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Open Skies Confusion
Here’s the full text of The Open Skies Treaty. As The New York Times reports,
Now some senior American intelligence and military officials say the new digital technology combined with shifting Russian flight plans would violate the spirit of the treaty. Some Republicans also expressed alarm.
“I cannot see why the United States would allow Russia to fly a surveillance plane with an advanced sensor over the United States to collect intelligence,” Representative Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who heads the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Monday.
Well, I can. And I can’t see why Representative Thornberry can’t. Maybe I’m missing something.
I just finished reading the treaty and its annexes. I’d never read it before. I don’t understand Thornberry’s claim, because this doesn’t violate the spirit of the treaty. It violates the letter, yes. But the Committee on Foreign Relations, which advised the ratification of the treaty in 1993, claimed this was the purpose — or what you could call the “spirit” — of the treaty:
The principal purpose of the Open Skies Treaty is to enhance military openness and transparency by providing each State Party with the right to overfly the territory of other States Parties using unarmed observation aircraft. The premise underlying the Treaty is that if there is greater military openness and transparency, then regional tensions will be reduced, thereby decreasing the probability of conflict. Because the United States already possesses high-quality national technical means of verification, the Treaty is expected to be largely of value to European States Parties, particularly for those nations that do not have access to sophisticated reconnaissance satellites. [My emphasis.] For such states, the Treaty may serve as a useful confidence- and security-building measure.
The issue at hand, from what I understand, is that Russia has asked to use digital, rather than film, photography. There’s no provision for this in the treaty. But it’s long been understood, and it was acknowledged in 2010 at the treaty’s Second Review Conference in Vienna, that this was an anachronism and needed to be rewritten. (The relevant part of the treaty begins on page 20; it’s Article IX, and it makes perfect sense if you assume it’s 1993, technologically. Otherwise, it makes no sense.)
“Shifting flight plans” are not a violation of the letter or the spirit of the treaty. All of a state-party’s territory can be overflown. No territory can be declared off-limits.
Unless I’m grossly misunderstanding something, the way it’s being reported is backward: Russia wants to violate the letter of the treaty, but not its spirit. Why would we make an issue of this? Why would we represent ourselves as incapable of understanding the purpose of the treaty?
There are many substantive reasons for alarm at Russian behavior, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. They want to use a digital camera, not film. Digital cameras aren’t “high tech spy devices” anymore. The image resolution would apparently be the same. What’s more, we use digital cameras, and it’s not a secret. See the last paragraph:
Why wouldn’t we say, “Sure, come take pictures of anything you like, Ivan, and please meet our team of comely flight attendants?” What do we imagine they’ll see that they can’t see already? Nothing, obviously: This is the year 2016.
I’m guessing that this is more about Turkey having barred Russia from conducting an Open Skies Treaty flight in early February. Russian propaganda sites might (might) be a clue about what Putin’s trying to achieve. (I take Sputnik to represent “What Vladimir Putin would like me to think.”) Their representation of this is, “Washington Hawks in panic over Russia’s use of Open Skies Treaty.” I suspect Washington hawks are indeed in a panic over Russia’s behavior, but I can’t figure out why this would incite it, can you? What are we trying to achieve?
Shouldn’t we be pushing for the skies to be more open, not less? The purpose of the treaty hasn’t changed. The greater the tension between Russia and NATO, the more important it is that no one make a mistake about the other’s intentions.
What am I missing?
Published in Foreign Policy, General
The Open Skies Treaty follows a path advocated by President Eisenhower while he was President.
The cost of closed skies could easily be war. The United States came perilously close to a nuclear war with the now-defunct Soviet Union at the end of the 1960s due to the Soviet policy of barring overflights. (Back then it was the US advocating open skies and the Soviets resisting.) Only the photographic intelligence provided by the then-secret Corona program deterred the US from launching a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union. (I wrote about it in an article titled “Corona: America’s First Eye in the Sky”, which appeared in Modern War, No. 4, Mar-April, 2013. Unfortunately it is not available online or I would link it.)
Seawriter
This may be a dumb question, but how do we know the plane is unarmed? Weapons are smaller than they used to be, including WMD.
If we’re worried about that, we may as well keep Aeroflot from flying in and out of the US several times a day. If Russia wants to drop nuclear weapons on the United States, it needs no subterfuge. It has ICBMs.
I can’t understand why this is being reported as it is. Can you?
Not sure why this is a big deal. If Russia wants overhead images they should go to google like everybody else.
Very cool video. Thanks.
Sure – disaster and peril sells copy. So, making this sound like a Big Deal sells papers (or gets clicks).
When the Soviet Union was around there were folks in the news industry (I. F. Stone and Walter Duranty, for instance) in the pay of the Soviet Union who would have spun this story so as to make the US the bad guy. But Putin’s Russia cannot afford tame new media personalities.
On the other hand, it would not surprise me if a lot of media folks are getting stipends from Middle Eastern paymasters. (Memoirs which come out 50 years from now will be revealing.) Perhaps someone worried about Russian oil might be willing to fan the flames and play a game of Let’s You and Him Fight with the United States and Russia.
Nah. That’s crazy talk.
Seawriter
Is this how you interpret the decision by the head of the House Armed Services Committee to issue a statement saying they couldn’t understand why this request had been made? How does this work?
I would think that the Russians already got everything they need to know off of Hillary’s server.
I am 100% for American plane flying over Russia as we see fit.
I am 100% against Russian planes (or Chinese ones) flying over America as they see fit.
All nations are sovereign. Some are more sovereign than others.
I might add, in 1950 it was easy to be about “Open Skies”, since we could fly over Russia with our planes, and they could not to ours. And the USSR kept trying to shoot them down.
I do not seem to think Gary Powers situation was because we and they were for Open Skies.
What am I missing?
So does Ivan. Thus this does not justify cutting the Ruskies any slack.
Yes it does violate the spirit because the Ruskies are themselves already in violation of both the letter and spirit in banning our flights.
I think that the real issue is that digital sensors must be of the type commercially available to all members. This begs a lot of questions. For example, clearly a high end DSLR camera could be used. But what if I modify such a camera? What if I use something sold commercially by Nikon, but that Nikon won’t just sell to everybody?
Pretty much. He is going by what he read in the news media. Some time today a member of his staff will bring him up to speed. Then he will have to decide whether to embarrass himself by backing down on his original statement or double down on stupid.
Why should Representatives be less likely to speak before thinking than other mortals?
Seawriter
They’re not banning our flights.
The head of the House Armed Services Committee? That seems profoundly implausible to me. Both the level of cluelessness and the level of irresponsibility.
They just selectively restrict and harass them.
http://dailysignal.com/2015/06/08/state-department-is-misleading-americans-about-russias-treaty-violations/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/17/russia-blocks-us-treaty-approved-spy-flights/?page=all
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/collision-course/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/30/inside-the-ring-house-panel-moves-to-stop-russia-s/?page=all
They’ve invaded a European country and annexed its territory, and formed an alliance with Iran and Assad to erase our influence from the Middle East and Europe. Most Americans think this is okay. We’re suddenly exercised about the threat posed by Russian surveillance flights?
Why? Our Representatives have demonstrated even greater levels of cluelessness and irresponsibility than off-the-cuff responses.
My suggestion: Whatever your lowest expectation of the behavior of an elected official, cut it in half, and divide what is left by 10. That will get to about the right level of expectation.
The alternative is to assume malice on the part of Thornberry. As the saying goes, never attribute to malice what is more likely attributable to stupidity. Shooting off his mouth without thinking really seems more likely to me than some deep-seated malicious motive.
Seawriter
Who do you mean by “we”? The people grumbling about this were also against the Iran surrender, etc.
I’m just not getting it: These surveillance flights pose no risk that I can imagine, and lessen the risk of war through miscalculation. We’ve failed to respond to open, calculated aggression — but are suddenly registering an objection to a treaty that’s in our interest and works entirely to our advantage?
So, then: overflights have been permitted in the age of film. Now, there’s a reasonable request to go to digital imaging. But, this request gives Congress the opportunity to revisit the agreement itself, to voice reluctance and signal some resentment at Russia’s cavalier indifference to national boundaries in Ukraine, and their banding together with Assad to massacre insurgents. Not to mention their inroads into our uranium supply. It sounds like Congress, having been excluded from foreign policy, now takes an opportunity to slap ineffectually at Putin over this gnat-sized issue. Or is this some baroque way of giving Obama a hard time?
Those are my questions exactly. Why this, why now?
AL may be on to something. Maybe it is the Willie Sutton answer, because this is the issue they can harass them on.
This is the sort of sniggling, nothing-burger of a treaty variance for which Executive Orders were created.
That was back when we had a Constitution, though.
They’re looking for WMD’s. We know that never works out well.
How would anybody else know if the Russians started using digital instead of film? I assume these flights don’t land to refuel near Chicago.
Perhaps California.
“The treaty fixes points of entry for the missions headed into Russia. In the west, they must enter at Kubinka; in the east, they start at Ulan-Ude. Russian observation missions over the U.S. must start at Travis Air Force Base in California or Dulles International Airport in Virginia, Nelson said.”
Several members of the Pentagon inspect the plane, fly with them, and then receive all copies of the imagery afterward.
That right there could be the source of their concern. If you want to see every image that the other guy has captured and he is using film, you can watch the film being developed. If you want the same thing and he’s using a digital camera, the phrase “trust me” will be invoked. There is no way to know you’ve seen every image he might have captured.
Not a big deal as far as I can see, but I’m no photo reconnaissance guru.
If this was a concern, we shouldn’t have publicly switched to digital ourselves — which they know about, not least because they accompany us on our surveillance flights and we give them the images; our NATO allies use digital, and we discussed this extensively in the last review conference and basically said, “we need to rewrite this because no one uses film anymore.” Mind you: We don’t, ourselves, need these surveillance flights. We can examine every centimeter of the Russian Federation down to the last Russian’s nostril hair via satellite. Probably they can do likewise with GLONASS. This is about keeping NATO allies who don’t have this kind of satellite coverage from freaking out and doing something stupid, as well as confirming what we already know from satellite imagery. It’s all about keeping people from panicking and doing something stupid. We have a huge interest in keeping the remaining parts of the world that haven’t yet panicked and done something stupid from panicking and doing something stupid. Remember: We don’t want a war with Russia, and if one must happen, we want it to be at the time and place of our choosing, not in response to Finland or Turkey freaking out, thinking they’ve been or are about to be invaded, and doing something dumb like … shooting down a Russian plane. As has happened recently.