Oh my lets see how On 18 June 2017, a United States Navy F/A-18E shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22 Fitter with an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile worked under battle condition
F/A-18 Super Hornet Missed Syrian Su-22 With Its First Sidewinder Missile (popularmechanics.com)
"
According to CNN, the Navy Super Hornet
locked onto the Su-22 Fitter at a range of 1.5 miles. The Super Hornet launched an
AIM-9X, and the Syrian pilot loosed flares to lure the infrared guided missile away from his fighter.
The trick worked, and the American missile missed."
"
So why did the AIM-9X miss? A contributor to
Combat Aircraft magazine
proposed a plausible theory: While the 9X is designed to resist the allure of defensive flares
, but it may have been too specialized in rejecting American flares. Contributor Angad Singh tweeted a story
originally written by aviation authority Bill Sweetman about American tests of Soviet aircraft during the Cold War."
What happened next surprised the Air Force. The
AIM-9P Sidewinder,
designed to see past flares,
was readily diverted by the Soviet flares. The problem was that the
-9P was too attuned to the characteristics of American flares it had been tested against and
not against the Soviet flares, which according to the squadron commander between 1985 and 1987 were "
dirty, and none of them looked the same." .