states and russia at the moment to understand each other s positions. general mark milley, the u.s. chief of staff, military chief of staff, spoke to his russian counterpart. that conversation was about risk reduction. it was about operational deconflictions. this is the kind of language that militaries use if they don t want to if they don t want to misread what the other is doing. the united states conundrum is that russia is massing those troops on the border with ukraine and that they have the military hardware there, the united states believes, to have an incursion. f from russia s perspective, it s not so much a hard military buildup in ukraine although the kremlin is accusing the ukrainian defense ministry of sort of building up troops in the region east of the country where there are two separatist areas.
work? one time the russian contractors we re told came too close to our forces and basically killed them. the deconflictions that worked. in a specific incident they were not controlled by the russian forces and russian command structure. they were outside of that. they didn t have a chance to deconflict. they wandered into an area. we took appropriate action because our troops were threatened and that is what is going to happen. that was with irregular troops. we have to make sure if it is federal troops it s a different ballgame. the deconfliction needs to be very much at the fore of it. the better solution we need to remove troops to the area to reduce the threat to the united states. here is the bottom line, as bad as that suffering it is, we ll not stop it with our troops there or our troops out. we need to make it not worse for our country. eric: what if assad launches chemical weapons again? there is possibilities of that. they launched them to basically drive people out. here
deconflictions, there s no way now we re going to get a u.n. security council resolution. this is a huge diplomatic crisis between world powers whether the trump administration likes it. they try to minimize this by saying we re going back to business, that s not going to happen. russia is taking this very seriously. but to david points, this does change the david s point. you will recall hillary clinton called him putin s puppet. this seems to defy that. it takes the heat off the investigation in congress about all of the potential collusion during the campaign with russia. now he will send in his secretary of state and i think we should underline this. secretary of state tillerson is putting on the table the idea that assad should go and russia should think carefully about its actions, but also support for
assad despite the very vehement condemnation, and the accurate condemnation by secretary of state and president obama, and russia is going in to prop up that regime. and the first concern that comes to mind with the aircraft reck is sill ati reck reconciliations going in, what is it for? to provide denial of anybody going after their the advance on the ground. that is the stor y they would use. but clearly, it puts a bubble over their capabilities to act with complete impunity and to conduct air operations with support on the ground if they were in anticipation of something else coming after them. while asking for the same time about conversation of the deconflictions and pointing guns to the sky, and paul kruk shank what air capacity do the rebels