- The US military is reporting frequent unsafe intercepts of its planes by Russian and Chinese jets.
- The intercepts reflect a desire to challenge the US and assess its capabilities, US commanders say.
Russian and Chinese jets have crowded, buzzed, and even collided with US aircraft in hotspots around the world in recent months in a series of encounters that reflect a greater willingness to challenge the US amid heightened tensions with both countries, top US military commanders say.
US officials have highlighted several dangerous incidents so far this year. In March, for example, US European Command said Russian jets interfered with a US MQ-9 drone over the Black Sea, colliding with the drone and forcing its operators to bring it down in the sea.
In July, US Central Command reported several instances of "unsafe and unprofessional behavior" by Russian jets around US drones and manned aircraft over Syria, and in mid-October, the Pentagon released photos and videos of what it called "coercive and risky" intercepts of US aircraft by Chinese jets over the previous two years.
Gen. Mark Kelly, who oversees the organizing, training, and equipping of US Air Force units as head of Air Combat Command, said the nature and frequency of those interactions was a new development.
"Five years ago we were not having our fighters interact with Chinese fighters on a routine basis in exercises. We were not having ... fighters merge with Russian fighters weekly, if not closer to daily, over Syria," Kelly said at the Air and Space Forces Association conference in mid-September.
"There's a few reasons that that's happening. One is that they want batting practice against the best in the world, and that's available for them," Kelly added. "The second is a direct challenge to the post-World War II rules-based construct that we all grew up in. And the third is — and we know this from insights — is they feel pretty confident they can compete in this arena."
The close encounters come amid Russia's ongoing attack on Ukraine, which has become the largest ground war in the region since World War II and prompted a reordering of Europe's security architecture. The US and China are also engaged in widening geopolitical competition that has its focal point in the Western Pacific, where the US and its allies operate close to China's military, which is growing in size and capability.
Kelly and other Air Force officials say the US still has an advantage in aircraft technology and pilot experience, but they argue that lead is shrinking, pointing to a force that is the smallest and oldest since its founding in 1947. The aircraft and weapons that have allowed the Air Force to attain air superiority in recent conflicts — including the F-22 stealth fighter and the AIM-120 air-to-air missile — are also aging, which Kelly said Russia and China had noticed.
"All of those capabilities — our sensors, our weapons, our platforms — are significantly improved and modernized than they were back a quarter of a century ago," Kelly said at the conference, "but there comes a time when you've squeezed the last ounce of combat capability out."
Russia and China have invested heavily in their own air forces in recent decades. Russia's is largely unscathed by the war in Ukraine, but its performance there has raised doubts about its capabilities. China's air force and navy now field the world's third-largest aviation fleet, including 1,900 fighter jets. Kelly said both countries wanted to test their aircraft and pilots against the US.
"They kind of want to know, 'Hey, how far can I detect fill-in-the-blank platform — F-22, F-35, F-15E, and F-16 — and once I get close to it, how far can they lock on to me,'" Kelly said, adding that those rivals were seeking to capitalize on what they saw as US shortcomings. "They're like, 'Hey, you know what? They aren't [at] the capacity and the capability advantage they had 30 years ago. Maybe this is a time to go give them a run for their money.'"
Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the commander of US Air Forces in the Middle East, said in June that Russia appeared to be acting more aggressively over Syria to compensate for having "to move capability and capacity" out of that country to support its war in Ukraine, but Russian pilots have dialed back that behavior.
"They do continue to intercept our MQ-9s, but I would say that we've seen some favorable shifts in behavior over the last month that are broadly de-escalatory," Grynkewich told reporters at a Defense Writers Group event on October 4, adding that the change could be because of the US publicizing Russian actions and to the demands Russia's military faces elsewhere.
"I can't speak to what their calculus is, but I can talk to the correlations that we've seen. We did see after we publicized some of their more egregious behavior that that behavior modified," Grynkewich added. "I also think Russia has a lot going on right now."
Little appears to have changed about Chinese behavior, however. A week after US officials released the declassified imagery of Chinese intercepts on October 17, US Indo-Pacific Command reported an "unsafe intercept" of a US B-52 bomber by a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea that put "both aircraft in danger of collision."
US officials say the risks in those encounters are exacerbated by China's refusal to engage in military-to-military discussions. Many of those channels were frozen after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022, and US officials say the absence of communications makes it more likely that an accident could escalate.
The attendance of US defense officials at an official security conference in Beijing this week and recent high-level meetings, including one expected this month between President Joe Biden and China's leader, Xi Jinping, suggest communication channels are reopening, but China still objects to US military operations in the Western Pacific, meaning tense encounters will most likely continue.
"Intercepts happen every day around the world," Adm. John Aquilino, head of Indo-Pacific Command, said when the intercept imagery was released. "The vast majority are conducted safely and without incident, and there's no reason for the intercepts with the [People's Republic of China] in the Indo-Pacific region to be any different."