I'm not sure I'd interpret this as incompetence. It seems to me like a successful attempt to bring down a drone "by accident" with enough plausible deniability, because shooting it would be too overtly an act of war.
Ordering a human pilot to fly into a collision with an unmanned aircraft is command incompetence.
The attempts here to backsplain this ridiculousness is maddening. Why is a plot-twisting-conspiracy easier to accept than the far more likely explanation that an undertrained russian pilot decided to risk his plane and his life to fuck around and buzz the unmanned drone he ran across?
>Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.
That could be argued to be more intentional than just faffing about.