U.S. jets conducting strikes against the Islamic State have had to alter their flights over Syria to avoid getting too close to Russian planes, a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.
“We are conducting strikes, I would drop that modifier myself,” said Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis, referring to previous reports that U.S. strikes had continued unabated.
Davis said there is no communication between Russian and U.S. pilots, and that the Russians have not told American officials where they plan to strike since first announcing airstrikes would begin last week.
Despite that, the U.S. maintains a “high level of situational awareness” about what else is in the skies over Syria. As a result, he said there has been at least one instance where a U.S. plane has had to change its path to avoid running into a Russian plane.
Davis would not specify how many times U.S. planes had rerouted or how close the planes got to each other.
He downplayed the seriousness of the changes in flight plans, stating that the core U.S. mission to defeat the Islamic State has not been affected by the actions. He also said it’s not that different from similar deconfliction that occurs among commercial airplanes every day in the U.S.
“This happens thousands of times every day in our own airspace,” he said.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter spoke with his Russian counterpart this month about deconflicting the two nations’ aircraft over Syria, but no conversation has taken place since then.
While the U.S. is willing to talk to Russia to keep its pilots safe, Davis stressed that that did not amount to cooperation between the two countries, since the U.S. sees the Russian support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime as a mistake that will only increase instability in the region.
“That’s the only basis for discussions that we have, because we continue to have a fundamental strategic disagreement and we believe that their strategy is fundamentally flawed,” Carter said Wednesday during a press conference in Italy.
