There are plenty of different ways to respond to the incident where Russian fighter pilots targeted our drone and knocked it out of the sky.
One one end of the spectrum is the Biden administration’s nutless hand-wringing about how unfair it was for Russians to do such a thing. They are whining about being over international waters, complaining about Russian pilots behaving in a ‘reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner’.
It had a real ‘I want to speak to your manager’ vibe to it.
On the other end of the spectrum is Lindsey Graham, who went on TV and said:
“Well, we should hold them accountable and say that, ‘If you ever get near another U.S. asset flying in international waters, your airplane will be shot down.’ What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.”
Now that the damage is done, and the plane has been ditched in the ocean, a race to recover the downed drone has already begun… just like the race that Americans won during the cold war when we used Howard Huges and Project Azorian to discretely recover a Soviet ballistic submarine in the early 1970s.
We needn’t wonder what happens if such tech falls into the hands of an enemy. Remember when Iran downed one of our drones in the Obama years? They copied our tech and are now selling drones to other countries.
Imagine the level of sophistication in the copies if the Russians get their hands on one.
Were we in international waters? Sure. Probably. But if America were at war with say, Mexico or Cuba, and they were heavily invested in making sure we lost, were actively giving logistic and tactical advice based on satellite and drone tech, and they just happened to be flying in the international waters of the Florida Strait or, say, the Gulf of Mexico — would we just accept their drone flying there? Or would we go out of our way to interfere with any project they were doing — up to and including knocking it from the sky and perhaps even retrieving it.
We need to be careful in our drone deployment strategies that we don’t set up any fat, juicy, Bigger-than-Dallas low-hanging fruit for our enemies to grab. The risk of having our drones messed with by an adversary is every bit as real of a cost-benefit consideration as anything else in the equation is.
If we’re going to play with expensive toys, we will need to be careful that other kids don’t come along and break them… including having a specific strategy for future provocations like this one. Because there WILL be others.
But let’s go back to this quote for a minute…
Are we really going to play the ‘spilled fuel is bad for the environment’ game?
So is burning the fuel to fly a drone, isn’t it? So is a ‘righteous strike’ that hits a man and his family with a Hellfire missile.
Or various acts of war over the years.
And there’s something else, not too long ago… what was it…?
Do we really expect Russia to take our hand-wringing about ‘environmental damage’ seriously when they are more interested in trying to fight a war that isn’t going as smoothly as they had hoped?
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
