WHAT IS A NO-FLY ZONE?

A lot of people have thrown around the idea that the US and NATO need to establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine. Probably most of the 74% of Americans who say - according to polls - that they support this do so without much knowledge of what a No-Fly Zone is and what enforcing it can ultimately mean.

School is hereby in session, folks:

For those who want the Cliff’s Notes of the Cliff’s Notes, a No-Fly Zone is effectively a declaration of war, or at least a declaration of a willingness to engage in warlike acts. Engaging in warlike acts with crazy people who control nuclear weapons is generally considered a bad idea. We would not want to establish a No-Fly Zone over North Korea (or at least those us who live on the US West Coast, which is in range of Nork missiles, would likely say that).

The desire to Do Something About This Terrible Situation is the driver behind the calls for a NFZ. It’s very understandable that President Yelins’kyi would keep calling for one. He’s in the country being bombed.

And as much as I would like to see Something Done because it is a terrible situation, I agree with the US government and NATO that it’s not something that can be done.

Admittedly, in the past three weeks of war, Western military aid and the incredible Ukrainian resistance have made the conflict a somewhat fairer fight. Russia’s armed forces have been revealed as something less than they were thought to be. They appear to have the command competence of the Red Army that was humiliated by Finland in the opening months of The Winter War back in 1939, after Stalin had decapitated the USSR’s military leadership in the Show Trials. The Russian army has captured just one city, and Ukrainian forces have slowed the advance to a crawl. But as the civilian toll rises and the Russians step up targeting of Ukraine’s urban centers, there are going to be more calls for Ukraine’s allies to do more. And it’s likely those calls are going to grow exponentially in the next few days when more reports get out of Kherson about Putin’s goon squad that arrived yesterday and began arresting people; indeed, if the threats of public execution of resisters are made good, the calls to Do Something may get so big that Something gets done.

In an open letter this past Tuesday, a group of prominent U.S. national security figures including former ambassadors and Philip Breedlove, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, called for a “limited” no-fly zone, covering the humanitarian corridors that were agreed to by Ukraine and Russia.

The Pentagon and Biden Administration have said it is not in the cards, with press secretary Jen Psaki calling it “not a good idea” and “definitely escalatory.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has also dismissed the notion, saying, “We are not part of this conflict.”

To understand why they say this, it’s necessary (at least to an historian like me) to look at the history of No-Fly Zones.

Essentially, no-fly zones are operations where an outside military power declares a certain territory off-limits to aircraft to discourage military conflict or atrocities against civilians. Always, the country or alliance imposing the NFZ has overwhelming air superiority.

The first time an NFZ was used was at the end of Gulf War, when U.S., British and French forces imposed a NFZ zone over the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Operation Provide Comfort and its successor, Operation Northern Watch, were designed to prevent a repeat of incidents like the 1988 Halabja massacre, an airborne chemical weapons attack that killed more than 3,000 Kurdish civilians. A similar operation, Operation Southern Watch, was launched in 1992 to protect Shiite areas of southern Iraq. Both zones remained in effect until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Between 1993-95, Operation Deny Flight was a NATO-imposed a no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina to protect Bosnian civilians from Serbian aircraft and allow the delivery of humanitarian aid.

In Libya in 2011 the U.S. and NATO allies launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, imposing a NFZ over the country.

All these missions ultimately involved air combat. Iraqi aircraft were shot down and Iraqi anti-aircraft and radar installations were struck. In the 1994 “Banja Luka incident,” U.S. F-16s shot down four Bosnian Serb planes after more than 1,000 violations of the NFZ, in the first offensive action in NATO’s history. In 1995, a U.S. F-16 was shot down over Bosnia, requiring a search-and-rescue mission for the pilot (which was the inspiration for the movie “Behind Enemy Lines” in 2001). The NFZ eventually evolved into Operation Deliberate Force, a bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces. In Odyssey Dawn, that mission turned into a campaign to strike Libyan government forces on the ground leading to the overthrow of Gaddafi’s regime.

One thing to note in all these cases: the enemy air forces were insignificant, and there was an enormous force difference between the powers establishing the NFZ and those on which the NFZ was imposed. That would not be the case with Ukraine.

Aircraft from the enforcing country generally run continuous sorties to monitor the zone and detect and respond to violations. Operating such a NFZ over a country the size of Ukraine would involve air activity beyond just fighter aircraft patrols; there would be a need to operate an AWACS over the country, as well as air-to-air refueling capability to keep the patrols on the line in the eastern part of the country. While over Ukrained, these craft would be vulnerable to fire from Russian air defense systems on the ground. And coming under such SAM fire from the ground would involve strikes against the SAM bases. Even doing this for a smaller area such as western Ukraine around Lviv would involve a major operation and significant risk.

In brief: a no-fly zone is a willingness to shoot down an aircraft that is operating in contravention of the zone. When people say, “We should have an no-fly zone in Ukraine,” they are saying we should be willing to shoot down Russian aircraft. Doing so with a “peer” military force is not the same as doing that with the defeated Iraqi Air Force, the put-together Bosnian Serb force, or the remains of the Libyan Air Force.

The U.S. and NATO hold no such overwhelming advantage over Russia; the Russian Air Force has demonstrated it is not as capable of maintaining a combined arms offensive as a Western air force, but they are still capable of engaging in significant air combat. Putin has said he is willing to choose the nuclear option if Western countries “create threats for our country,” and said last week that he would view a no-fly zone as a threat, and countries imposing one would be considered “participants of the military conflict.”

So far, the Russians have made surprisingly little use of air power so far in the war and is targeting cities with ground-based artillery. It’s worth recalling that the worst instance of genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, the killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, was carried out by ground forces underneath the NATO no-fly zone.

Still, as things get worse, calls to Do Something More are only going to escalate. It kills me to think of having to tell my friends in Kyiv, “Sorry, but nuclear war is a line we can’t cross.” Now you know why all these other countries are working to obtain nuclear weapons. Once you have them, nobody fucks with you.

Perhaps the political scientist Seva Gunitsky put it best when he wrote on Twitter : “The people calling for a no-fly zone should explicitly say they are willing to risk nuclear war and the people calling for backing off should explicitly say they are willing to tolerate war crimes. There is no moral high ground for anyone here.”

He’s right. Unfortunately.

We need to stop looking for easy solutions. Anywhere.

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