A no-fly zone is waging war
A no-fly zone over Ukraine would be the military version of getting a little bit pregnant
Bad answers to a bad war
The Russian military’s invaded Ukraine, and a lot of people beyond Russia and Ukraine are brainstorming approaches to countering Vladimir Putin’s aggression. At least a couple of ideas seem plainly bad to my lay eye. Like trying to frack our way out:
And like the US, or EU, or NATO setting up a no-fly zone over Ukraine:
Notice that these demands for a no-fly zone — which I’ll just call an “NFZ” from this point — don’t come with explicit demands to actively jump into the fighting.
There are no explicit demands that France start flying bombers behind enemy lines or that the US move brigades of personnel into Ukraine. Instead the calls for an NFZ accompany calls for non-military measures (disconnecting Russia from SWIFT, recalling ambassadors from Russia, expelling Russian ambassadors, halting imports of Russian energy, etc.) or, at most, pouring more arms into Ukraine.
That might give the impression that an NFZ isn’t a military action. But it is. Enforcing an NFZ would be an overt, offensive act of war.
The reality of an NFZ over Ukraine
An NFZ over Ukraine would be a ban on Russian military aircraft flying over Ukraine, and such a ban would obviously have to be enforced. Like the Office joke, the US/EU/NATO can’t just shout “I declare no-fly zooooone!!” and expect it to work; the US/EU/NATO would have to actively deter Russian aircraft from flying over Ukraine. As such an NFZ would mean the US/EU/NATO flying its own planes over and around Ukraine, actively shooting down any Russian aircraft in the same airspace, and bombing Russian aircraft, airstrips, and aircraft-maintenance facilities on the ground.
Hence any meaningful NFZ entails committing acts of war against Russia. If NATO enforces an NFZ over Ukraine, that means NATO going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
Some vicariously brave people would be willing to take that risk as stated. After all, it’s theoretically possible that the US or the EU (France? Poland? Sweden?) or NATO would send jets, pilots, and logistical staff into Ukraine, fly around shooting down and bombing Russian jets exclusively within Ukraine’s borders narrowly defined, and meticulously limit itself to doing just that and not one thing more.
In practice, however, the specific circumstances and the general history of NFZs both suggest that there’d be a great temptation to do more and to succumb to mission creep.
Why an anti-Russia NFZ might suffer mission creep
The specific circumstances include Russia having already annexed Crimea, and (basic point, I know) Russian aircraft having the ability to fly.
If the US/EU/NATO enforced an NFZ over mainland Ukraine, it would be a small and intuitive step to extend the NFZ over Crimea as well. But that would hand Russia a pretext to claim aggression; after all, if Russia’s position is that Crimea is an integral part of Russia, it follows that bombing Russian planes parked in Crimea is bombing Russia.
Moreover, given a US/EU/NATO NFZ, with or without Crimea, another question’s liable to come up: whether to confront jets or helicopters or drones flying in from Russia that try to attack border areas of Ukraine before being shot down. There would be a temptation to preempt those attacks by shooting down Russian jets or helicopters or drones in and over Russia before they make it to Ukraine.
If it seems implausible that the US/EU/NATO could argue itself into bombing mainland Russia as long as Russia attacked only Ukraine, consider that there are other tempting intermediate steps.
Once the US military (for example) committed itself to enforcing an NFZ over mainland Ukraine, it would be easy for it to tell itself “I’m already shooting and bombing Ukraine proper; let’s just extend that to Ukraine’s Black Sea coasts”. Having accepted the premise of an NFZ generally, it could be hard to resist that urge to chase Russian jets away from Odessa over the Black Sea. If it took that step, the US could then tell itself, “I’ve already extended the NFZ to the Black Sea, no harm in extending it to the Sea of Azov”. Again, having gone that far, not so easy to resist that urge, so the NFZ goes further. Then: “my NFZ surrounds Crimea, which isn’t even really Russia anyway, so I might as well let it encroach on Crimea”. Russia would no doubt kick up a stink, but Russia’s in the wrong anyway, so who cares? And if encroaching on supposedly Russian Crimea is OK, why not start bombing Russian units just inside Belarus? And once that clearer breach of borders is accepted, why not let the USAF chase Russian bombers back into mainland Russia? And then why not start bombing planes on the ground in Russia?
The slippery-slope history of NFZs
To be sure, I’m making a slippery-slope argument, which can famously be a fallacy. But the general history of NFZs is a history of genuine slippery slopes. To show that, I now review the best-known examples of NFZs, namely NATO’s Operation Deny Flight during the Bosnian War, the NFZs imposed by the US and UK and France over Iraq between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, and the NATO-led NFZ over Libya during its (first) civil war.
Operation Deny Flight
Operation Deny Flight itself grew out of a mere monitoring mission. In October 1992 the UN Security Council banned non-UN military flights over Bosnia and Herzegovina, but didn’t set up a way to enforce that NFZ. NATO dutifully began monitoring Bosnia and Herzegovina’s airspace for violations of the NFZ, and soon detected scores of them. After a couple of months of recording violations, NATO voted to enforce the NFZ, and at the end of March 1993 the Security Council authorized “all necessary measures in the airspace” “to ensure compliance with the ban on flights”. 12 days later NATO officially inaugurated Operation Deny Flight and began enforcing the NFZ.
While that involved relatively little combat, Bosnian Serb forces posed a continued threat to supposed “safe areas” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in June 1993 the Security Council allowed “all necessary measures, through the use of air power” to support UN forces in defending the “safe” areas. Thus Operation Deny Flight expanded from NFZ enforcement to the provision of air support. The immediate impact was minimal, because of a requirement that both the UN and NATO approve air-support missions, but eventually, months later, the USAF bombed a Bosnian Serb tank and command post. In the meantime the USAF also shot down 4 Bosnian Serb jets that had bombed a factory, its first combat action to enforce the NFZ (and NATO’s first combat action in general).
Serb nationalists, however, were armed not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina but in the neighboring country of Croatia. They took to flying planes from territory they held in Croatia, dropping napalm and cluster bombs onto Bosnia and Herzegovina, then trying to fly the planes back to Croatia to shake off NATO’s NFZ enforcers. Once again the Security Council stepped in, allowing aircraft to defend Bosnian “safe” areas in Croatian airspace as well as Bosnian airspace. Two days later NATO bombed the Serb-controlled airfield in Croatia, although Serb-nationalist retaliation and a 4-month ceasefire negotiated by Jimmy Carter prevented the bombing campaign from growing much further.
Fighting resumed when the ceasefire expired in the spring of 1995, and in the summer Bosnian Serb forces shelled and overran multiple “safe” areas. After the Bosnian Serb army and paramilitaries overwhelmed Srebrenica in a genocidal massacre, and shelled a marketplace in Sarajevo, NATO built on Operation Deny Flight with a new mission, Operation Deliberate Force, which dropped over a thousand bombs on Bosnian Serb positions and assets in less than a month.
I have to summarize all of that history to make the point that the UN and NATO inched themselves, year by year, into an escalating air campaign.
In 1992 they just declared an NFZ.
In itself that was pointless, so they escalated to monitoring the NFZ.
Monitoring made the pointlessness so obvious that in 1993 NATO began enforcing the NFZ.
In February 1994 the NFZ enforcement entailed a shoot-down, and the bombers deployed to enforce the NFZ were later used to attack ground units.
When aggressors exploited an international border to do hit-and-run attacks, that super-NFZ expanded in November 1994 to a second country.
Eventually, in 1995, the aggressors racked up enough outrages on the ground to provoke an intensive bombing campaign.
NFZs over Iraq, 1991 to 2003
On April 5, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 688, condemning “the repression of the Iraqi civilian population” while claiming to reaffirm “the commitment of all Member States to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq”. France, the US, and the UK promptly imposed an NFZ over northern Iraq, and in August 1992 instituted another NFZ over southern Iraq. In 1996 the latter “was extended northward, closer to the Iraqi capital” “after Iraq intervened in fighting between Kurdish factions around the city of Irbil, a UN-designated safe haven” (although France partially tapped out around that time).
After the US and UK bombed Iraq in 1998, Iraq retaliated by routinely shooting at their planes, and the US in turn bombed “communications and anti-aircraft artillery sites” in Iraq. In the 2000s the US and UK intensified their air attacks on Iraq, culminating in the undeclared Operation Southern Focus, which saw hundreds of bombs dropped in the 9 months before Iraq was invaded.
Once again, a gradual but clear trend towards escalation: first one NFZ, then two, then bigger NFZs (albeit with France stepping back at the same time), then harsher enforcement of the bigger NFZs (provoking retaliation) until an outright invasion.
The NATO-led NFZ over Libya
The Bosnian(-Croatian) and Iraqi NFZs were slippery slopes, but they might also seem to suggest an out for an anti-Russia NFZ’s boosters. The two historical NFZs fitted into programs of military escalation, but those escalations took years: 3 years in the Bosnian case, over a decade in the Iraqi case. One could argue that NFZs therefore seem relatively safe as long as they don’t last for years.
Why would Russia’s war on Ukraine last that long? Putin presumably doesn’t want to occupy Ukraine for years, so if it takes years to slide down the slippery slope from NFZ declaration to full-scale war, why worry? NATO could just zoom in, circle planes and drop bombs for a few months, then zoom out when the war ends, right?
Unfortunately, even ignoring the Ukraine-specific factors threatening to make a Ukraine NFZ a ready slippery slope, my final example, Libya, shows that NATO can slide down the slippery slope in under a year.
Wikipedia’s timelines document that in February and March of 2011 politicians called for an NFZ over Libya to stop Muammar Gaddafi from killing Libyan civilians, on March 17 the UN Security Council approved an NFZ, the next day Barack Obama authorized US enforcement of it, and on March 25 NATO took command of the NFZ. As early as May NATO bombings were killing civilians and on 20 October they enabled the capture and killing of Gaddafi. An anti-Gaddafi coalition then took on the mantle of Libya’s government, although continuing low-level violence and a later split in the government led to another civil war in 2014.
The progression from NFZ to regime change therefore took only 7 months, destroying scores of civilians and thousands of Libyan targets (including non-air units like tanks) in between. The ultimate outcome was not a stable democracy but renewed war.
An NFZ is like trying to get a little bit pregnant
The core problem is that people propose an NFZ like it’s an alternative to entering the war, or like it’s diet war, or like it’s war lite. In reality an NFZ is just war. It’s war virtually by definition; Ukraine’s specific circumstances imply that an NFZ over Ukraine would be a war over Ukraine that risked becoming cross-border war; the general history of NFZs shows that they tend to evolve into (or start as) offensive bombing campaigns.
In short, “we have to impose an NFZ” is the warfare analog of “we have to get you a little bit pregnant”, a spurious gesture at compromise. You needn’t take my word for it. The analogy isn’t original to me. Here’s former General, Anthony Zinni, in 2016:
You can't get a little bit pregnant. You can't just set up a no-fly zone. You own what goes on underneath that airspace once you take a little bit of control over it. You own what the people you're protecting do. You own what others might do that are in there.
Here’s former British MP, and current Baroness, Lorely Burt, in 2013:
The implication is that if we do not get the UN resolution we will take action anyway and that that will be the next step. If the UN cannot get the consensus it needs, will we not already have tacitly supported military action? It is only one small step to approve “limited” action, and once you have done that you are on the road. It is a bit like pregnancy: a woman cannot be a little bit pregnant— either she is or she is not.
And here’s no less an authority than pro-war Susan Rice in her memoir Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For:
The no-fly zone seemed a half-assed response, like being a little bit pregnant. We would own the problem but not have the means to fix it. Merely preventing Libyan planes from flying and bombing would not stop the ground forces with tanks from seizing successive cities on the road from Tripoli to Benghazi.
Support an NFZ over Ukraine, oppose it, feel ambivalent, suspend judgment, whatever. I oppose an NFZ, for whatever little that’s worth. Ukraine defending itself on its territory with its personnel, fine; it’s been invaded, Russia’s broken that seal. But I don’t want nuclear powers getting into the active fighting, and I can’t bear people pretending that it wouldn’t be active fighting.