Turkey: we’ll shoot again; What’s the Syrian endgame?; Lessons from Sinjar; Kunduz probe finds multiple problems; and a bit more...

Turkey’s President Erdogan to Russia: We don’t really want a fight, but we’ll shoot again if our airspace is violated. “We have no intention of escalating this incident,” Erdogan said this morning, a day after his military downed a Russian jet. “We are only defending our own security and the rights of our brothers,” he said, repeating Ankara’s claims that the Russian aircraft violated Turkish airspace after nearly a dozen warnings.

Check out the competing takes on what happened, along with a visualization of “Russia’s pattern of confrontation,” right here.

NATO is standing by Turkey’s depiction of the event after Ankara called an emergency session Tuesday. “The information we have from other allies is consistent with what we have got from Turkey,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “This is a serious situation...We have to avoid that situations, incidents, accidents spiral out of control.”

While Russian and Syrian special forces reportedly rescued the navigator of the downed plane this morning at 3:40 a.m. local, Russia’s defense ministry confirmed “that the pilot of the Sukhoi Su-24 fighter-bomber was killed on Tuesday by ground fire from insurgents shooting at him as his parachute descended,” the New York Times reports. Moscow’s defense chief said the navigator “was now on the Russian base outside Latakia, Syria, after an overnight operation to rescue him that lasted 12 hours.” A second Russian soldier was also killed when his search helicopter was blown up in the Jabal al-Turkoman region, home to both western-backed rebels and al-Qaeda-linked extremists and located some 40 miles north of Latakia.

Russia also announced that it’s dispatching a new air defense system to the region. The S-400 is headed to the Hmeimim air base outside Latakia where “its more than 50 warplanes and other aircraft are deployed. The sophisticated system, known in the West as the SA-21 Growler, is designed to hit targets at long range, including other aircraft and missiles.”

So far, Putin has ruled out a military response while lobbing pointed words at Ankara. Trade and travel sanctions could be forthcoming; meanwhile, Russians have been discouraged from travel to Turkey by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who cancelled a trip there today.

Which is all to say: few now expect any fast movement toward a so-called “grand coalition” against the Islamic State group, even as Syria remains a proving ground for new and rusty weapons while the death toll eclipses 250,000 with another 11 million displaced. After all, the “only winner in a confrontation between Russia and the West is the Islamic State,” writes the NYTs Editorial Board.

The U.S. and France are at Turkey’s side while they look into ways to put more pressure on ISIS in coming weeks. In a Tuesday meeting at the White House with French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Obama called for a de-escalation of tensions between Russia and Turkey — but added, “Turkey, like every country, has the right to defend its territory and its airspace.” Obama also touted the U.S.-led coalition of 65 nations taking the fight to ISIS while “Russia right now is a coalition of two: Iran and Russia supporting Assad,” he said.

Added Hollande: “Terrorism will not destroy France because France will destroy it.” He vowed “to intensify France’s airstrikes in Syria, citing Islamic State supply lines and command centers as top targets. But he noted that he does not plan to send ground forces to Syria,” the Washington Post reports.

Too soon to be asking about an end game? Not at all, and the lack of chatter on the subject is disturbing, writes Dominic Tierney, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Since no one else will, he tackles the question and shares his own recipe for at least a half-way responsible conflict, here.

The lessons of Sinjar: Backed by U.S. airpower, the Kurdish clearance of the Iraqi city of Sinjar has revealed at least one thing: “ISIS has been well-prepared for this kind of intervention.” That’s the word from Lina Khatib, a senior research associate at the Arab Reform initiative, a Paris-based think-tank, after Peshmerga troops revealed some 30 to 40 tunnels underneath Sinjar. The Associated Press has the gritty details and video, here.

From Defense One

Tunisia declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after an explosion killed 12 presidential guards in the capital, a worrying development for a country that is at once the most democratic to emerge from the Arab Spring and also the largest source of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria. The Atlantic’s Adam Chandler has more, here.

European officials have begun to cast a censorious eye on websites like al-Fateh, a colorful site for children whose illustrations, games, and stories encourage terrorism and heap praise upon suicide bombers. French and Belgian lawmakers have already proposed laws to silence this and other online tools of ISIS followers. But history shows that such laws may do more harm than good, reports National Journal’s Kaveh Waddell, here.

Recent terrorism alerts may put the flying public on edge, but not every would-be solution ought to get off the ground. Take, for example, the quiet push to patent escape pods in passenger airliners, writes Defense One Tech Editor Patrick Tucker. “In theory, it’s not unlike the escape systems for some manned spacecraft. But the small explosives that might pull a capsule from a malfunctioning booster rocket wouldn’t be safe in commercial flight. So Demenchuk’s patent calls for tubular guides (or rails) and special motorized devices to push the escape pod out the open bay doors.”

Would it work? Tucker investigates, here.

Don’t miss our Dec. 7 event: Defense One Leadership Briefing with Jeh Johnson: How prepared is the U.S. to prevent, defend and respond to an attack from ISIS? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson sits for an intimate conversation with Defense One, on Monday, Dec. 7, to discuss how threats are transitioning from the battlefield to the homefront, and how DHS is working with the military, Defense Department, intelligence community, and other agencies for a whole-of-government defense against terrorism, cyber attacks, and more. Defense One Executive Editor Kevin Baron moderates the event, 8 a.m. EDT at Washington’s District Architecture Center. Register for your spot here.

Welcome to the Thanksgiving Eve edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. We’re back on Monday, so here's wishing all a safe, pleasant day tomorrow—from Kandahar to Korea, Irbil to Lemonnier, and all around the world. And for those of you stateside this holiday, get those nieces, nephews, and that cantankerous uncle smart on national security—point ’em to our subscribe link here: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Want to see something we’re not covering? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.

Multiple “human errors, failures in procedure and technical malfunctions” led a U.S. gunship to pound a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last month, killing at least 30 people, the NYT reported Tuesday. Citing unnamed senior Defense Department officials who described the findings in a 3,000-page investigative file, the Times reported that “the investigation found that the gunship’s crew had been unable to rely on instruments to find the target. Instead, they relied on descriptions of the location relayed by troops on the ground, a mix of American and Afghan Special Forces. Based on those descriptions, the crew locked onto the hospital compound, mistakenly believing that it was the building the ground troops were describing.”

However, “It remained unclear if relying on such informal instructions would amount to a breach of military operational rules in an urban area with civilians present. And the officials’ account did not address why the ground forces said to be in contact with the gunship would not have informed the crew that it was hitting the wrong building at some point during the hour-plus that the aircraft kept up its heavy fire.” Read the rest, here.

And today, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, will brief the press on the investigation via satellite feed at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

Meanwhile, the Afghan army is amid an operation “to rescue 18 hostages including two Moldovans captured by the Taliban after their [Mi-17] helicopter crash-landed in the north,” Agence France Presse reports. “The helicopter came down in the Pashtun Kot district of Faryab province,” where Taliban fighters reportedly “killed three of those on board—two Afghans and a third foreigner—in an initial firefight and took the rest hostage after the Tuesday crash,” Kabul’s defense ministry said.

ICYMI: A former SOCOM chief, retired Adm. William McRaven, says the biggest struggle against ISIS is “convincing the American people that the money and casualties spent on the battle are worth it,” The Austin-American Statesman reports from the University of Texas’s second annual national security conference Friday.

His pitch: “In the end, we know the right strategy: It is continuous and direct action on the extremists until they have no more capacity and no more reach. It will be a generational fight, but if we don’t take it on now, then we should not be surprised when the barbarians are at our gate and we’re wondering how they got here.” More here.

And P4 says sending ground troops into Syria would be a mistake, calling Syria very possibly “a Humpty Dumpty that can’t be put back together again.” Former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus told PBS’ Charlie Rose that the sticking point is the Sunni turf held by ISIS in Syria. Iraq’s Sunni lands are less fraught than Syria’s, thanks to the tenuous Kurdish-Baghdad connection, he said, but “there is no unified political leadership of the Sunni Arabs in Syria.” More from Politico here, or catch a clip of the interview, here.

And lastly today: Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 campaign offers a surprising lens on the U.S. voters’ psyche when it comes to national security and the threat of terrorism from the Middle East, writes The Daily Beast. “A New York Times/CBS News poll from June 2013 found that six in 10 people did not want the U.S. to take a lead role in solving conflicts in the Middle East. But two years later, the world has changed. And what Paul is offering voters provides little comfort to Americans who are scared.”

In contrast, “Donald Trump—whose response to the Paris terror attacks has included claiming he witnessed New Jersey Muslims cheering on Sept. 11, 2001—is the only candidate to have received a bump in the polls as the focus of the primary has shifted to national security, suggesting that either voters don’t care about candidates having specific plans to combat terror, or nativist shouting is comforting in times of heightened distress.” Read on, here.