CQ WEEKLY – COVER STORY
Nov. 6, 2015 – 5:40 p.m.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
John Donnelly
As the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier — nearly 100,000 tons of American military might — sailed through the Sea of Japan on Oct. 27, sailors on board suddenly noticed that two Russian Tu-142 Bear bombers were charging at the massive U.S. warship. The Russian planes flew low, just 500 feet over the waves.
A Predator drone. |
The Reagan’s commander scrambled four Super Hornet fighter jets to chase away the Russian planes.
The encounter happened in international waters, and U.S. officials later described it as “safe.” But the Russian planes had gotten within a mile of the carrier — alarmingly close given the flight speed and firepower of the jets.
At almost the same time on that Tuesday, in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy had another potential close encounter with a different nuclear power, China.
The U.S. government had decided to send the USS Lassen destroyer and a pair of reconnaissance planes within the
12 nautical-mile radius that China had effectively drawn around an island Beijing had built through dredging but now declared as its territory — a claim disputed by the United States and some of its Asian allies.
The Pentagon said the action in the South China Sea was just a “freedom of navigation” exercise in international waters. China, however, didn’t see it that way. It sent its own destroyers out to track the U.S. ship and planes. Chinese officials called the U.S. move a provocation. The next day, a state-run Chinese paper said Beijing is “not afraid to fight a war with the U.S. in the region.”
The pace of such dangerous encounters appears to be increasing. In the last 18 months, the U.S. military and NATO forces, along with some European civilian airliners, have had alarming run-ins with military elements from Russia, China and Iran.
Any of these incidents could have turned out very differently, perhaps even escalated into war as a result of miscalculation, miscommunication or accident.
These near-collisions are happening not only in the air and on the sea, but also on the ground, in space and in cyberspace.
Conservatives in Washington, including presidential hopeful Sen.
“The weak standing we have in the world invites aggression,” the South Carolina Republican says.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
But Pentagon spending, while down from its post-Sept. 11 wartime high, is still at near-record levels. America’s arsenal dwarfs every other country’s, even as U.S. adversaries have begun to narrow that gap. And while Obama has been more sparing in his use of military power than his predecessor, he has remained engaged in several wars that liberals wanted him to leave behind years ago.
Perhaps more importantly, Russia, China and Iran are all rising powers — or at least see themselves as rising powers. Leaders in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are acutely aware that their countries were once far more powerful. Now they are looking to “reassert lost influence” in their regions — if not globally — as they slowly gain ground militarily on a war-weary United States, says Frank Hoffman, a research fellow at the National Defense University. These three nations all see America, which has inserted its forces into nearly every corner of the Earth, not as the guarantor of world stability it considers itself, but as a rival and even a bully.
Indeed, the United States and its allies are stepping up military exercises and patrols just as its adversaries are. There’s even talk in NATO of training, for the first time since the Cold War’s end, for scenarios in which conventional war turns nuclear.
In some ways, it’s like the early days of the Cold War redux, where the rules of the road are unclear and there is little communication between rivals.
As in the 1950s, America’s perceptions of its rivals, and theirs of Washington, are inordinately driven by the bellicose rhetoric that each side hears from the other. Russia, China and Iran are famous for their fighting words.
And American politicians are just as personal and pugilistic.
“Ronald Reagan would have told the Russians to get the hell out” of Syria, Senate Armed Services Chairman
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Putin and Obama met in September at the U.N. |
But Reagan talked with his counterparts in the Soviet “evil empire.” By contrast, official U.S. contact with Russia and Iran is virtually nonexistent, and it’s arguably not what it should be with China.
Congress, in its fiscal 2016 defense authorization measure (
At the same time, efforts to write agreements governing how military forces should behave in a crisis are not widespread enough, experts say. McCain and others have even depicted them as forms of appeasement.
Starting the Fire
Whenever tensions rise like this, so will the chances that a miscalculation or accident can lead to war.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
“We are very worried about it,” says Senate Foreign Relations Chairman
With proxy forces and faceless hackers at work, it might not be abundantly clear who set the fire. And when contacts between countries are few and protocols for handling run-ins are not clear, it can be harder to put it out.
“If you have a situation which is already tense, where there’s a lot of rhetoric being thrown around by all sides and accusations being made by one against the other and where the domestic political environments of each side are worked up and hostile to each other, it then becomes much harder for leaders to keep a sensible lid on things,” says Ian Kearns, director of the European Leadership Network, a research group that promotes European security.
Retired Gen. David Richards, former head of Britain’s military forces, agrees.
“The scope will grow for misunderstanding and confusion between America and those who might ineluctably challenge it,” Richards says. “Confused aims and messaging will lead to states bumping into each other, and the law of unintended consequences may apply, perhaps to disastrous effect.”
That doesn’t mean there is not a role for forceful military action or the threat of it. It’s just that clarity is needed to avoid misunderstanding, and clarity is best achieved via communication.
McCain acknowledged in a brief interview with CQ that the “prospects of confrontation” between America and its foes have “dramatically increased.” For all his tough talk, he says he knows that, with any military moves, “you have to be very careful.”
Still, in public, McCain sounds a lot more threatening to officials in Moscow, Beijing or Tehran.
On the day that Russia started bombing rebel targets in Syria, an angry McCain took to the Senate floor. Putin, he said, “can only understand a steadfast and strong American policy that brings American strength back to bear.”
“We are still the strongest nation in the world,” he added. “Now it’s time for us to act like it.”
Under Putin, Russian forces are reasserting themselves all over the globe. More and more often, they are literally almost colliding with Western planes and ships.
In March 2014, a Scandinavian Airlines jet carrying 132 passengers had just taken off from Copenhagen, bound for Rome, when it nearly crashed into a Russian military reconnaissance plane. The Russian plane had turned off its transponders, making it essentially invisible to other planes’ sensors. The SAS pilot noticed the Russian jet just in time to avert a midair collision, but the planes passed within 300 feet of each other.
An almost exact repeat of the incident occurred nine months later, with another SAS flight on nearly the same route.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
Either incident could have been a disaster.
“You would’ve seen immense pressure in Western and NATO countries to say to the Russians, ‘Look, you either stop these flights or we’re going to interdict them, because we can’t have civilian airliners brought down,’ ” says the European Leadership Network’s Kearns. “At the same time, Putin has created, fed into and drawn upon a particular domestic political context in Russia which would make it very difficult for him to publicly back down in such a scenario.”
The near-misses are just two of 16 “high-risk” or “serious” incidents between Russia and the West from March 2014 to March 2015, according to Kearns’ group. These include incidents such as a hunt for Russian subs off Sweden and a Russian simulated attack on a Danish island in the Baltic Sea.
The first clue that Putin might be taking Russia back onto a more confrontational Cold War path emerged in 2008, when Russia began its war with Georgia, though officials largely wrote it off then as an aberration, not the start of a trend.
The tension really stepped up in 2014, when Putin inserted proxy forces into Ukraine’s Crimea region, and helped force a referendum that triggered the annexation of Crimea. Subsequently, he conducted a proxy campaign to undermine the rest of Ukraine.
Putin has also built up Russia’s military presence in the Arctic. And he has developed a cruise missile that the U.S. government says violates a treaty barring intermediate range missiles.
In late September, Putin upped the ante again. He sent Russian fighter jets, drones, helicopters, personnel and more to Syria to help that country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, fight off insurgents. Some of the weapons — such as air-to-air interceptor jets and surface-to-air missiles — uniquely threaten U.S. and allied planes, but not rebels, who lack an air force, Pentagon officials have said.
In early November, the U.S. military said it deployed six F-15C air-to-air combat jets to Turkey after two Russian warplanes strayed into Turkish airspace last month.
McCain has made it clear that he doesn’t think the United States should defer in any way to Russia’s operations there.
“What we should be saying to Vladimir Putin is that you fly, but we fly anywhere we want to, when and how we want to, and you’d better stay out of the way,” he said Sept. 30 on the Senate floor.
U.S. and Russian aircraft are operating for the most part in different parts of Syria, but they have come in close enough contact that they had to work out a “deconfliction” agreement in that country aimed at reducing the chances that a close encounter could spark a larger conflict.
It’s one of several such pacts that now exist to govern behavior when potential adversaries encounter each other. But experts say there need to be more of them, even if they are not foolproof.
Scrambling Jets
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
Putin’s actions — and the West’s reactions — are increasingly putting his military close up against those of the United States and its allies, particularly in Europe.
NATO says it scrambled its fighter jets more than 400 times last year to intercept Russian military flights close to the alliance’s borders, quadruple the previous year’s number. This year, NATO intercepts over Europe have topped 300 so far. Russia, meanwhile, claims NATO has doubled the number of aircraft flying just off Russia’s borders.
The pace and scope of potentially provocative military exercises is also increasing. NATO says Russia held 10 times as many in 2014 as the year before. And NATO confirms it doubled its number of exercises in that time span.
Among the more worrisome developments on the Russian side was a mammoth training exercise in March. Beforehand, Moscow had announced a limited set of maneuvers. But the exercise ultimately encompassed the entire country and grew to twice as large as initially announced: 80,000 personnel, 12,000 pieces of heavy equipment, 65 warships, 15 submarines and 220 aircraft.
The United States and NATO, for their part, have deployed additional forces and equipment to nations that abut Russia’s border. Early this month, NATO concluded its largest exercise since the Cold War. Located in, around and over the Mediterranean Sea, it comprised five weeks of maneuvers involving 36,000 troops, 600 ships and 140 planes.
“Russia is clearing preparing for a conflict with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a conflict with Russia,” says Des Browne, a former U.K. secretary of defense. “There is no other way to interpret it.”
And now, for the first time since the Cold War, NATO is considering conducting exercises for scenarios in which a conflict between East and West escalates from conventional to nuclear war.
“Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has done conventional exercising and nuclear exercising, both, but not exercised the transition from one to the other,” Sir Adam Thomson, the British representative to NATO, told reporters last month. “It is safe to say the U.K. does see merit in making sure we know how, as an alliance, to transition up the escalatory ladder in order to strengthen our deterrence.”
These exercises would likely be so-called tabletop discussions of how and when to employ nuclear forces if Russia were to attack, experts say. But NATO has conducted more tangible activities, such as sending nuclear-capable bombers to train in places that are closer to Russia, like the Arctic, says Hans Kristensen, an expert with the Federation of American Scientists research group.
The nuclear option discussion is meant to have a deterrent effect on Russia, but it could backfire.
“If we start to exercise in this fashion and we start to anticipate or expect that there will be escalation from conventional to nuclear weapons, it will take us decades to get away from it,” Browne says.
Unlike in the Cold War, new forms of combat have made war a murkier affair.
NATO officials are debating whether a cyberattack or aggression by proxy forces — such as Putin’s army of unmarked Russian soldiers, or “little green men,” in Ukraine — should trigger an alliance response, says Corker.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
It may have been these “little green men” who shot down a Malaysian jetliner last summer with a Russian-made missile over territory in eastern Ukraine controlled by Putin’s allies, killing all 283 on board.
In cyberspace and space, it’s often hard to know who is responsible for harmful actions. That confusion can make it harder to feel certain about whom to punish. It can also lead officials to blame another country without solid proof.
Russian hackers, some possibly working for the government, are stealing U.S. corporate secrets, conducting espionage and trying to disrupt or disable U.S. military systems. American cyberwarriors are doubtless also snooping on Russian computers and perhaps causing mayhem of their own.
In space, Russia is updating Cold War anti-satellite weapons. The Pentagon, for its part, is spending $1 billion more a year to protect its satellites and is believed to be funding anti-satellite projects of its own.
The mistrust between Washington and Moscow may not be quite at Cold War levels, but the comparison is no longer outlandish.
The odds of a deliberate nuclear exchange are at the highest level since the Cold War, according to scholars polled by the Nuclear Threat Initiative for a report issued this fall.
“But it is the possibility of a major transformative event, such as a midair collision or a skirmish along NATO or Russian borders, that is on the rise,” says the report. “Such an incident involving the world’s two largest nuclear powers could plausibly shift alert postures and lead to a rapid series of escalatory measures precipitated by miscalculation and exacerbated by mistrust.”
This past March, Putin said he had considered placing Russian nuclear forces on alert during the Crimea annexation. The same month, Russia’s ambassador to Denmark threatened that country with a nuclear attack if it joined NATO’s missile defense shield; and a top Russian news anchor said on TV that Russia is “the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash.”
The United States has initiated its own set of responses, deepening the cycle.
The White House has irked Moscow not only by deploying bombers for training missions ever closer to Russian territory but also by stationing missile defenses in Europe.
What’s more, U.S. spy planes often turn off their own transponders, experts say, and U.S. ships and planes frequently transit near, or in, other countries’ territories.
“It’s a two-way street,” says Eugene Habiger, a retired general who once headed U.S. Strategic Command.
The commander of U.S. forces in Europe, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, told reporters in late October that the U.S. military is looking to preposition more equipment and rotational forces in Europe and to bolster its maritime response to a growing Russian naval presence in the Black Sea. He also said U.S. intelligence agencies are now making “fairly dramatic changes” to reposition to focus more on Russia.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
Marine Corps Gen.
Such rhetoric may be hardening Russian views. It “feeds a public mood in Russia that honestly borders on national hysteria,” Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations said at a hearing before McCain’s committee last month.
“Unfortunately, hearing that we see Russia as an existential threat — pretty extreme language, after all — tells many Russians that our countries are on a collision course toward war and that we have accepted that idea,” said Sestanovich, who served as ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001. “I urge the members of this committee to take a different approach: to challenge responsible Russians to see how strange and counterproductive their country’s policy looks to the outside world, not to make ourselves look equally strange.”
China
The USS Lassen’s challenge to China’s claims of sovereignty over artificial islands in the South China Sea in late October was perhaps the most recent encounter between the U.S. and Chinese militaries — but by no means the first.
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In April 2014 in Beijing, U.S. Ambassador Max Baucus and Defense Secretary |
In 2001, five months before the Sept. 11 attacks, an earlier incident in the South China Sea roiled relations between Washington and Beijing.
A Chinese J-8 interceptor fighter jet had collided with a U.S. EP-3 signals-intelligence plane. The Chinese plane crashed and the pilot died. When the U.S. plane was first hit, it reportedly dropped 8,000 feet in 30 seconds. As the plane plummeted, the U.S. aircrew of 24 were said to have poured hot coffee on hard drives containing sensitive U.S. data to keep the Chinese from getting it. The air crew was ultimately able to land the plane on nearby Hainan Island.
China interrogated the Americans on the island for a week before the situation was defused.
The odds of a repeat, or worse, appear to be increasing, with U.S. and Chinese military aircraft and ships frequently in close contact.
China, another nuclear power, has used its increasing wealth to fuel nearly 10 percent real annual growth in its public defense budget over the last decade, the Pentagon says, a rate of spending U.S. officials expect will continue.
China’s disclosed military budget is one-third of America’s, but the gap in military might is closing. China is investing in surface ships, missiles, mines, high-performance aircraft, anti-satellite systems, ballistic missile submarines, advanced guidance systems and more.
Beijing has thrown some sharp elbows around its neighborhood lately. It has asserted territorial rights in the air and around islands in the seas to its east and south. In the South China Sea, it has built those artificial islands atop reefs, creating outposts big enough for military runways and facilities.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
What’ s more, like Russia, China has engaged in major cyberattacks on the U.S. government and U.S. corporations. Beijing, for example, is believed to be behind the enormous hack earlier this year of the personnel records of an estimated 22 million current, former and prospective U.S. government employees.
In space, China destroyed one of its own satellites in a 2007 weapon test that littered space to this day with thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.
And China launched a rocket in 2013 that the Pentagon believes demonstrates Beijing’s ability to put anti-satellite weapons into the same orbit in which key U.S. spying and communication satellites are found.
Against that backdrop, there have been more close encounters recently between U.S. and Chinese forces.
Adm. Harry Harris, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told reporters in October that he believes a close call over the Yellow Sea the month before, when two Chinese fighters intercepted a U.S. surveillance plane, was “an instance of simply poor airmanship. It wasn’t some higher headquarters-directed interaction.”
That’s not entirely reassuring. It illustrates how the actions of a rogue commander can lead to a dangerous situation, even if things didn’t escalate in this case.
After the USS Lassen operation last month, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said, “We hope that the U.S. side will not take actions that will backfire.”
The United States has previously conducted such so-called freedom-of-navigation exercises in areas China claims as its own, most recently in 2012. This latest one occurred after months of pressure from hawks inside the administration and on Capitol Hill.
During Harris’ appearance before Senate Armed Services a month before the USS Lassen’s move, Alaska Republican
Richards, the former top British general, says of such rhetoric, “What worries me the most is the megaphone diplomacy being carried out.”
A clash that could trigger unintended military consequences need not involve warships or warplanes at the outset, Harris told reporters during an October visit to Washington. Even commercial or Coast Guard ships could have some kind of run-in that could lead to military involvement, he said.
Run-ins between the United States and China are likely going to proliferate in the years ahead, as China’s economic — and military — power relative to the United States grows.
China, says Hoffman of the National Defense University, is determined not to allow the United States to push it around in its own neighborhood. Beijing, he adds, “definitely has a sense of a position in the world that has been denied by America and the West.”
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
Iran
In 2011, in one of his last public appearances before he retired, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen worried aloud about the lack of contact between American leaders and Iranian ones.
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Kurdish forces in Syria take aim at Islamic State fighters in April. |
“We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other,” Mullen said then. “If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation, which would be extremely dangerous in that part of the world.”
While high-level government contacts have occurred since then over a high-profile nuclear deal, at all other levels the points of intersection between Iran and America are still virtually nil.
Yet the flashpoints between America and Iran are not dwindling, despite the promise of the recently signed nuclear accord, assuming it is implemented fully. Indeed, there are a growing number of places where Iranian and American agendas are on a collision course.
With such tense relations and minimal communication, any run-in with Iran is fraught with danger. And they happen all the time.
Take an incident in January 2008, when three U.S. Navy ships were sailing through the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf when five Iranian boats approached at high speed and swarmed around them within 200 yards, U.S. officials told reporters at the time.
The U.S. ships received an ominous radio transmission that they believed was coming from the fast boats: “I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes.”
The boats dropped boxes in the water, which the U.S. sailors thought might be mines. The commander of one of the U.S. ships had approved opening fire on the Iranian boats.
Then, as quickly as they had arrived, the Iranians left.
What the Iranians dropped in the water were “probably garbage bags,” says David Crist, a Mideast expert who serves as historian for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an adviser to senior defense officials.
The 2008 run-in illustrates how even high-tech warships must be vigilant against small-scale attacks from mines, missiles or just explosives like those that blew a hole in the USS Cole in a Yemeni harbor in 2000.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
It also shows how even a small scare could easily spark a shooting war.
It was just one of many tense moments in three decades of shadowy, low-level conflict in the Persian Gulf between American ships and their Iranian counterparts, usually the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite force within the country’s military.
Today, U.S. and Iranian forces interact with Iranian counterparts in the region on “a nearly daily basis” with few incidents, says Cmdr. Kyle Raines, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command.
“U.S. Naval forces are routinely approached by Iranian warships and aircraft as they operate in the region, with the majority of all interaction by the Iranians conducted in a safe and professional manner,” Raines wrote in an email.
The good news is, except for some battles in the 1980s, no incident has led to a major conflict between Iran and the United States. The bad news is that belligerent encounters are frequent, and they don’t appear to be abating. Any one of them could spiral into something larger, even with the recent nuclear arms accord.
Many lawmakers on Capitol Hill worry that some of the billions of dollars Iran will reap from sanctions being lifted could be spent on its military and paramilitary activities across the region, where Iran and its allies are frequently at odds with the United States.
Iran’s support for Hezbollah, a Shiite militia and political party based in Lebanon, is one reason Tehran is an enemy of America and Israel.
Shiite-dominated Iran is also fighting a sectarian proxy war across the Mideast with Sunni Saudi Arabia, one of America’s staunchest allies. In Yemen, Iran backs the Houthi rebels and the United States supports Saudi Arabia on the other side.
In Syria, too, Iran is on the side opposite the United States. Up to 2,000 Iranian military personnel are in Syria helping the Russians counter rebel groups that oppose Assad, some of which also fight America’s enemy, the Islamic State terrorist group.
The United States is providing Syrian rebels with high-tech weapons such as anti-tank missiles that are being used against Iranian forces in Syria. Iran sees this as aiding its enemies, just as the United States objected when Iran started giving deadly roadside bombs to Shiite militias fighting U.S. soldiers in Iraq 10 years ago.
U.S. politicians have also convinced Iranians that America is an implacable foe.
“It’s a ruthless, brutal regime that has the blood of Americans, many others, and including its own people, on its hands,” Hillary Rodham Clinton, the leading Democratic contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, said in a September speech. Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are even harsher about Iran. Republicans led an unsuccessful charge to derail the recent nuclear deal with Iran and are still pushing for additional sanctions.
And as Mullen predicted, the lack of diplomatic or military relations with Iran increases the chances that the law of unintended consequences could come into effect after some kind of haphazard clash of forces.
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
Habiger, the former U.S. Strategic Command chief, says three things are needed to reduce the risks of war, regardless of whether the adversary is Russia, China or Iran.
“You have to have confidence-building, trust and transparency,” Habiger says.
In the case of Iran, there is a dearth of all three elements.
Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.