quote:

Fri Aug 17, 5:46 PM ET
CHEBARKUL TESTING RANGE, Russia - President Vladimir Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup, sending a tough message to the United States on Friday hours after a major Russian military exercise with China.


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Putin reviewed the first Russian-Chinese joint exercise on Russian soil before announcing that 20 strategic bombers had been sent far over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans — showing off Moscow's muscular new posture and its growing military ties with Beijing.
"Starting today, such tours of duty will be conducted regularly and on the strategic scale," Putin said. "Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life."
Putin said halting long-range bombers after the Soviet collapse had hurt Russia's security because other nations — an oblique reference to the United States — had continued such missions.
"I have made a decision to resume regular flights of Russian strategic aviation," Putin said in nationally televised remarks. "We proceed from the assumption that our partners will view the resumption of flights of Russia's strategic aviation with understanding."
U.S.-Russian relations have been strained over Washington's criticism of Russia's democracy record, Moscow's objections to U.S. missile defense plans and differences over crises such as the Iraq war. But the Bush administration downplayed the significance of the renewed patrols.
"We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It's a different era," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that's their decision."
Soviet bombers routinely flew missions to areas where nuclear-tipped cruise missiles could be launched at the United States. They stopped in the post-Soviet economic meltdown. Booming oil prices have allowed Russia to sharply increase its military spending.
Russian Air Force spokesman Col. Alexander Drobyshevsky said that Friday's exercise involved Tu-160, Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers, tanker aircraft and air radars. NATO jets were scrambled to escort the Russian aircraft over the oceans, he said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Eleven Russian military planes — including strategic bombers and fighter jets — carried out maneuvers west of NATO member Norway on Friday, a military official said.
Norway sent F-16 fighter jets to observe and photograph the Russian planes, which rounded the northern tip of Norway and flew south over the Norwegian Sea toward the Faeroe Islands before turning back, said Brig. Gen. Ole Asak, chief of the Norwegian Joint Air Operations Center.
A pair of Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers approached the Pacific Island of Guam — home to a major U.S. military base — this month for the first time since the Cold War.
Last month, two similar bombers briefly entered British air space but turned back after British fighter jets intercepted them. Norwegian F-16s were also scrambled when the Tu-95s headed south along the Norwegian coast in international air space.
"This is a significant change of posture of Russian strategic forces," Alexander Pikayev, a senior military analyst with the Moscow-based Institute for World Economy and International Relations, told The Associated Press. "It's a response to the relocation of NATO forces closer to Russia's western border."
NATO has expanded in recent years to include the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
As of the beginning of the year, Russia had 79 strategic bombers, according to data exchanged with the United States under the START I arms control treaty. At the peak of the Cold War, the Soviet long-range bomber fleet numbered several hundred.
Friday's war games with China near the Urals Mountain city of Chelyabinsk involved some 6,000 troops from both countries, along with soldiers from four ex-Soviet Central Asian nations that are part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional group dominated by Moscow and Beijing.
The former Cold War rivals share a heightening distrust of what they see as the United States' outsized role in global politics, and they have forged a "strategic partnership" aimed at counterbalancing Washington's policies.
The United States, Russia and China are locked in a tense rivalry for influence in Central Asia, the site of vast hydrocarbon resources. Washington supports plans for pipelines that would carry oil and gas to the West and bypass Russia, while Moscow has maneuvered to control exports. China also has shown a growing appetite for energy to power its booming economy.
Putin, Chinese leader Hu Jintao and other leaders of the SCO nations attended the joint exercise, which followed their summit Thursday in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.
The summit concluded with a communique that sounded like a thinly veiled warning to the United States to stay away from the region: "Stability and security in Central Asia are best ensured primarily through efforts taken by the nations of the region on the basis of the existing regional associations."
Putin hailed the exercise — which involved dozens of aircraft and hundreds of armored vehicles countering a mock attack by terrorists and insurgents striving to take control of energy resources — "as another step to strengthen relations between our countries." Hu said the maneuvers "underlined the SCO's readiness to confront terror."
The exercises underlined that "the SCO wants to show that Central Asia is its exclusive sphere of responsibility," said Ivan Safranchuk, an analyst at World Security Institute
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said the exercise was not aimed at the United States.
"I don't see anything anti-American in the SCO exercise," he was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.
The SCO was created 11 years ago to address religious extremism and border security issues in Central Asia. In recent years, the group has grown into a bloc aimed at defying U.S. interests in the region.
In 2005, the SCO called for a timetable to be set for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from two member countries, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan evicted U.S. forces later that year, but Kyrgyzstan still has a U.S. base, which supports operations in nearby Afghanistan. Russia also maintains a military base in Kyrgyzstan.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country has SCO observer status, attended the summit for the second consecutive year. On Thursday, he echoed Russia's criticism of U.S. plans to deploy missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, saying they were a threat to the entire region.

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

      Please, Fargle.  The Russians are going to accomplish precisely what with this airplane?  We don't send in the BUFFs until we own the air.

      Show me a new stealth project (and the F-117 was based on their math ), a new tank that can fire accurately while travelling at 100 kph, a new armoured personnel carrier.  Show me the kind of expenditure it takes to fix an army that has been shit on for 20 years.

     Who are they going to dominate?  The Chinese not only have them massively outnumbered, they have way too many young men they need to get rid of anyway.  The Russians have already had their asses handed to them by Afghanistan.  I doubt President Ralph Nader would allow them to move in Western Europe.

      My take is that this is a defensive show of force.  Hell the Russians probably need to pump the military back up.  They have scary neighbors.

     

quote:

ORIGINAL: FullCircle
I’m wondering who they are thinking of bombing?

quote:

ORIGINAL: slaveboyforyou
I really love how the State Department is viewing this as a amusing temper tantrum on the part of Russia.  They are carrying out joint exercises with China, refitting their military from huge oil profits, and still have a massive nuclear strike capability.  But our forward looking government still treats them as a has been nation that only presents itself as a minor annoyance.

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

     Please, Fargle.  The Russians are going to accomplish precisely what with this airplane?  We don't send in the BUFFs until we own the air.

     Show me a new stealth project (and the F-117 was based on their math ), a new tank that can fire accurately while travelling at 100 kph, a new armoured personnel carrier.  Show me the kind of expenditure it takes to fix an army that has been shit on for 20 years.

    Who are they going to dominate?  The Chinese not only have them massively outnumbered, they have way too many young men they need to get rid of anyway.  The Russians have already had their asses handed to them by Afghanistan.  I doubt President Ralph Nader would allow them to move in Western Europe.

     My take is that this is a defensive show of force.  Hell the Russians probably need to pump the military back up.  They have scary neighbors.

    

quote:

ORIGINAL: Owner59

Great! And a military expert, too!!
You must just luvvvv Bill Oreilly...

Ahh, ...and their nuclear missile force?
The one that makes neo-con mumblings, kind of irrelevant.....


bush is steering us toward a new cold war.

Backing out of the SALT treaty,etc.....Did he campaign on that?

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

       Cool stuff, Real.  Think their stealth bomber will turn out better than their space shuttle did?

      They need a good military.  Why is this a problem?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sinergy


While Russia may consistently build weaponry that is singularly superior to ours, with the exception of missile technology, the reason their military would not be all that much of a stretch for the US military is in the area of C3I.

Not only does our stuff work reasonably well, and we cannot necessarily shoot down that one plane with one of our planes, our approach is to massively blast the thing from multiple angles with extremely effective control.

We have much more effective electronic warfare devices than they do.

Warfare is a different game even going back to the Cold War era.

While they might join up with China, as long as we in the United States do not try to do an Adolph Hitler, there is probably not much to worry about.

Sinergy

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ORIGINAL: cyberdude611

None of you guys seem to understand Russia and her culture.

Russians do not view democracy and government the same way the west does. Russia is a proud nation and they want to have influence in the world. And when a leader (like Putin) is able to show and push for that influence, his ratings go up. Every time Putin does any kind of military buildup or exercises...his approval ratings go up. The Russians like strong and powerful leaders. That is what they have always had and that is what they are used to. They really have yet to grasp on to the philosophy of limited government. They just dont see how that works.