According to John Kerry, the warship would have been within its rights to fire on the Russian jets: “under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down”. Despite the provocation, I don’t suppose it was worth escalating things into a shooting match.
Asked and answered right there.
Hell, when did the US ever shoot down a Russian / Soviet plane, piloted and ID’ed politically as such? Ever? WWI? WWII friendly fire?–Wrong front.
In the Vincennes’s shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655, the Vincennes had been previously that day involved in a gun battle with Iranian gun boats, and was in hot pursuit of said gunboats into Iranian territorial waters. During said hot pursuit, Flight 655 took off from Bandar Abbas, about ~30 nautical miles away from the action. The flight path was direct Bandar Abbas/Dubai, which unfortunately meant the flight was going to fly very close to the Vincennes. Bandar Abbas, like many airfields, is a combination military and civilian airfield. Per the wiki, Vincennes tried to hail the airliner on Guard and several military frequencies, but did not hail the airliner on civilian ATC frequencies. The airliner never responded to the repeated radio queries from Vincennes.
For whatever reason, the Vincennes’s CIC personnel thought the airliner was descending towards them (it wasn’t) and that the airliner was broadcasting a military IFF transponder code (it also wasn’t). Combined, all of these things made the crew think the airliner was a military aircraft attacking them and so they shot the airliner down. Whether a reasonable crew in a similar situation would’ve thought the same thing, is another matter.
In the matter of the Burke getting buzzed the other day, no one was shooting at anyone else beforehand, and so far as I know, no one was doing things to indicate that shooting was likely (locking fire control radar in guidance mode, opening bomb bay doors, actually firing weapons). I don’t know whether radio contact was established here or not.
The main thing is that, in all of the countless Soviet/Russian buzzings (and U.S. planes returning the favor), I am not aware of either side shooting at each other recently. They buzz us, we buzz them; Playboy centerfolds may or may not be shown to each other, and everyone goes on doing what they do. (Shootings used to happen quite a bit during the late 40s through the 60s. And of course there’s KAL 007.) That wasn’t the case in the Persian Gulf between the U.S. and Iran throughout the late 80s when the shootdown occurred.
There are a few recorded, admitted US shootdowns of Soviet aircraft. This is a wiki list of shootdowns between the two sides. The latest one for the U.S. was a case of mistaken identity at the end of the Korean War.
As far as more silliness during flybys, like the one that sparked the collision between the PRC fighter and U.S. EP-3 that I mentioned, a Russian SU-27 barrel rolled within 50 feet of a U.S. RC-135 spy plane the other day over the Baltic Sea. As I said before, it’s all fun and games until someone misjudges their skills…
Thanks Gray Ghost.
I, too, have served (in the USN, 1986-1989) at sea. Soviet TU-95 would overfly the ship I was on, at least once every cruise. I used to have photos of a Soviet cruiser that paralleled our course for a while. (They probably took pictures of us, as well.)
This document lists incidents (in respect with the Russians) over a one year period, March 2014 to March 2015. Note incidents #1 & 7 (page 9).
The Iranian incident took place in the middle of an undeclared war. The tanker wars were the largest naval engagement since Ww2.
The captain of the Vincennes was an aggressive type and took every opportunity to show it, even when his crew was demonstrably I’ll trained and equipment problematic.
Nevertheless the crew was under the impression that they were under attack by hostile force that they had engaged with/tried shooting up earlier. ( the facts were that they weren’t under attack by the plane, and at least some of the boats/torpedo gunships that the Vincennes hared after (and not just by chopper) were false radar echoes)
The Russians are a known professional force , there are not large political /military stress between the us and Russia (despite Ukraine) and they are known not to start ww3 and professional enough not to do it by accident in international waters in peacetime.
Now if people started getting doubtful about peacetime or international boundary broached, shoot down might happen, but otherwise a cool head knows not to fire and cause an international incident and kill someone.
Defcon and standing procedures help here.
I mean a gun is created to kill people, but if you were approached by someone wearing a gun and shot him because there was no way for you to know his intentions, you would be on trial and found guilty…
Then ther was that incident at Pearl Harbor not too long ago.
Imagine how that would have turned out if the OOTD had been doing his job, and had scrambled his forces when aerial activity was idenified …!