Hotdogging Russian pilots send U.S. drone crashing into the Black Sea. No pretext recovered.
(Originally published March 15 in “What in the World“) Maybe the robots will be better at war than us.
Two Russian Su-27 fighter jets harassing an unmanned U.S. Reaper drone flying over international waters in the Black Sea off Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula forced its operators in the U.S. Air Force to “bring it down.” That apparently means to let it crash, because the drone landed somewhere in the water and hasn’t been recovered.
The fact that no U.S. personnel were around for the Su-27s to harm may be what kept this incident from creating a pretext for direct U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, where Russian attacks are intensifying ahead of a possible new offensive.
As described before in this space, close encounters like this one are a routine feature of national defense. Militaries test potential adversaries by flying their aircraft really close to the other guy’s border and seeing what he does. The danger, of course, is that their planes crash and a government interprets it as an act of war.
But having a drone involved instead of a human pilot may have lowered the risk that such aerial antics escalate into something more serious. According to the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, the Su-27 pilots intercepted the Reaper and then dumped fuel on it from overhead (wasting precious fuel!), flew in front of it in a reckless and unprofessional manner. The encounter ended, according to the U.S. account, when one of the Su-27s collided with the Reaper’s rear-facing propeller.
The media were nonetheless quick to herald the Reaper’s demise as an escalation in the war. A 2021 analysis by the RAND Corporation of close aerial encounters with Russian aircraft identified a trend of Russian pilots employing more aggressive tactics, termed “coercive signaling,” when encountering U.S. and other aircraft or vessels from members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Eastern Europe or the Black Sea. According to The Guardian, an Su-27 in 2017 “flew dangerously close to an allied RC-135 surveillance plane. The next year, a Russian warplane flew across the nose of a U.S. EP-3 spy plane, and in 2020, a Su-27 flew directly in front of a U.S. B-52 bomber.”
But the incident is also ominously similar to recent encounters between Chinese fighter jets and manned U.S. military spy planes monitoring China from international waters in the South China Sea near Hainan. Last December, the Pentagon got upset because a Chinese fighter jet flew within six meters of a U.S. spy plane while over international waters in the South China Sea spying on China. The Pentagon said flying that close to the spy plane was super dangerous and risked collision. In future, Chinese aircraft trying to repel American spy planes spying on them in international waters off China’s coast should maintain a safe distance. Pentagon officials apparently never watched Hollywood’s 1986 homage to American coercive signaling, “Top Gun.”
Earlier, in June of last year, Australia protested what it said was a Chinese fighter jet intercepting one of its maritime surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea and releasing anti-radar chaff that flew into the Australian plane’s engines.
In 2001, a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet 110km off the coast of China’s Hainan and 1,900km from the U.S. base on Japan’s Okinawa. The crew of the U.S. plane made an emergency landing in Hainan where they were detained and interrogated for 10 days before being sent home. The Chinese pilot ejected but was never found.
Meanwhile, pressure is building in the U.S. Congress for President Joe Biden to relent and send Ukraine F-16s. The fighter jets are already a staple among U.S. allies worldwide: the latest batch were just delivered to Bahrain.
The U.S. may dominate global arms exports, but it’s Russia and China that have been arming Africa over the past decade. Washington-based think tank, the Atlantic Council, says in a new report that Russia accounted for 24% of arms shipments to sub-Saharan Africa between 2010 and 2021, while China’s shipments made up 22%.
While both the West and Russia struggle with dwindling stocks of ammunition for the war in Ukraine, one country that seems to have no shortage is North Korea. In its ongoing war against the Sea of Japan, Pyongyang fired another couple of short-range missiles into those innocent waters to register a protest against military drills underway between the U.S. and South Korea.