I think that some people are getting the idea of SAMs in small countries in the wrong way. If you are a relatively small country and you have to face a stronger opponent, the rules of the game change a bit. It is pointless to try to destroy the entire strike package that is going against you, you could try to let your AD assets survive as long as possible and continue inflicting casualties on your opponent throughout the conflict. If we look at recent events, the two times that a large airforce confronted an enemy that more or less knew what he was doing were Serbia in 1999 and Georgia in 2008. From events there I think we could observe several interesting phenomena:
1. Always try to deny the enemy airforce the low altitudes. In Serbia that was done using MANPADs, AAA, and strangely R-60 and R-73 mounted onto solid boosters taken from GRAD missiles. All these measures were quite quite simple and unsophisticated, with a really low kill probability. Yet, NATO was forced to fly above 3-5 kilometers most of the time, which in itself is a small victory – the Serbs suffered little damage to their ground forces. Russia had the same problem with Georgia, but the conflict was a short and intense one, which forced the Russians to conduct CAS missions knowing that they will have some loses.
2. Always attempt to have mission kills, Serbs tended to launch rockets like S-125 only at the relative position of NATO formations without actually turning the radar on to guide them. The possibility for a kill is 0, yet often aircraft will jetison their bombs and conduct evasive manuevers.
3. When fighting an asymmetrical war rough terrain could be an advantage (if you use medium range mobile systems). Usually, you won’t place your SAM site on the botton of a valley between two peaks because you will see only a limited part of the sky. However, the enemy ELINT and electronic warfare aircraft won’t be able to see you and they couldn’t jam the frequencies easily or launch a missile at you. Provided that you have some passive sensors and a few people on the mountain tops around you, you could turn on the radar and fire from short range at enemy aircraft just as they pass above you (point 1 should have forced at least part of the enemy airplanes to fly sufficiently high so that you will have time to shoot at them). After you fire a few missiles, the system moves to another direction and repeats the attack after a day or two (from what I gather that was used by Georgia, the problem was solved when Spetsnaz captured the battery).
4. Something quite obvious – always rely on as many passive sensors as possible. The Russians are happy to sell some Kolchuga type systems that would give you an approximate idea what the enemy is doing. Also, electronic warfare from the ground should be as intense as possible to provide at least a bit of an organizational hindrance to the enemy.
5. Long-range SAM systems should be used rarely and mainly to force enemy AWACS, ELINT, and refueling birds as far away as possible, reducing the time the enemy airplanes could search for targets.
6 Of course, make as many decoys resembling SAM systems as possible.
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