I’m not that worried about this.
It wasn’t a good idea for Iran back when Iran tried bombing airliners as leverage.
I am even more comfortable saying that it’d be a bad idea for Russia.
Russia could, no doubt, bring down airliners one way or another if it were set on doing so, but:
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I think that it’s very questionable that Russia actually benefits from escalation. That will only happen if Russia is (a) being irrational (not impossible, but diplomats can go bang on that), or (b) we’ve dicked up managing the escalation ladder. Russia doesn’t come out on top in pretty much any kind of conflict with NATO, so trying to generate more conflict once Russia hits the “there is a response” threshold, which they are definitely past, seems like a bad idea.
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What’s the worst that happens? Maybe a coordinated attack on multiple airliners, kills a few hundred, thousand people, destroys a handful of jets? I mean, sure, that’s bad, but it’s not that big a deal as interstate conflict goes. Like, if Russia wants to attack in some way, that’s a pretty bad way to expend the advantage of surprise.
Maybe the idea could be that an attack couldn’t be firmly attributed to Russia, especially if Russian intelligence tries paying people in country to do something, as was the case IIRC with those arson attacks earlier, but then it’s at least more-difficult for Russia to use that as leverage. Like, trying to make use of the window where you both have plausible deniability so that the other side doesn’t feel like they’re on firm enough ground to act and actually feels confident enough that you were responsible to be affected by using it as leverage seems like a very narrow and dangerous place to act.
If it were a fantastic way to conduct interstate conflict, then this sort of thing would be the norm in interstate conflict, and it isn’t.
I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.
I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.
One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
https://www.google.com/search?q=ooda+site%3Amil
The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.
Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.
In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea
The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.
Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.
As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.
One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that cycle.