Last week, two Russian SU-24 fighter planes buzzed a US Navy destroyer over the Baltic Sea. One of the planes flew within 30 feet of the ship, according to US officials. Secretary of State John Kerry protested, saying that the Russians were endangering the destroyer. The media in the West concluded that the Russians were simulating an attack on the destroyer. The Russians made no official statement, though a spokesperson for the Russian Defense Ministry commented to Interfax that Russia had done nothing that violated international laws or that endangered the destroyer or its crew. He expressed surprise that the Americans felt the need to be so “touchy”—and he was clearly pleased at the American response. Unofficially, the Russians dramatically inflated their account of what they did—an embellishment in many ways far more interesting than buzzing the destroyer.
To begin to understand this event, it is important to remember that such behavior was common during the Cold War and occurs with some regularity now as well. It involves not only Russia and the United States but also China and some countries allied with the US, including Britain and Japan. In November, the Turks shot down a Russian plane intruding on Turkish air space.
It is not as uncommon to see aircraft intercepting each other in international waters. There is a limited military purpose for this. Near-threatening behavior elicits responses. Those responses tell the other side about how ships and planes might maneuver in a real attack, how quickly events are communicated to higher echelons, frequencies used by fire-control systems, and so on. The target must assume that the approach is hostile and begin responding, and that response can provide useful data. But the primary purpose of such a maneuver is simply to show that you are willing to do it, to signal unhappiness, and to impress the public by projecting a sense of power.
The media’s claim that the Russians were simulating a real attack on the destroyer is not credible. An attacking aircraft does not swoop down on a ship these days. It launches anti-ship missiles from a position that it hopes is outside the range of the destroyer’s anti-aircraft systems.
A destroyer would pick up an attacker with search radar at least 100 miles out. As it approached to fire its missiles, fire-control radar would lock on the aircraft, and if an anti-ship missile were fired, the destroyer would launch Standard surface-to-air missiles at the plane. The ship and aircraft would both activate electronic warfare systems to confuse the opponent’s radar and incoming missiles. On the destroyer, fire-control radar would lock onto the incoming missiles and attempt to destroy them with missiles fired from the ship. If that failed, the ship would open intense fire on the incoming missiles with a Phalanx cannon. The attacker’s strategy would be to saturate the destroyer with missiles to overwhelm the ship’s defense systems, so multiple aircraft would be used in the attack. Finally, since the destroyer would likely be operating with a carrier battle group, when the Russian fighters were still hundreds of miles out, F-18s would be scrambling to intercept.
This is a very simple description of air-sea combat. Visual contact between ship and plane would be unlikely. A Russian aircraft coming in low and slow over an American destroyer would be blown into small pieces by the time any pictures were taken. It is not that the destroyer can’t be sunk by an aircraft, or that an aircraft would always lose in such an encounter. The crux of the matter is that this is not how an attack would be carried out. That is why the risk involved in such hostile actions is low. In reality, neither the aircraft nor the destroyer interpreted what was happening as hostile. The Russians were simply trying to jerk the Americans’ chain.
The US was operating near Russian waters, and the Russians decided to show their displeasure (not that the US cared). The US tried to make the event appear as a near disaster (not that the Russians cared). The level of outrage expressed by the Americans was a bit greater than usual, given that the US Secretary of State decided to personally protest and indicated that the Russian planes risked being shot down (a possibility, yes, but an unlikely one). The encounter grew a bit heated but was still conducted within normal bounds on both sides. More intriguing was where Russian information operations (also known as psychological warfare, disinformation, propaganda, or lies) took the story.
The Russians need to convince their public that Russia is returning to “great power” status. President Vladimir Putin is embroiled in significant political challenges—from Ukraine to the price of oil and its effect on the economy. He wants to be seen as having rebuilt Russia’s military to make it the equal of the United States military. This was one of the points of Russia’s intervention in Syria, and it is also one of the reasons for this incident involving the US destroyer.
The Russians were delighted to see the event portrayed as a simulated attack on an American destroyer, and Kerry’s outraged reaction was also valuable to the Russians. Both made the event appear much more significant than it was and therefore made Russia appear much more significant than it is. But lots of people knew better than to be impressed, and eventually, this view supplanted overblown concerns. The Russians then decided to add another dimension to their version of the story. Shortly after the incident, stories started appearing on the Internet claiming that the Russian attack aircraft carried new electronic warfare equipment that had crippled the destroyer’s combat systems. If that story took hold, Russian ability to cripple the defense systems of a US warship would turn into a major story, marking a turning point in naval warfare.
This story isn’t true for two reasons. First, an electronic attack that could cripple all weapons systems would also have knocked out communications and navigation on board the ship, too. Consequently, the ability to maneuver the ship would likely be affected, if not negated. The ship showed no sign of such paralysis.