Literally nothing. The US does this all the time. As does Russia...look into their bombers being escorted by US fighters off Alaska.
Yep. I’ve spent many hours flying on the wing of Russian Bear and Badger bombers, Mays, Coots and even an Iranian P-3. They were testing us all the time. Here’s a good example that happened in the North Pacific in about ‘81 or so.
In a Phantom one night off the Midway, Strike advised us that they thought my wingman had lost his radio. While I was plugged in, taking gas off our A-7 tanker, he joined up with his lights were flashing as the signal that he was lost comm.. “Damn, we’re just going to be boring holes waiting for our recovery.” After topping off our tanks we started out toward our designated station and the next thing you know Strike comes up and says we have a bogey 330 at 100 miles, angels high, “signal gait” meaning full afterburner, go as fast as you can to ID it.
Now, I hadn’t heard “signal gait” since my radar simulator hops years before but I asked if we had more tankers airborne because we would need more fuel pretty quickly and Strike confirmed there was more sweet tankers. My wingman was a nugget (“Bowser”) and his back seater was my roommate (Tracker), again with no radio. I’m thinking “Bowser you’d better hang on dude ‘cause here we go!” I went to min-burner and when I saw his burners light I figured “OK, he’s got the idea.” We accelerated in full burner to 450 kts and climbed to 25,000 where we pushed over to zero G to reduce the induced drag and at 1.4M resumed the climb eventually going 1.8 Mach at 40,000’+ We got a radar lock out about 40 miles and it showed that the target was doing about the same speed. Range continued to close quickly with closure approaching Mach 4 and through it all Bowser was hanging on like a good wingman should 😁 This was going to be a really interesting conversion turn to join, particularly at night.
We were setting up for the stern conversion but at about 12-15 miles the radar showed the closure was beginning to drop off as the bogey turned around and headed back to the northwest. Strike then told us to knock it and return overhead. “Wonder what the hell that was all about?”
So we headed back, took on enough gas to make it to recovery then flew out to the marshall stack, holding until it was time to come down. We brought the wingman down to about a mile and detached them with flashing lights and they landed uneventfully. Marshall (Approach Control) took us back around and they worked us into a gap on final and we landed no problem.
After landing, the first thing we always did was go through CVIC (Carrier Intelligence Center). Bowser and Tracker were already there at the counter and as we walked in, Bowser turned and asked, “WHAT THE PHOOK WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” 😳
“I don’t know, ask them!” meaning the intell guys.
Turns out that it was a Backfire bomber out of some Russian base and they were testing our response.
Bowser said, “here we were with no radio and the next thing we know is you lit the burners trying to run away from us,” 😁😳