Following Major Kong's review of AirLand Battle, it seems apropos to note that in recent months, there has been an increased tempo of Russian aircraft operating in areas of concern to NATO, i.e.: the Baltics, and in the Black Sea as well.
Needless to say, this is of some immediate concern to European nations.
A November report by a British thinktank noted a rise in close military encounters between Russia and the west this year, including “violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, simulated attack runs and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area.” Nato states had scrambled fighter jets to intercept Russian aircraft more than 100 times this year as of late October, more than three times more than in 2013, it said.
Among 40 incidents listed, three had posed a high risk of causing casualties or direct military confrontations, it added.
One especially troubling tale is of
operations that put commercial air travel at risk.
For the second time this year, a Russian military aircraft turned off its transponders to avoid commercial radar and nearly collided with a passenger jet over Sweden, officials have said.
Swedish authorities said that on Friday, a Russian military aircraft nearly collided above southern Sweden with a commercial passenger jet that had taken off from Copenhagen in Denmark.
Sweden’s air force chief, Major General Micael Bydén, said the aircraft’s transponders, which make the plane visible to commercial radar, were shut off. Swedish fighter jets were sent up to identify the aircraft, and Hultqvist later identified it as a Russian intelligence plane.
“This is serious. This is inappropriate. This is outright dangerous when you turn off the transponder,” Swedish defence minister Peter Hultqvist said on Swedish radio.
Officials at Russia’s ministry of defence in Moscow were not available to comment on Saturday.
Dutch pilots flying F-16s out of Poland in a NATO exercise
brought back video of two Russian
SU-34 fighter-bombers they intercepted. A Norwegian F-16 pilot reportedly had to maneuver to avoid colliding with another Russian aircraft (
video here). According to
an account of the incident,
'The Russian pilot's behaviour was not quite normal,' said Norwegian armed forces spokesman Brynjar Stordal about the 26-second film clip of the encounter in international airspace 'north of Norway'.
'We don't know if it was a miscalculation or if he deliberately put himself in the path of our F-16,' said Stordal, adding that Norway's armed forces had informed Russia that the incident was 'undesirable'.
The Daily Mail article has some nice shots of Russian
TU-95 Bears, being shadowed by RAF
Typhoons. (Bear diary by Major Kong
here.) Russia has resumed long range ocean patrols with them, once a regular feature of the Cold War.
Nato announced last month that it had scrambled warplanes 400 times so far this year in response to increased Russian air activity around Europe.
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the problem was not just where the Russians are flying but that they are not turning on their transponders or communicating.
He said the flights - which have risen 50 percent over the last year - posed a risk to commercial air traffic, but admitted there had been 'very limited numbers of violations' of Nato air space.
It came after it emerged Russia was resuming patrols by long-range strategic bombers in international airspace from the Arctic Ocean to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Speculation as to Russian motivations behind the more prominent display of military force is ongoing.
According to a Reuters article,
Russian President Vladimir Putin may see the small Nordic and Baltic nations as a testing ground for the unity of the U.S.-led NATO alliance - NATO members are obliged to treat an attack on any member as an attack on all.
The Baltic states, which regained independence from Moscow in 1991, are acutely aware of vulnerability. Like Ukraine, they rely on Russian energy and have sizeable Russian minorities.
Lithuania hopes to meet an informal NATO goal of 2 percent of GDP on defence in 2017, up from 0.9 percent in 2014. Latvia aims to met the goal by 2020, also up from 0.9 pct in 2014.
Estonia, the only Nordic or Baltic nation to meet the NATO goal, plans to raise spending fractionally to 2.05 percent of GDP in 2015.
Finland is considering raising defence spending, projected at 1.3 percent of GDP in 2015.
The aforementioned Baltic States are under a certain amount of understandable stress, as is Europe, whose economy is still rather weaker than is desirable - faced by a Russia also under stress from falling oil prices, adventures in the Crimean, and more. This is
not a good time to have worrisome neighbors.
Estonia says a Russian unit used smoke bombs and electronic jammers to confuse its agents and their equipment, and crossed the frontier to abduct Eston Kohver [an Estonian counterintelligence operative], who is now in Moscow facing 20 years in jail for spying for his homeland.
The alleged snatch took place just two days after US president Barack Obama visited Estonia and lambasted Russia’s “brazen assault” on Ukraine and told the Baltic states that Nato considered the defence of their capitals – Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius – “just as important as the defence of Berlin and Paris and London”.
“An attack on one is an attack on all, and so if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, ‘Who’ll come to help?’ you’ll know the answer: the Nato alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America,” Obama told his audience. “You lost your independence once before. With Nato you will never lose it again.”
The Baltic states believe that, but do not take it for granted.
Among the debates about the costs of the Military Industrial Complex and arguments over weapons systems, (See Major Kong's excellent discussion of
the A-10 versus the F-35), it's worth remembering that we are not the only players in the game. It would be a much simpler world if that were so.
It's also worth noting how this impacts the case for economic justice in the U.S and the rest of the Free World, as it used to be called. It has been noted that the rich and corporations used to carry a much larger share of the tax burden back in the 1950s and 60s. Well, a big part of it was that the threat of International Communism was seen as a direct threat to their existence - and a good reason to throw a bone to the starving masses, lest communism start to seem like a better deal to them than the glories of free-market wage slavery.
Then Ronald Reagan tore down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands, and used the awesome power of Freedom to cause the Evil Soviet Empire to collapse. (Snark) And everywhere, there were demands for the Peace Dividend to be paid out. Which seems to have - not surprisingly - trickled up to the top. (The use of a stock market word should have been a tip off.) Meanwhile, we ended up fighting some very expensive wars on credit.
We're probably not going back to that Cold War economic dynamic with high taxes on the top again - not if they can help it! - but it might be a useful argument to hit the right wingers with. If they support the troops, so to speak, shouldn't the people with all the money kick in their fair share too? The middle class can't pay for it any more, though there seems to be more money than ever out there - for some.
It's one of those paradoxes of human nature that some of the really cool flying machines we like to talk about here are often linked to really bad behavior on the part of humans. We really need a better way to inspire our efforts.