Otto said a continued lack of communication by the Russians could worsen the situation in Syria, and warned that encounters could get out of hand if Russian and U.S. fighters cross paths without clear intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“His stated intentions and what I saw in air strikes yesterday are not congruent,” Otto said. “You see where those strikes occurred, those were not anti-ISIS strikes. There’s an incongruence between what President Putin is saying and what his forces are doing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Any time that you have an aircraft pointed at you that has air-to-air missiles, you’re concerned about what their intent is,” he said. “It’s almost like if you’ve ever been driving down the road and then you see somebody in your lane coming the opposite direction. That immediately gets your attention. Are they going to move out of the lane? What’s going to happen?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having armed Russian jets flying near Air Force craft would also hinder strikes against the Islamic State group, Otto said, as it would be difficult for pilots to focus on dropping bombs with a potentially hostile aircraft so close by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lt. Gen. Robert “Bob” Otto, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Air Force<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n “If you want to avoid those kinds of missteps, isn’t it handy to know ahead of time ‘Okay we’re going to be operating up in this area tomorrow.’ That’d be helpful to know,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Otto chided the Russians for not telling the U.S. earlier about their airstrikes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our forces got, I think,\u00a0one hours’ notice. ‘Hey we’re going to conduct strikes, we’d like you to exit Syria.’ Well that’s not de-confliction and that’s not something we’re going to do,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The general said the U.S. and Russia need to be very clear about what areas of Syria their planes are operating in so both nations may avoid any close-calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I think we see that as a very advisable thing to do from a military point of view,” he said, adding he suspects Russian pilots would agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while the U.S. and Russian need to communicate what areas they will be conducting airstrikes in, Otto said it’s unlikely the two nations will share any additional information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s easy to exchange factual data where you’re going to operate,” he said. “I would not envision a relationship where I would share some of my intelligence with them. I just don’t envision it based on where our interests are and based on where their demonstrated intent, based on where their airstrikes are.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Noting that he was speaking personally and not as a military commander, Otto said “I have a low level of trust in the Russians.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s too early to tell whether Russia will serve as the de facto air force for embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the general said, but added that he thinks Russian strikes could backfire and create more problems and more terrorists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I think precision matters,” Otto said, noting that the Russian airstrikes were carried out with “dumb bombs” that don’t have accurate targeting. “I think when you hit things that you’re not intending to hit, you create second and third order consequences.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Large-scale bombing of civilian areas could lead to even more resistance against Russia, Otto said, similar to the backlash against Assad when he started using barrel bombs against rebel elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to the United States’ own intelligence flights over Syria, Otto said the Air Force needs to not only add more airmen to try to reduce workloads, but also work smarter in analyzing intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We haven’t figured out the right data to collect that allows us to, with the fidelity that would satisfy me, determine measures of effectiveness,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “How busy were our analysts last year? I’d say ‘Oh my gosh, they were so busy, we looked at 450,000 hours of full motion video. Well so what? What did we get for all of that looking? What are the measures of effectiveness?” Otto said. “It shouldn’t be the number of hours we fly a platform or the number of images we take. It’s much better if you can talk about the number of IEDs that we discovered or the number of bad guys that we were able to take off the battlefield.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The U.S. and Russia need to communicate more about airstrikes in Syria, but won’t share intelligence with each other<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":71598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":65,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[16,65,67],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1813],"class_list":["post-38866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-pentagon-congress","category-your-air-force"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"UOETDZSZTVC2LGHLIOSQVHTO3A","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2015\/10\/01\/u-s-and-russia-unlikely-to-share-intelligence-on-syria\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/635793015897245670-ottojpg.jpg\")
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