Everyone remain calm.
No need to ask
me twice.
This is hardly the first of these little "exercises" by the Russians in the last few years. Their military has had lousy morale and poor maintenance since the end of the cold war, they're simply trying to boost it.
I'm far more worried about the nukes they
lost than I am the few bombers they can still find the keys to.
Don't forget who's still in charge over there: Komerade Putin. Die-hard KGB, right down to the last (remaining) follicle. Nothing he'd like more than the old regime rising to power once more with him at the helm. He knows that won't be accomplished through military might, he also knows that wasn't the key to power last time, either.
Military might wasn't the strong point of the old regime:
propaganda was. The best propaganda the soviets had was pulling little stunts that got the attention of western reporters, such that those western reporters would tell the western people how scared they needed to be. They didn't need military might to continue the cold war, only the
image of it.
That panic-ridden coverage then got rebroadcast on Bremya, (remember "BPEMR", with the backwards "P" and "R"? That's "Bremya") and was used to show the soviet people how scared the west was of them. It worked. For decades, not a single shot was fired. We were scared because our news media (no, not the government, the news media)
told us to be, they were confident because their news media told them how scared we were.
He's using our own media against us in order to provide footage for his own propaganda machine, just like his old masters did.
If
western reporters take the bait, he'll succeed in that endeavor.
Including the F-18 guy who left a spot on the seat during this fly-by.
...as if by example. Not one mention of
that in the article, or any other article I've seen on the topic.
Don't be one of
those reporters, please. What would Mr. Murrow think?
--Thom
Kiloton Arsenal One Zealous Giant Cloud
