Quote:
Originally Posted by Otterbox
This really isn't unexpected or unusual when you look at how our interactions have been with the Russians in recent history.
Actually, since the ridiculously labeled and totally inaccurate "End of the Cold War", Russia has been mostly benign and our respective militaries have been downright friendly with one another. Being broke and domestically (inwardly) focused does this to a military (Russia).
Only recently (since Russian invaded Crimea in 2014, in fact) has Russia returned to being so provocative with incidents like this, as anyone who reads and kept up with world news knows.
It's really simple. Flying within a mile or two of a warship at 1,000' or higher can be considered "normal", particularly when paralleling the ship's heading (ie. symbolically <and militaries are very symbolic> the gun barrels are not pointing at the vessel). In contrast, screaming in below the horizon at combat speeds perpendicular to the ship's heading and passing over the ship's deck at less than 100' is as "aggressive", provocative, unnecessary, and dangerous as it gets.
What
REALLY frosts my cake is knowing that, if something went wrong and the plane hit the ship for some freak reason causing an international incident, there are actually American-born idiots who would blame the ship (and their own country) for it....
...the same folks who call this kind of thing "normal" and ask "what were we doing so close to Russia?" (ie. the uneducated and uninformed).