Gen. Milley Won’t Stop Russia From Retrieving U.S. Drone Wreckage The profiles in courage just keep coming. by Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-wont-stop-russia-from-retrieving-u-s-drone-wreckage/
The profiles in courage just keep coming.
Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday.
The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.
It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.
Russia then followed that up by announcing it was going to retrieve the wreckage to count coup and gain whatever intel they liked.
Russia will attempt to retrieve and study the wreckage of the American MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea after being harassed by Russian fighter jets.
Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, told Rossiya-1 TV on Wednesday that he was not certain the drone could be extricated from the water.
Gen. Milley is on the case though.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon briefing that the drone sank into water that’s 4,000-5,000 feet deep, making its recovery very difficult.
“It probably broke up. There’s probably not a lot to recover, frankly,” Milley said. “As far as the loss of anything of sensitive intelligence, etc., as normal we would take and we did take mitigating measures, so we’re quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value.”
Much like everything we left behind in Afghanistan and that drone the Iranians captured under Obama.
The Russians took down a U.S. drone. Now they’re going to try to recover it. Regardless of whether their efforts are successful, they’ve shown that they can attack us, get away with it and we’ll shrug. We won’t even try to interfere with their recovery operation.
It’s a familiar story and that is how wars start. Sometimes wars start through escalation, more often through shows of weakness.
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