For the fourth time in five days, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said on Sunday that it had identified and tracked Russian military planes approaching airspace off the coast of Alaska.
“The Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace. This Russian activity in the Alaska (Air Defense Identification Zone) occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat,” NORAD said in a statement Sunday.
Nearly identical statements were released for similar events on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, and Sept. 14, with minor variations in which kinds of military aircraft NORAD identified.
The Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone is an enormous boundary off the state’s coast, in some areas extending for hundreds of miles. Sovereign airspace, by contrast, begins 12 nautical miles off the coast. All aircraft flying within Alaska’s ADIZ must comply with certain national security and Federal Aviation Administration requirements.
NORAD did not specify whether it had launched Air Force fighter jets to meet the Russian aircraft. Citing “operational security reasons,” Alaskan Command, headquartered at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, declined to specify if aircraft were mobilized for interceptions and directed further questions to NORAD.
Though exceptional in the rapid tempo, the Russian-American interception incidents are fairly routine. In 2017, while thousands of military personnel were in the Gulf of Alaska for large-scale military exercises, five interceptions happened in one month. Often they occur on American holidays or symbolically important days, like a kind of high-level military cat-and-mouse game.
Much of the military equipment and many of the service members based in Alaska are part of the air defense mission, which includes everything from remote radars for around-the-clock surveillance to the most cutting-edge, expensive aircraft in the world. Beginning in the Cold War, the military began staging assets in Alaska to monitor long-range Soviet bombers and ballistic missiles. Much of the technology has evolved to serve similar basic functions, all to watch for potential attacks coming over the top of the hemisphere.