Posted on 04/14/2016 6:23:59 PM PDT by Mariner
“No one does it this close to a ship.”
Sure they do, and it’s been going on for 50 years...
“10 Meters is not “normal” and within safety precautions for a jet.”
Perhaps not for the USAF or the USN, but these are RUSSIANS...
Their pilots are ENCOURAGED to show how big their cajones are, especially the low fliers. They don’t have the same attitude toward “Training Accidents” that we do.
The Soviets used to BRAG that their Spetz training was so realistic, they’d have one or two from every class killed by live fire accidents.
30 meters is quite close. Would be a shame if the warplanes were actually shot down.
US policy would be better served by closer political ties and relationships with Russia.
And US interests would benefit from an occasional partner at sea. Like joint exercises in the Med and East China Sea.
Most people believe the Russians are our enemy...because they exercised historical hegemony over Ukraine, Caucuses etc. And those same people were cheering when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan...and bombed Libya and Serbia and all over Syria.
And we had no history in any of those countries.
The Russians lost 3 million men to the Nazi's in Ukraine...and Catherine the Great built Odessa from the beach up. And look at the history of Sevastopol.
I've even seen some folks post on this forum that we SHOULD bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
What a ridiculous thought.
Yes, and they knew everything that was going on. We didn’t know it at the time but this was the peak of the Walker Spy Ring penetration, and the Soviets were reading all of our KW-7 traffic.
I have personally loaded hundreds of KW-7's with 7314 cards, hundreds of times.
Thing is about the Walker thing, is the Soviets didn't get the cards until a few weeks after they were used and could only decrypt traffic they had previously recorded.
That's exactly what should happen and believe that is what Trump wants. I think he could communicate very effectively with those folks. Playing games with each other and being each others throat is just plain stupid and goes bad from there.
Yes, it was real treason on the part of the Walkers, but it probably saved a lot of misunderstandings that could have been deadly.
There was a Soviet AG that thought it was cute to spoof the SPS-26 tones that we used to communicate with the submarines. This went on for a couple of weeks, and then all of a sudden stopped just after midnight Charlie time. I figured Moscow Center had finally sent the AGI a message that said, “You realize that one of those codes is ‘Sink the Russian’, don’t you?” Now I know they were probably responding the message we got from CTF 69 saying the same thing.
Nope.
I just assumed, however, that the purpose of a warship was to not allow the armed enemy to penetrate their perimeter without fighting back. Care to explain why that's allowed?
There's close, and then there's close. At some point the whole concept of perimeter defense becomes moot. Why exactly would such a level of penetration be allowed against a warship?
We need to show them that we are prepared to shoot them down and could have done so while they were at a safe distance.
If they see that we are not ready for them they will note that we are lax.
Getting this close isn’t “business as usual” They wouldn’t let us get so close we could actually take out one of their ships w/o trying to destroy our planes - e should have shot some of them out of the air instead of letting them in on the fact that they aren’t allowed to even protect themselves as our own business as usual. They discovered that they can get in and destroy our ships because policy dictates that’s better than pissing off anyone else in the world.
well, perhaps on the starboard side.....but we’ve done fly bys in open waters for sure.
Our interests and Russia's interests rarely align, so I don't see this as a feasible option.
The Russians lost 3 million men to the Nazi's in Ukraine
After the Russians starved 12 million Ukrainians to death. It's not exactly a patriotic love story over there.
I've even seen some folks post on this forum that we SHOULD bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
What a ridiculous thought.
I agree. That would be a major, unnecessary provocation against Russia.
“scrambled planes from a destroyer?”
You mean the destroyer was not attached to a carrier group operating in the area?
Slightly different subject, but somewhat related: I grew up in rural Nebraska near a P47 training base. Practically every day they would come up and do dog fights with each other or if bombers on training missions came by, with those. In addition, they would do strafing runs along the section roads. I was too young to go to school, but my older brother walked the 2.5 miles. A few years ago he described those strafing runs & I asked, “How high were the planes?” He said, “About twice the elevation of the telephone posts”.
My career took me away from the farm, but one summer during the cold war, I heard a low flying jet. It was a B52 flying about a wing span high about half a mile west. Talked to the local farmers & found out it was the practice range for low level bombing missions to the Soviet Union. I don’t know if they ever flew at night, but at times the windows were blacked out. Later Stealth bombers used the run. I never did see one. The B52s you could hear and spot, but the farmers said that the stealth bombers were gone by the time you heard them. It was only by accident that you saw them.
I got a reply from my BIL who flew P2V Neptunes.
For what it is worth, he said they were never buzzed by Russian aircraft either aboard ship or on the plane. The one close incident they did have was when they flew close (500’) to a Russian warship.
He said the ship turned on their anti aircraft defense and could have easily shot them down but never fired. He did say they were sweating it out.
Another time their plane caught on fire while they were shadowing a Russian freighter near Maine. They were going to ditch near the ship hoping they would be picked up.
Fortunately, the fire was in a radar in the planes bottom and they were able to extinguish it.
They would have been picked up and well treated, with a free ride to the nearest port of entry. Vodka the night before arrival.
But ditching at sea is always the very last resort. 50-50 at best.
Tell your BIL I'm glad he didn't have to face the worst at sea.
Well in this case the US Destroyer had moved its perimeter so close to Russian soil that the jets could have conducted a missile attack without leaving Russian airspace - even a simulated one, firecontrol radar live, even inert weapons release. Unarmed close approach was the less aggressive response.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.