WASHINGTON, Feb 17, 2008 (AFP) — When a Russian bomber roared over a US aircraft carrier in the Pacific this week, ears pricked up all over Washington: Cold War?
But the response from the Pentagon has been a shrug and a reassuring: No, not yet.
"I know of no one who is hyperventilating about this," said a senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The USS Nimitz launched four F-18 fighters to intercept a pair of TU-95 Bear bombers off Japan and then escorted one of them as it flew over the carrier at an altitude of 2,000 feet.
But the chief of US naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, said the overflight was "benign" and unprovocative, unusual only in that it has been a while since the Russians have tried to overfly a US aircraft carrier.
The last time was in July 2004 when another Russian bomber flew over the USS Kitty Hawk.
In Moscow, a Russian air force officer quoted by the Interfax news agency said the flight was "routine training for long-range air force crews ... for combat with aircraft carriers and large naval formations."
Russia has made other attention-getting displays of force in recent months, resuming long-range bomber flights to probe US and European air defenses and sending an aircraft carrier battle group to the Mediterranean for exercises for the first time since 2000.
In the political arena, it has suspended its participation in the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which set limits on ground forces deployed in eastern and central Europe.
It also has threatened to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which abolished that category of missiles in Europe.
Through it all, Russia has directed withering verbal fire at US plans to install missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
"What we're concerned about is, what are the indications of this return to a Cold War mindset -- what are the implications of that activity and how do we best address that?" said General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"It is free and international airspace, and we're just trying to now go back and look what message was intended by this overflight," he told a Senate hearing this week.
US experts said the message from Moscow is that Russia, riding a gusher of oil wealth, is back as a global power.
But they said the Russian military is still only a shadow of its former Soviet self, and not an imminent threat.
"They now have more money to do these sorts of operations, when they were hard pressed to do them say ten or even five years ago," said Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and now a senior associate at the RAND Corp.
"Part of this is just to re-establish a Russian military presence, but it's mainly political," he said.
The Russian military suffered a vertiginous decline in the 1990s that will take many years to recover from, analysts say.
Although high oil prices have revived Russia's fortunes in recent years, it has not yet translated into big increases in military spending, which has held fairly steady at under three percent of its gross domestic product, they said.
"A single US weapons program is the entire (Russian) defense budget," said Olga Oliker, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"From the US perspective, yes, Russia is one of the top six military spenders, but compared to the United States they don't spend anything like what we spend on defense," she said.
"So if you were looking at it from a bi-polar perspective, if there's somebody who should be worried, it is Russia."
To offset the imbalance, Russia has focused on modernizing its strategic nuclear forces and "asymmetric" capabilities, such as cyberwarfare, while trying to rebuild its capability to project force over long distances, said Stephen Blank, a professor at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
"Yes, they are trying, but they're failing," he said.
"The fact of the matter is that their defense industry cannot keep up with the US and I suspect other major military powers, either in quantity or quality," he said.
"This is a government that is trying to punch above its weight. And if it can't do so in the ring, at least it can in shadow boxing," he said.
Pifer said the Russian military also had to contend with a dramatically shrinking population of military-age males.
"They will devote sufficient resources to strategic nuclear systems so that in ten years when people look around they'll say 'there's the United States and Russia in a class by themselves.' I believe that is very important to Russia's strategic vision of itself."
"On the conventional side, I'm not too sure," he said.
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