Russia Not Striking Islamic State Targets, Air Force Official Says
By Yasmin Tadjdeh
As Russia enters its second day conducting airstrikes in Syria, one Air Force leader said its bombs appear not to be striking Islamic State targets.
“There is an incongruency between what president [Vladimir] Putin is saying and what his forces are doing,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Otto, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “One of the things we’re asking is, ‘Well, what are Putin’s intentions?’ His stated intentions and what I saw in airstrikes yesterday are not congruent.”
Russia, a long time ally of the Bashar al-Assad regime, has indicated that it intends to enter the fight against the Islamic State by providing air support for Syrian forces. However, U.S. leaders have questioned that assertion and believe Russia may target other Syrian rebels.
Otto reviewed unclassified imagery of airstrikes conducted Sept. 30 and that based on his assessment they were “not anti-ISIS strikes, he said during an Oct. 1 breakfast meeting with defense reporters in Washington, D.C.
Russian warplanes, like the SU-30, have been dropping “dumb bombs” over Syria, he said.
“Those aren’t precision weapons,” he said. “To me it was representative of what you would expect from dumb bombs being dropped from airplanes at medium altitude which … [is] not that impressive.”
If Russia begins indiscriminately bombing Syrian civilians who are injured or killed, it could have major ramifications, Otto said.
“Precision matters and I think … when you hit things that you’re not intending to hit you create second and third order consequences,” he noted.
It’s still too early to tell if Russia will become the de facto air force for Assad’s military, but Otto said Russia likely entered the conflict because it believed the Assad regime was losing its civil war.
Otto noted that Russia only gave the United States and its coalition partners one to two hours of notification before it began airstrikes, which is not in line with deconfliction. Deconfliction refers to entities’ efforts to avoid operating in the same area at the same time.
“Yesterday, our forces got ... two or one hours notice that ‘Hey, we’re going to conduct strikes, we would like you to exit Syria,'” he said. “Well, that’s not deconflication and that’s not something we’re going to do.”
“We would certainly like to avoid [a direct confrontation of a Russian aircraft and a coalition aircraft]. The best way to avoid that is to be in consultation for deconflication,” he said. Ideally, the military would like to share air tasking order information, he added.
Otto said it is unlikely the military will share ISR information with Russia in its presumed fight against ISIL.
“I have a low-level of trust in the Russians,” he said. “I would not envision a relationship where I would share some of my intelligence with them. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, I just don’t envision it based on where our interests are and based on … where their air strikes are.”
There has been an “insatiable” demand for ISR in the conflict with ISIL, he said. However, because of a lack of human intelligence on the ground, it has been tough to receive enough information to call in airstrikes.
“I would say we are challenged in finding enough targets that the airplanes can hit that meet the rules of engagement that the commanders want,” he said. The U.S. military has been extremely cautious in its application of force to ensure that it is does not harm civilians, he added.
“When you look at when we had a higher tempo … we had people [on the ground] that could identify targets that we could trust,” he said. “Human intelligence is a piece of this and then ground observation is a piece of this. And those are things we don’t have to the same level that we had say in classic counterinsurgency operations.”
While the U.S. military uses sophisticated sensor platforms against ISIL, the terror group's capability is much less advanced, Otto said.
ISIL's systems are "rudimentary" and there is a heavy reliance on human intelligence, he said. However, its use of cheap, commercially available drones is in some ways "innovative," he added.
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