I've been wondering all day whether the Rooskies had them stand down to save face or the local operators were just horribly incompetent.
I don't think the S-400's were even fired. S-300's maybe and a mix of other defense missiles, but it appears to me that all the defense firing was done after the fact, (probably an agreement between Russia and Assad) to make things look good to their populace. The Russians certainly lied to their populace about how many they shot down.(Unless we believe that Trump and the Pentagon are lying to us).
“I’ve been wondering all day whether the Rooskies had them stand down to save face or the local operators were just horribly incompetent.”
Or the Rooskies had them stand down so we would not get any EM signatures from them, which can be used to develop countermeasures. If so, the Rooskies are using the Syrians as cannon fodder.
We don’t have a need to know, but we could have had a bird in the area doing ELINT. If the Russians lit up the radars for the S-300 and S-400 sites, that would have given us a wealth of data on their systems.
The S-400 can probably take out a cruise missile or even the new missiles that were fired from the B1 bombers at Syria.
The weakness of the S-400 is that the missiles it fires are too expensive for Russia to build in great enough quantity to make much of a difference on the battlefield.
You could use up all the S-400 missiles in Syria by firing cheap cruise-missiles or drones at valuable targets...
Then you have air superiority and the S-400 systems are all used up.
This, along with sophisticated electronic countermeasures, is Israel’s strategy for dealing with the S-400.
Or the Russians did not want to reveal to us, at this time, the details of how the S-400 worked. I'm sure we had stealthy aircraft there, monitoring radar frequencies, checking to see at what ranges the S-400 would lock onto targets, and the performance of the anti-air missiles launched.