The public affairs department of US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) is facing ridicule on Twitter over a graphic featuring what appear to be Russian jets in a post celebrating the US Air Force’s birthday.
“Happy Birthday US Air Force!” USSOUTHCOM, responsible for US military operations in Latin America, wrote Saturday.
Eagle-eyed users took issue with the graphic accompanying the tweet, which features the silhouettes of three jets flying through the clouds with trails of blue and red smoke streaming from their tails. Users pointed out that the jets looked more like Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 fighters than anything in the US Air Force’s inventory.
“Happy Birthday, blin!” one sarcastic Russian-language user tweeted, using the Russian slang for ‘darn’, and accompanying his post with a poster featuring jets, tanks and warships from Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day, marked every 23 February.
Others joined in the trolling a similar vein.
“Will you use this photo next year?” one Turkish user wrote, accompanying his post with a rendering of a non-existent Turkish F-35 – deliveries of which the US cancelled in 2019 after Ankara decided to buy Russian-made S-400 air defence systems.
A few users defended SOUTHCOM, with one expressing hope that the silhouettes in the picture were really Rockwell Advanced Tactical Fighters – a fighter jet design concept from the 1980s by now defunct US defence giant Rockwell that never got past the drawing board.
Another offered a ‘corrected’ version of the poster featuring F-22 Raptors.
USSOUTHCOM wasn’t the only US military Twitter account to carelessly use graphics in its account Saturday, with Special Operation Joint Task Force – Levant, the account of the US military’s ‘Operation Inherent Resolve’ mission against Daesh (ISIS)* using a photo of US Navy jets flying through the desert with the US Air Force logo sloppily pasted on.
The Sukhoi mix-up isn’t the first time officials have mistakenly used Russian military equipment in promotional materials. Last year, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee used an image featuring what looked like Russian MiG-29 fighters and a soldier armed with a Kalashnikov rifle in an ad. The public affairs departments of the Chinese and Russian militaries were caught making similar snafus before that.
* A terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.