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“They’re going to be focused on rooting out coup plotters, and that’s going to preoccupy all the national security services; and everything else, including going after ISIL, will be secondary,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former United States ambassador to Turkey and top Pentagon official under President George W. Bush. “It may affect their ability to protect themselves from ISIL blowback in Turkey.”

Moreover, the failure to anticipate events goes to our lack of adeptness at handling Erdogan, once President Obama’s favorite world leader. Former ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman tells me, “The reason people didn’t see it coming is that Erdogan has been so successful at turning things to his advantage (like the elections last year) that people had stopped thinking about the potential downside risks. The military had clearly been broken as an institution by the various conspiracy trials and jailings of general/flag officers (over 100 in jail at one point).” The lack of a coherent policy toward Turkey is a bipartisan failure. “In general, in both the Bush and Obama Administrations we have tended to turn a blind eye to the negative trajectory of domestic developments in Turkey because we have seen the country as ‘too important to fail’ for other reasons — Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. I think that has been a mistake.”

Well, Hari, Turkey is an extremely divided and polarized society, and the former prime minister now President Tayyip Erdogan is an enormously polarizing figure. He has been driving the country in a direction of greater division because of his desire to establish an executive presidency. There’s a lot of concern about his autocratic rule and those divisions, as it turns out, also appeared to be mirrored in the military. And some members of the military, obviously, yesterday decided to — or earlier, but activated yesterday a plan to take him out of office.

“The Chinese bear acute and deeply felt memories…of the humiliation and weakness suffered at the hands of invasive Western powers,” said Peter Haynes of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “British (and later Western) sea power fundamentally changed China, and not for the better.”

However, Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Budgetary and Strategic Analysis and a former Air Force colonel, disputed the idea that Welsh and Goldfein’s comments represented a veiled attempt to retire the jet. Instead, they should be seen as a “huge signal” that the service remains committed to the close air support mission, he said. If the Air Force does press on with a new program, the service will have to establish what capabilities will be needed to perform the CAS mission in a more highly contested environment. Potential adversaries in the Asia-Pacific and Europe already maintain capable air defenses, but Middle Eastern and African state and nonstate actors also are gaining access to more sophisticated weaponry capable of bringing down a slow, low-flying aircraft like the A-10, Gunzinger said. With that in mind, an A-10 replacement should look a lot like an F-35, Gunzinger said: stealthy, capable of data fusion with other aircraft, and with the ability to fire off a variety of precision-guided munitions, including joint direct attack munitions and small diameter bombs. Couldn’t the F-35 just be used for close air support missions, as was the Air Force’s original plan? “The Marine Corps thinks so,” Gunzinger said, but added that another option is to develop an A-10 replacement with lower operating costs than the F-35, perhaps with less stealth and a larger payload…Gunzinger was more supportive of buying a purpose-built A-10 replacement, but the service should not rush procurement of a new aircraft during the near term, when so many acquisition programs are in their beginning stages. Until those programs mature, “fly the wings off the A-10,” he said

The defeat before the tribunal is “on the order of a 10 or 15-yard penalty,” no more, said Peter Haynes of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “In a more strategic sense, I think they’re just going to keep moving on the direction they’re moving (with) grey zone tactics, salami slicing….This is just one front of many.”