By lex, on September 18th, 2011
In the late 80s, when I was a fleet lieutenant with one deployment behind me, we were invited to a presentation by Alexander Zuyev, a Soviet era MiG-29 pilot who defected with his airplane to Trabzon, Turkey. The aircraft was re-patriated, but Zuyev was allowed asylum in the US. He gave a pretty good pitch about the differing mindsets between the air forces of the Cold War adversaries. Centralized control we knew about, but they counted sorties rather than flight hours since – as Alex phrased it – fighter combat was more like a boxing match than an endurance contest. He also offered us two of his regiment’s rules of engagement: They would never fire on a man in a parachute, which was we all agreed was gratifyingly humane, but neither would they fire on an aircraft with its landing gear down. A couple of those in my cohort exchanged meaningful glances, acutely aware that insofar as his second rule went, his regiment would not have received the same consideration from us.