The US-Russia drone collision over the Black Sea is a sign of increasingly unfriendly skies

The proliferation of drones in conflict zones is a game-changer.

After viewing the video released on Thursday of the downing of a U.S. drone by Russian fighter jets over the Black Sea, Brynn Tannehill, a former U.S. Navy aviator, told Grid, “I’ve been intercepted numerous times, flying P-3 [surveillance planes] and SH-60 [helicopters] in the Gulf, and I can tell you that this was incredibly aggressive in ways that I’ve never personally witnessed.”

According to the U.S. account of the incident that took place over the Black Sea on Tuesday, two Russian Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets buzzed and dumped fuel on an American MQ-9 Reaper drone. Making another pass, one of the jets collided with the drone, forcing the U.S. to bring the drone down in the water. The Kremlin denies this account, claiming the drone was intercepted after flying close to Russian airspace, was never hit by the planes and crashed “as a result of sharp maneuver.” The U.S. government’s release of the video seemed intended at least in part to bolster its own version of the story.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday that the U.S. could not determine if the Russians intended to destroy the drone but called their conduct “reckless and unprofessional.” Tannehill, now an analyst at the Rand Corporation, agreed with that assessment and said the intentional dumping of fuel on another aircraft was not a tactic she’d seen before. “That’s not just hot dogging. That’s taking it to a different level,” she said.

But while the specifics of the Black Sea collision may have been unusual, close encounters between Russian and U.S. aircraft are not; they have a long history dating back to the early days of the Cold War. Other nations have had close calls as well. And while militaries generally have guidelines and best practices for avoiding aerial collisions, the widespread proliferation of drone aircraft has changed the equation. And experts told Grid that some of the old rules of the game may need to be updated.

The not-so-friendly skies

Air intercepts are a relatively common feature of modern military aviation. The idea is either to identify and photograph the aircraft, or send a warning if it’s somewhere you don’t think it should be. During the 1950s, particularly during the heightened tensions of the Korean War, intercepts often involved U.S. and Soviet planes actually firing on one another, but these encounters became more routine — and less combative — over time. In a ritual repeated thousands of times during the Cold War, U.S. fighter jets would scramble and fly in close formation with Soviet aircraft approaching North American airspace, shadowing them until they left. The idea was to get close enough to send a message but not so close as to risk collision were one plane to suddenly change course. At times, the pilots were even having fun: U.S. fighter pilots would sometimes perform barrel rolls at the request of the Soviet crews.

Over time, such intercepts became less common. One likely reason is that satellite imagery has made aerial surveillance less important. Another may have been the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA), under which Moscow and Washington agreed to certain rules of the road for military encounters in international waters and airspace, and set up a regular process to discuss these incidents. Among other provisions, the agreement specified that “Commanders of aircraft of the Parties shall use the greatest caution and prudence in approaching aircraft and ships of the other Party.” (Of particular relevance to this week’s incident, INCSEA prohibits “dropping various objects” on other craft, though it seems to have in mind aircraft dropping things on ships rather than on other aircraft.)

INCSEA remained in effect between Russia and the United States after the end of the Cold War, and the two countries’ navies held meetings to discuss its implementation as recently as 2021.

Midair incidents have been rare — but deadly. In 1983, for instance, during a moment of heightened Cold War military tension, Soviet fighter jets shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 that had drifted off course and was mistaken for a spy plane. Two hundred and sixty-nine people were killed.

In a 2001 incident involving the U.S. and China, a Chinese navy interceptor jet collided with a U.S. surveillance plane near the island of Hainan in the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was killed while the U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan, setting off a diplomatic incident between the two countries. And in 2020, U.S. F-15s intercepted an Iranian passenger plane that had flown close to a U.S. air base in Syria, forcing it to make an emergency landing and injuring several passengers.

But the conflict in Ukraine — dating to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 — has led to a notable uptick in intercept-related incidents. Most of these took place over the Baltic Sea, but incidents over the Black Sea and the Arctic have also increased. Since 2017, there have been more than 150 such “air incidents” each year — mostly intercepts — according to a report by the arms control group Global Zero.

Still, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, Gen. Tod Wolters, assured an audience in 2019 that “well over 99 percent of the intercepts that occur in the air are actually safe.”

The risks may be even higher around Taiwan, where Taiwanese air intercepts involving Chinese, Taiwanese and U.S. aircraft are increasingly common. In an incident in December of last year, the U.S. accused China of flying a fighter jet dangerously close to a U.S. reconnaissance plane, risking a repeat of something like the Hainan Island incident.

Close encounters of the unmanned kind

Though air intercepts involving manned aircraft may be relatively common, incidents involving drones, like this week’s Black Sea collision, are a new phenomenon.

Paul Lushenko, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Cornell University PhD candidate who studies drone warfare, told Grid that until recently, drones were deployed in less-contested skies.

“They’ve mainly been used against terrorists in places where air superiority and air dominance was never in question — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,” Lushenko said. “We haven’t really seen these capabilities used in interstate wars as much, and we haven’t seen it between great powers like this.”

The main difference when drones are involved is that they are, for obvious reasons, considered more expendable than manned aircraft, and therefore their destruction is less escalatory. Increasingly, there are also simply more of them.

“If a Russian Sukhoi had hit my helicopter, it would have killed everybody on board the helicopter, and the Sukhoi pilot would probably also have had to bail out,” said Tannehill. “A significant portion the American public would be demanding retribution for our dead, brave airmen. You’d have state funerals, and Biden showing up at Arlington. It creates a very different set of diplomatic and military problems.”

This logic was put to the test by the incident in 2019 when Iran shot down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz. The arguments then were similar to this week’s U.S.-Russia claims; the U.S. said the drone was in international airspace; Iran claimed it had strayed into its own maritime territory. Then-President Donald Trump reportedly approved military strikes against Iran but called them off at the last minute.

The fact that drones carry no human beings reduces the likelihood than any particular air-to-air incident will result in World War III, but it also means militaries are more likely to take risky actions against them. Tannehill said that if the Russian downing of the drone was intentional — which, again, has not been confirmed — “there is probably a political calculus there, that there’s nothing that the U.S. can, or is willing to, do about it.”

On Thursday’s call, Kirby would not comment on whether there are plans to provide armed escorts to U.S. drones flying in the region, but he reiterated that there would no scaling-back of the surveillance flights. “It ain’t gonna deter us from flying these things again,” he said.

A world in which militaries consider it consequence-free to blow their adversaries’ drones out of the sky carries with it a whole range of risks. Last month’s incursion by a Chinese balloon into U.S. airspace showed that an unmanned craft can easily set off a political and military crisis. This has led a number of experts to conclude that Cold War-era agreements and norms about air-to-air encounters need to be updated for the drone era.

“What you’re seeing here is the natural lag between emerging capabilities and the policies and international regimes to account for these situations,” said Lushenko.

A $32 million aircraft, even an unmanned one, sitting at the bottom of the Black Sea is not something the Pentagon or White House are thrilled about, and in the context of the Ukraine War, it’s a reminder of the risks that the conflict could escalate or draw in the U.S. military more directly. But given the seemingly unstoppable proliferation of military drones and the lack of guidelines around their use, what happened this week could be a preview of more serious confrontations to come.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

Joshua Keating

The US-Russia drone collision over the Black Sea is a sign of increasingly unfriendly skies