What They Used to Call DEFCON
The scary birds are moving towards Ukraine and Taiwan
While pundits and politicians bicker over the seriousness of world tensions, aviation hobbyists have pointed out the material evidence of mounting global danger in plain sight, no pun intended.
Though likely racked by nervous frissons, flight fanboys were abuzz this week as public access air traffic radar and planespotters captured the sharp angles of F-117 stealth fighters on camera in the skies around the country earlier this week. Though officially retired, the all-black, stealthy fighter-bombers were noticed flying in twos doing formation training in the American southwest, possibly amassing near San Diego. Hours later in the early hours of Wednesday morning, I started seeing leaks and rumors that a squadron of 8 of B-52s had received orders to rebase from the east and west coasts to the UK and Guam, each, respectively, undoubtedly as a response to Russian and Communist Chinese expansionism. Those rumors were confirmed by the BBC this Thursday morning. Today, the same folks speculate on the lines of sight and detection available to the two RQ-4 Global Hawk long-loitering surveillance drones which ran training operations over southern California yesterday according to air traffic monitors.
Superbowl week is generally a high-activity time for the Air Force, generally containing the most frequent civilian sightings of rare technologies like the Nighthawk or Stratofortress. These impressive military aircraft are brought out for flyovers at the season’s most spectacular games and often take a few joyrides before or after but these two sets of movements are important repositionings of powerful strategic assets that signal, if not to Americans, then to her enemies, a very clear message. The current (or re-current, as the case may be) eruptions of tension on the Ukrainian border indicate to Pentagon officials that the tectonic plates of global power are in danger of quickly becoming dynamic along two unstable fault lines.
Furthermore, joint US-Canadian air exercises off the coast of Vancouver and a crashed contractor-flown F-1 Mirage in Arizona indicate an uptick in red vs. blue aerial wargames and preparations for confrontations with the CCP and or Putin. Compared to the obvious and diplomatically telegraphed wargames and naval deployments in the South China Sea, these moves are being made without fanfare and without timely official confirmation. Similarly, the Pentagon has evidently fast-tracked the B-21 stealth bomber project, quietly removing the project’s “experimental” status and confirming that a wing of 8 would be operational this year.
This is my blog dedicated to tracking events in geopolitics as they occur or as I see them. I should have posted this yesterday… I will do my best going forward to print shorter updates as I become aware of them on a nearly daily basis.
I am generally at least half a day ahead of the news cycle and two levels lower on the information iceberg than what is fit to print or typically considered “newsworthy.” Feel free to use this post any way you please, and if you have questions, contact me on Twitter, @gavinphanson. I hope that I can provide a useful, if not amusing, service to anyone interested in staying ahead of geopolitical discourse.
Don’t call me a journalist, I’m just a nerd, blogging.