a limited air defence capability in the face of continued Western, Turkish and Israeli airspace violations, which helped pave the way to the country’s eventual defeat in December 2024.