...played out on the evening news.
Two Tu-95 "Bear" bombers of the Russian Pacific Strategic Forces buzzed the USS Nimitz just a few days ago, and the ripples are still being felt today.
Of course, no one doubts the threat level this exercize actually contained... very low. Had the Bears really been intent on mayhem, they'd have launched from the very limits of their detectable range... not from 2,000 feet away. In fact, both planes were so close to the carrier itself, that the Nimitz's own AA guns were in range... the last line of defense for a carrier.
It's the fact that Russia and Putin are so bent on applying Cold War "bump-and-grind" manuevers to a post-war world that I find fascinating. Russia is not an irrelevant player on the world stage, post-Soviet or not. Nuclear arsenal aside, even their admittedly under-maintained naval forces can't be ignored, and Putin has dedicated BILLIONS to bring both the conventional and strategic forces of the Russian Army, Navy and Air Forces back to "super-power" status by the end of the decade.
The Military Channel did a show on the Spetsnaz forces since the fall of the USSR, and touched on the fact that Putin has increased the size and number of units from 8 to 32, spreading beyond the traditional 5 military districts of the former USSR and now deploying new battalions to other Republics that share a defense agreement with Russia.
I am beginning to feel that the reasoning behind this increase in personnel and capacity is that Putin wants to see a greater role for Russian military intervention in global trouble spots... Central Asia, Central Africa and the Middle East... to further the interests of Russia, the same way the US is furthering the interest of America abroad with its interventionist policies.
Who else thinks this is troublesome?
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