At least the possibility of World War III has been slightly lessened

The US and Russia have apparently reached a “de-confliction” agreement for their dueling coincidental air campaigns over Syria:

The Pentagon and Russian military have agreed on a list of rules designed to ensure the two countries’ pilots will not mistakenly run into — or fire upon — one another as they conduct daily bombing runs in the skies above Syria.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Tuesday that the U.S. military came to the agreement with the Russians after weeks of negotiations on how pilots could communicate with each other and other technical details to guard against an accident.

Cook was quick to add that this doesn’t mean the US and Russia will be cooperating or sharing intelligence or anything like that. This supposedly was something of a disappointment to the Russians, who may have been looking for a more comprehensive agreement covering things like targeting, search and rescue operations, and so on.

The complete details of the agreement aren’t being released, but it probably calls for Russian and American pilots to have specific communications frequencies open to communicate with one another and to have open communication between Russian and American command and control operations on the ground. But this agreement is more about letting everybody feel good about their diplomatic skills and maybe keeping an accident from spiraling into something much bigger than it is about actually preventing accidents from happening in the first place. If something goes sideways in the air, there’s simply not going to be enough time for anything but direct, pilot-to-pilot contact to avert a disaster, and that assumes that American and Russian pilots can communicate with one another. It may be time for some quick Russian courses at Incirlik air base.

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