More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing") Anyway, as a former navy officer it looks very bad that the flagship of a fleet was apparently sunk by a anti ship missile (ASM) strike. Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets and while the Neptune ASM is very modern, the flagship should definitely not have been the first to be sunk.
This will be (should be) a wake up call for the rest of the fleet and keep them much further from the shore, which in turn has impact on the amount of air control the Russians can exert on the southern parts of Ukraine as apparently they have been leaning on navy vessels to provide SAM cover.
>So how did Ukraine do it? Early reports suggest a brilliantly effective combination of tactics, strategy and the exploitation of its own capabilities, combined with awareness of Russian weaknesses
>According to early reports, the attack took place during a storm. This would have made flying difficult but also helps to conceal shore-based activity from observation. The Russians wouldn't have seen the preparations
>Reportedly, the Ukrainians used a Bayraktar TB-2 drone to distract the Moskva. The Ukrainian Navy introduced TB-2s into service in August 2021.
>How did the Russians not see the incoming Neptunes? The Moskva has/had a single main air defence radar - a 3P41 Volna phased array to guide S300 missiles. Problem is, it only has a 180 degree field of vision
>360 degree coverage is provided by MR-800 Voshkod/Top Pair 3-D long range air search radars for shorter-range SA-8 missiles. But it's likely that in the storm, they couldn't distinguish the sea-skimming Neptunes from the wavetops.
Would you be able to share some light on what a cruiser is (that's how this ship is classified on wikipedia) vs another kind of ship. I am comparing to the british navy which doesn't seem to have anything above destroyer (outside of aircraft carriers). In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?
Ship class designations are weird. Russia keeps a ship or two designated as "battlecruisers" (in the WWII era, that would have meant a lightly-armored, probably fast, very large ship with battleship-class guns) that would just be called cruisers in most other navies, now. I've seen British ships with tonnage that would put them nearly up to a WWII-era heavy cruiser (step under a battlecruiser, the smallest thing generally regarded as a "capital ship" in that era) called a destroyer (formerly that would have been a much smaller size of ship), these days.
From their design, the ship class in question seem to be some kind of largish general-purpose missile cruisers with substantial armament and decent anti-air/anti-missile defenses, but not intended to survive sustained fighting (their weapon placement suggests that—all those missile tubes on the deck can't possibly be safe, but it might let them cram more weapons on there cheaply)
[VERY LATE EDIT] The TL;DR here is that "cruiser" and "destroyer" and all that are nearly meaningless without context of who's doing the labeling, and when.
[ANOTHER LATE EDIT] I overstated the degree to which the Kirov class' designation is misleading: its displacement is roughly in the range of WWII-era battlecruisers (~1/2 the displacement of an Iowa class battleship—armor is really, really heavy). It lacks battleship-class guns, but so does everything else these days and it'd be kinda silly if it had them.
> From their design, the ship class in question seem to be some kind of largish general-purpose missile cruisers with substantial armament and decent anti-air/anti-missile defenses,
My understanding is that the Moskva specifically had few and outdated anti-missile self-defense systems, but capable anti-air systems (and was, in fact, the main anti-air platform as well as the flagship for the Black Sea fleet.)
The battlecruisers are actual battlecruisers including having a lot of deck guns. They are nowhere near Ukraine though. Seemly their job is patrol seas where US warships might attack Russia.
Also I`ve read the reason Iowa Battleship in USA is not fully decomissined is just in case they need it to take out the two Russian battlecruisers... not likely to be nededed but "just in case"
> Also I`ve read the reason Iowa Battleship in USA is not fully decomissined is just in case they need it to take out the two Russian battlecruisers... not likely to be nededed but "just in case"
The Iowa and Wisconsin (originally New Jersey and Wisconsin, but then Congress specifically intervened to override the Navy and specify Iowa to replace New Jersey) were returned to the reserve status and kept in mothballs because Congress ordered the Navy to keep to Iowa-class BBs in reserve in case needed to support Marine amphibious operations (this ended in 2006), not to fight the Kirovs.
Lots of big missiles; the only real naval gun is a twin 130mm. (That's about the size of an Arleigh Burke destroyer's gun. The Iowa's 15" guns are 406mm.) If you're in gun range of a Kirov, something has gone badly wrong for the Kirov.
Correct. Toward the end of the age of big ship's guns it'd have been designated a heavy cruiser, probably.
But, other countries operate ships they designate destroyers at roughly the same displacement, these days. Role of the ship, and just preference of the country deciding what they'll call them, is a bigger factor than size.
Most of the other replies here say it’s all about size, and size does matter, but it’s not the whole story.
Generally, cruisers are designed with capabilities that allow them to operate anywhere on the ocean on their own, or as the lead vessels in small groups of ships (along with frigates and destroyers). Destroyers are usually smaller and have a more limited set of capabilities, and are intended to operate as ocean-going support ships in a combat group. Frigates are usually even smaller, with similar set of capabilities to a destroyer, but more limited equipment and intended to operate relatively close to their home ports.
Every navy has different sizes for each, with the USA having some of the largest ships of each designation. You should also keep in mind that each type of ship has gotten progressively larger over time; as of WWII, destroyers were roughly 2000 tons, and cruisers were about 8000 tons.
> Most of the other replies here say it’s all about size, and size does matter, but it’s not the whole story.
Originally the distinctions were (mostly) of purpose, but after WWI a series of treaties (mostly the Washington Naval Treaty and the First and Second London Naval Treaties) set out size, equipment, and numerical limits for various categories, so a whole lot of the interwar design and classification was based on gaming treaty limits, and the resulting naming patterns had a lasting influence that gradually faded.
In modern usage it's mostly just about size. Naval non-carrier surface combat vessels have a bunch of roles and weapon systems, but tend to be generalists and not specialists. So everything has cruise missiles and SAMs and radars and antisubmarine helicopters, etc... If it's big it's a "cruiser" and if it's small it's a "frigate" and everything else is a "destroyer". And there's a bunch of overlap and ambiguity.
These ships are big-ish soviet-era vessels designed primarily (as I understand it) for anti-ship cruise missile focus, but they fill all roles.
> So it looks like they're larger than destroyers but have a similar function.
The Ticonderoga class cruisers are basically the same size as the Arleigh Burke destroyers (smaller than the Flight III, larger than earlier ones) and much smaller than the Zumwalt-class destroyers.
There's a degree of what amounts to fashion in the naming, and “cruiser“ is out of fashion for newer ships.
I'm no Navy expert. But, here's my understanding of today's Navies.
* Corvette/Frigates -- Smaller ships with smaller munitions. They're just missile platforms. Anything smaller than a Corvette basically is ignored for most discussions. Frigates are slightly larger than Corvette.
* Destroyers -- Bigger than Frigates. Not only do Destroyers have significant missile capacities (like Corvette / Frigates), Destroyers are big enough for major sensor suites. SONAR, RADAR, etc. etc. Maybe enough for a CWIS (aim-bot with a gatling gun, designed to automatically shoot down enemy missiles as they approach).
* Cruisers -- Bigger than Destroyers. More missiles, more sensors. While a Destroyer might have 1x CWIS and 1x RADAR, you might be seeing 2x or 3x CWIS or RADARS on the larger Cruiser class.
> In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?
Defense. You need a lot of power to run those RADAR systems, which are constantly scanning the skies for enemy missiles. Corvette/Frigates are too small to have a CWIS / anti-missile defense system, so they need to hang around larger ships (like Destroyers or Cruisers) for defense.
Multiple Destroyers could be stationed next to each other to increase their defenses. But if two Destroyers were just going to sail together (for better RADAR coverage and/or defenses), its a better idea to just make a slightly bigger ship, but with twice the RADAR / twice the defense of a singular Destroyer.
The difference is less the CIWS and more the amount of displacement that they have to spend on capabilities and the generality of those capabilities.
Even LCSs, effectively overpowered corvettes, have CIWS. They don't have the radar which can deal with threats further out than the 10 miles or so that their SeaRAM can deal with.
Frigates have more room to fit larger radars, power plants to feed them, and missiles to fire with them. Smaller frigates usually have 8-16 VLS tubes with ESSM or SM-2 to deal with threats 30+ miles out. Bigger ones, like the planned Constellation class, will have 32.
Destroyers are where you get enough room to start having strike and long range defense capabilities. The radar is now powerful enough to track ballistic missiles coming in from space, and they have missiles that can intercept them like SM-3. They also have extra VLS to store strike capabilities, like Tomahawk missiles. US Arleigh Burke class Destroyers have 96 VLS cells.
Cruisers have an interesting role. In the US navy, we don't really need them. We have a slightly larger destroyer hull with extra room for a fleet command center that we call cruisers to make congress happy. In navies that don't have carriers, though, their role is to be the main strike platform for the fleet. They'll have mounts for the largest mobile missiles in their arsenal, like the Russian P-700 Granit, which NATO called "Shipwreck".
Carriers are the most important part of the US Navy. Their power projection and sea control capabilities are unmatched. Each one carries their own airborne radar squadron, as well as 44+ strike fighters to not only defend it but to strike back at their foes. The carrier allows the fleet to know everything that happens within 500 miles, and destroy anything that it doesn't want there.
So, why don't we want to just have lots of cruisers? A mix of survivability and flexibility. While offensive capability scales linearly with tonnage, survivability falls to the cube-square law and only increases as the cube root of tonnage. Carriers are a special exception to this, because their aircraft are such a force multiplier. However, they're extremely expensive so very few countries can afford more than one or two. The US, however, is required by congress to have at least 10. For flexibility, it's often nice to have more platforms with less capabilites in more places than one platform with more capabilities in one place.
> Carriers are the most important part of the US Navy. Their power projection and sea control capabilities are unmatched. Each one carries their own airborne radar squadron, as well as 44+ strike fighters to not only defend it but to strike back at their foes. The carrier allows the fleet to know everything that happens within 500 miles, and destroy anything that it doesn't want there.
Modern US Carriers are pretty absurd though. Do they really need 2 runways and 4 catapults?
I get it, in combat, you really want to launch your aircraft really fast. But it does show how building one-ship with 2x runways is considered better (by the US Navy anyway) than building 2x ships with 1x runways each.
There's a lot of decisions that went into the design of these ships. I'm not sure if they all made sense... it all comes down to what modern naval combat is (and frankly, no one really knows what modern naval combat is... there hasn't been a clash of major powers since WW2. Falklands War IMO doesn't count since Argentina isn't really the same kind of power as United Kingdom)
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I think everyone knows that our Carriers are vulnerable to enemies. But they're so useful for power projection that we keep building them...
Nah, that's the benefit of the Supercarriers actually.
A typical carrier (Chinese Shandong) is 70,000 tons. The Gerald Ford Supercarrier is 100,000 tons.
So you can see that 3x regular carriers cost as much tons as 2x Supercarriers (210,000 tons vs 200,000 tons). But 2x supercarriers have 4-runways total and 8 catapults, while 3x carriers would only have 3-runways.
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The real problem with "Supercarriers" is that you've got all your eggs in one basket. Killing one supercarrier is kinda-sorta like killing two carriers, in terms of capabilities.
More efficient for the US Navy to use, but also more efficient for the enemy to kill.
Don't know if this is just a meme or actually called that by real Navy members, but I heard them referred to as "missile sponges", i.e. to "soak up" missiles fired at the convoy/battle group.
Destroyers are around 8000 tons. Cruisers are around 10,000 tons.
You need 16,000 tons of metal to make 2x Destroyers. You only need 10,000 tons of metal to make 1x Cruiser.
Your crew sizes are also merged together with the larger-ships, meaning you need fewer sailors to perform the same amount of firepower. Two Destroyers would have a lot of redundant jobs compared to one Cruiser.
The distinctions between surface warship classes are somewhat arbitrary. Some modern frigates and destroyers are larger than WW2 cruisers. Originally cruisers were lightly armored vessels intended for long range, high speed commerce raiding to disrupt enemy logistics. They weren't intended to stand in the line of battle and slug it out with heavily armored battleships. But now modern cruisers carry large numbers of missiles for attacking other ships, or striking surface targets, or defending an aircraft carrier from air and missile attacks. So the key distinction that characterizes a cruiser is basically just "more missiles".
The US Navy is gradually decommissioning their cruisers and can't afford to build new ones.
> The US Navy is gradually decommissioning their cruisers and can't afford to build new ones.
The Ticonderoga class cruisers are 9,600 tons, the Arleigh Burke Flight III destroyers are 9,700 tons, the Zumwalt class destroyers are almost 16k tons.
We have newer cruisers, we just call them destroyers.
Well, can't afford while keeping 9 super carriers and 30 odd virginia class. It should be noted that the current generation of super subs can fire cruise missiles at shore targets as well as old cruisers could. Add in the shift in drone technology and the argument for big, non carrier surface combatants looks poor.
> Add in the shift in drone technology and the argument for big, non carrier surface combatants looks poor.
The newer American destroyers are bigger than the last cruisers we built, so phasing out of cruisers isn't about not having big, non-carrier surface combatants.
The Zumwalts are cancelled now. The calculus seems to be that if you are building a modern capital ship then it's either an aircraft platform, an assault ship or it needs to be able to go underwater - because it will cost just as much. There is a sharp division between naval assets to be used in war, and everything else.
Sure, but they are the newest destroyers we have, and illustrate (along with the Flight III Ashleigh Burke) a pattern. DDG(X) won't be twice the Ticonderoga-class displacement like the Zumwalt-class, but they'll also be bigger than the Ticonderoga by a sizable margin.
The key distinction is what name when applied to the hoped for platform will win funding from the national tax authority - what ever that is.
In the UK talk of cruisers is a no-no, the last "through deck cruisers" were actually aircraft carriers, and no one is falling for that again. Thus the Type 45's are definitely destroyers despite displacing 9400 tonnes. In other lands the Ticonderoga's are cruisers, even though they displace 9600 tonnes, the Arleigh Burke are destroyers at 9300 tonnes, but the Zumwalt's come in at 14000 tonnes as destroyers as well! Note, there will only ever be three Zumwalt's.
Some are bigger than others, which means that they can launch more missiles (and maybe also longer range missiles). They may also have more powerful radars, and have a more central role in coordinating the fleet as a whole.
Also, they have more people, so it's a bigger deal if they get sunk.
Originally cruisers were pretty much the largest ships in a fleet, capable of independent long range cruising missions. Battleship was a broader term.
The development of HMS Dreadnought heralded a revolution in big gun capital ship design and modern battleships were sometimes referred to as Dreadnought class battleships, though for a long time that’s been the only kind. Particularly large or capable cruisers are sometimes called battle cruisers.
This ship doesn’t have big guns because it’s a missile ship so it can’t be a battleship, but it is a capital ship, which makes it a cruiser.
"Cruiser" is an old term, and it originally referred to the mission rather than to the ship. Cruisers were usually smaller ships such as frigates or sloops, because bigger ships were too expensive to use in that role.
Battleships were the last descendants of the ship of line, which basically meant a ship big enough and heavily armed enough to not be a weak link in the line of battle.
As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying:
1) Do ships truly have good defences against Harpoons etc. these days? If 1 or 2 were sent a ship is there a decent chance they'd be neutralized?
2) There's indications Ukraine was flying a drone to distract them possible have their radars not on the right thing, firing missiles from behind. Does this remotely make sense i.e. radar coverage? Or possibly even just overwhelming/confusing the ships operators a bit?
1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact.
2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.
Warships certainly do suddenly catch fire. They just don't usually catch fire in such a way that it's a casualty. DCS is usually competent enough to get things under control in reasonable amounts of time.
Normally the sudden catching fire is due to electrical problems, particularly when repairs are done by non-electrical teams who fail to follow the correct procedures or doubly so if they are battleshorting for one reason or another.
Now what happened here though definitely wasn't "suddenly catching fire" unless the crew were negligent and incompetent... which well actually looking at the performance of the Russian army that could actually be a possibility.
Warships, just like everything else, do suddenly catch fire from time to time. Carelessness, negligence, sabotage, or bad luck could cause a fire that would sink a ship. Especially during a war, when munitions are being handled under pressure.
Not the most likely cause, but shit does happen.
BTW, By sabotage I don't mean some mustache twirling spy, but something more mundane, a disgruntled sailor, or a homesick one that wants to return to base as soon as possible.
OK sure, they do. But on every warship I've ever been on (granted, none of them were Russian), every single person was a trained firefighter and very well aware that there was no fire brigade to call. In particular, setting fire to an ammunition store (as opposed to something more innocent but still vital like the galley) seems like an especially stupid thing to do. I'd also like to point out that every single missile system I've ever seen is not reloaded in any meaningful way at sea. Ships just pull into port an a crane lifts the replacement canisters into place.
Given the potential causes basically being [accident, self-inflicted sabotage, hit by missile], "hit by missile" seems by far the most likely given all the other information about this.
On the warships I've been on, there were only a few well trained fire fighters, and the rest were poorly trained on the job. I doubt if I would have been a very useful member of the damage control team had something happened.
Galley fires could happen anytime. During times of war, guns are being loaded, missile systems are turned on and tested to ensure they are ready. Somebody could easily screw up and cause a major fire. If missiles were fired by the Moskva, then a dud could have caused a fire, and so on.
I'm not claiming this is likely in this case, but it does happen.
Why not consider the sabotage option? A well controlled scuttle will ensure 100% survival for the perpetrators, sure beats dying of Vlady Putin's cancerous convulsions, plus you get to not commit war crimes... What's not to like?
Do you know what happens to explosives on sunk ships generally? Are they usually left at the bottom of the ocean, and could they have the potential to detonate?
Typically they would just be left there and (very) slowly degrade. As an example, the Dutch navy still clears hundreds of mines and unexploded bombs every year, left over from the 2nd world war. The explosives still work and are usually triggered with a small clearing charge so that they won't pose any danger to fishermen and the like.
So yes there is potential to detonate, but in general that does not matter a lot unless you are the unluckiest person in the world and happen to be right above it at the time. The explosive wave front expands in a sphere and so decreases in amplitude with the square of the distance to the origin. It loses lethal potential very quickly.
That said, if anyone decides to mount a recovery or salvage mission of any kind, it may be worth upgrading that "no" to a soft "maybe".
As far as I know, nobody has tried to retrieve conventional munitions from a shipwreck, and reasonably enough - they're not dangerous enough to be worth the trouble. Nations will go after lost nuclear warheads, though; indeed, Bayesian search theory saw significant development and interest to serve that purpose [1], and the CIA's been known to go to Bond-movie levels of trouble to the same end [2].
Granted, these were both First Cold War projects, but it seems like there's some degree of possibility that this use of "First Cold War" may eventually prove not to have been a somewhat silly joke, so...
No, but by the wonders of a moment's consideration we can surmise that leaving an example of the US's newest stealth technology, in the backyard pool of the power it's primarily designed to be used against, might not strike someone in the US Department of Defense as the world's cleverest idea.
(For what it's worth, I don't love linking to Less Wrong for this or any reason, but I couldn't as quickly find another reference for the point about Bayesian search theory. If not for the fact that I've seen it mentioned elsewhere in, let's say, less breathlessly wide-eyed technopositivistic contexts, I wouldn't have included it at all.)
That's basically my point. There are plenty of good reasons for salvaging the Moskva that are completely unrelated to whether it carried nuclear weapons.
Understandable! I used the phrase "soft maybe" earlier with deliberation aforethought, but I can't blame anyone for overlooking that in favor of the giant red flag I also sent up in the same comment. (Not when there's still 98 years and change to go on my ban from Scott Siskind's Substack, anyway...)
With regard to the value of recovering Moskva, I suppose I don't know. It's not all that young a design, and evidently struggles against even subsonic antiship missiles. Not that that means it's worth nothing, of course, but I could see the possibility that to attempt a recovery would be throwing good money after bad. That said, you quite evidently have experience in this realm that I lack, and your analysis is thus certainly better informed than mine.
National pride could be a big reason, maybe it carried their newest hypersonic missile, or maybe it carried some other new technology.
And since it sunk in the Black Sea, depending on the exact location, it could have sunk in a relatively shallow area, where it is easy to do the salvage even if there is no really good reason.
The Israeli Navy, for example, spent several decades searching for its lost submarine INS Dakar. It was located in 1999 and then the conning tower was salvaged from a depth of 3,000m and placed in the Naval Museum.
Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.
It's always seemed very doubtful to me that a layered defense of the type mounted by U.S.N. carrier groups would be effective in a real war against a sophisticated opponent. It's obvious to me that every capital ship would be at the bottom of the ocean in the first hour of a war with China. The useless Russian ship we are discussing was, after all, equipped with a modern anti-missile system and yet it sank. Perhaps their CIWS readiness was not optimal, but that has also happened to the U.S. in the case of the Stark.
Ships are expensive and missiles are almost free by comparison, so this seems like a fundamental problem for naval warfare.
What I'm really wondering is why the Russians even staged this ship into the Black Sea. What possible capabilities could it have been providing that the Russians could not also get from land units?
There was a famous exercise in which a Dutch submarine managed to sink over half a carrier group in an exercise (https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/dutch-submarine-sinks-half-of...) and printed a t-shirt to commemorate the occasion. The shirt was very swiftly forbidden by the leadership team, since the Americans were rather unhappy about the whole thing and it was deemed to be not very diplomatic to wear such shirts to the traditional end-of-exercise bbq on the flight deck.
Though reading too much into wargames is also a mistake - they put significant limits on the sonar power as otherwise it would devastate the local ocean ecology, which naturally benefits those who want to remain hidden like submarines in exercises. They're meant to use estimates and an honor system of detection, but I've generally heard it's pretty laughable from people involved.
I don't doubt that such ecological worries will go out the window if there's actual threats involved.
The joke on our submarine was that aircraft carriers should more properly be called "targets." Sweden has a super quiet submarine design using Sterling engines:
A Stirling engine is particularly well suited for a submarine because the engine is nearly silent and can use the surrounding sea water as a heat sink to increase efficiency
In 2005, HSwMS Gotland managed to snap several pictures of USS Ronald Reagan during a wargaming exercise in the Pacific Ocean, effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier
My own opinion is that aircraft carriers are very effective in projecting power around the world during peacetime or low intensity conflicts, but military planners recognize (I hope) that they will be quickly sunk in an all out war and have contingency plans.
There is this theory that at least US CVNs have enough power and the correct hull shape to hydroplane in an event of an emergency. It would likely do a lot of damage in the process so it's probably never tested, and it's classified so nobody really knows for sure.
But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.
There is no such theory. You can clearly see from construction pictures that those ships have displacement hulls. A displacement hull won't plane no matter how much power you put into the shafts.
Well it's more of a conspiracy theory really. Along with the Aurora aircraft, Area 51 aliens and the like. Just slightly more believable than the rest.
> A displacement hull won't plane no matter how much power you put into the shafts.
I wouldn't be so sure, the main difference between the two is that a planing hull has an angle of attack in regards to the water, so it can generate lift. You can achieve the same by increasing stern trim on a displacement hull.
As for it being flat on the bottom, there are also less stable flat planning hulls that work so that doesn't disqualify it either.
That seems pretty wild. Torpedos don't strike the side of a ship, rather they are meant to explode underneath for max damage. So even if a CVN could hydroplane, I don't think it would evade a torpedo.
Well an ADCAP can do as much as 55 kts, which is probably the fastest conventional torps go, and you'd definitely buy more time to deploy countermeasures and decoys.
A Shkval can go as fast as a missile, but it can't turn very well so you might be able to dodge it this way.
Sure it's not a good outlook in any case, but it's better than sitting there waiting to be hit.
They not only have ship escorts, they have submarine escorts. But no fence around a carrier is perfect. An attacking submarine doesn't have to chase a carrier, they can lie in wait in ship lanes. A new development since I was in the sub service is submarine launched cruise missiles in addiction to torpedoes.
To me it feels like an asymmetry between progress in sensors/software vs. progress in hardware/personnel since the last major wars ?
That is, are the warships of today much better than the warships of 1950, if better at all? What about the skill and preparation of the crews?
On the other hand when I watched videos of the Javelin missile I see a lot of sensors and software that probably could have only been created recently.
I don't think such a thing could have existed in 1950 or 1970. Probably by 1990 it was possible, but I bet it's a lot better by 2010 too. Electronics got cheaper and smaller and more mobile. Imaging is way better.
So while I don't know any of the specifics, this seems like a general trend. It's going to be harder for the offensive side to take and hold territory, and maybe the aircraft carrier is obsolete in a big conflict.
We saw some asymmetry in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it doesn't seem like the same type, since AFAIK the opponents didn't have many smart weapons.
Modern warships are far, far better than the ones that we used in the 50s. We have more powerful engines, more redundancy, and better damage control systems. The sensors that we have on the ships are much better, and they are used to control more advanced, accurate, and powerful missiles. The crews are better trained, because they're a fully volunteer force, and more lessons have been learned over the years.
The carrier is not obsolete. They are surrounded by a battle group of the best of these modern ships, in open ocean with mobility unrestrained by the rules of engagement of a pre-planned exercise. On their decks, they carry 50+ aircraft that can investigate anywhere within 500nmi, ensuring that nothing moves on the surface that they don't know about. When a plane lands, it can be turned around for another sortie in an hour with a fresh pilot and more missiles. Each of these missiles have a range of their own of 100nmi+, and can be carried more than 500nmi by the aircraft carrying them. An aircraft carrier at full power can even outrun some smaller surface ships.
Yeah true, I shouldn't have stated in absolute terms ... But I still suspect there is a differential in the progress in tech for offense (holding a territory) vs. defense. And maybe that differential is greater than you consider Russian offense vs. western defense ...
On one hand, this sounds much like military folklore. "If you serve in role X, you have Y seconds/minutes to live once the fighting starts", or something like that.
Real wars are confusing and there is a lot of uncertainty about everything. Maybe China could sink every US Navy capital ship if they fire everything they have at once, but they are not sure about that. There have not been any major naval battles since WW2, and nobody really knows what would happen in one. If they fire everything and it doesn't work, their forces will be spent and vulnerable until they can resupply, and they may not want to risk that.
On the other hand, big high-value targets do sound like a bad idea, given how warfare has evolved in the past 30-40 years.
Glory to them if true, but this particular ship had 6 independent fire control radars for their close-in weapons systems, which are automatic. The UAV perhaps destroyed the sensor system of the long-range anti-air missile system? Either way, obviously it worked. I am a huge skeptic of anti-missile weapons since they have performed extremely poorly in limited practice.
I'm not sure about the terminology, but yes, it sounded like it was the long-range defense system radar that was taken out, because that was deemed to be the one most likely to shoot the missile down. Their close-range stuff was supposedly operational, it just didn't work as well in practice as it did on paper.
BTW, it should also be noted that the missile that took it down was - again, supposedly - Ukraine's very recently (2020) developed P-360 Neptune; and they have very few of them in service. They haven't been used until this point, so the assumption now is that it was a long-running operation in which Ukrainians bided their time and patiently arranged for all the pieces to be just right before making the move - and it paid off big time.
Ships can now be attacked from shore. That really hadn't been much of a thing since the era of seacoast forts. But that's changing. China has invested heavily in shore-based anti-ship missiles. There are now more things you can launch from a truck that can take out a ship. As seems to be what happened here.
Look at a map of western Russia's sea access. Choke points everywhere, most of them controlled by others.
And yes, Russia's sea access is surprisingly limited for a country which nominally has the 4th longest coastline of any --- largely along the Arctic ocean.
In the case of the Stark there were failures, but the incident response was much more coherent than the Russian one. All arms of the Russian forces seem to suffer from similar problems of low morale, poor discipline, poor training, etc.
It's worth looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Gloucester_(D96)#First_Gul... as another example. My understanding is that the Falklands experience resulted in lots of changes and a much higher state of readiness for these situations within the Royal Navy. Budget and tech were much harder to acquire than tactics were to develop. In the case of China, there may be some upgraded weapons which can't be countered with training and tactics.
You are correct on the economics of ships to missiles and that those ships have anti-missile systems but being close to land can put you at a disadvantage due to radar having a certain range it can operate at. Low flying projectiles may be harder to track due to these limitations and the Ukrainians have been very resourceful with the weapons they do have and have used them in ways that even western militaries were surprised with.
I'm guessing here but I think it might have been more a show of force by putting that cruiser there as well as an attempt at dissuading other countries from entering the area.
To be clear I am arm-chairing here and would love to know more on the operational capabilities of radar on ships.
A saying I've heard from current/former sailors is, "Submarines are weapons, surface ships are targets". Surface ships, especially carriers, are very useful during peace time, but that during war time submarines can actually operate whereas surface ships must spend the majority of their time being evasive rather than offensive.
I've heard that actually hitting a carrier group at open sea is pretty tough with a cruise/ballistic missile, where are they? Where are they moving? Layered defenses etc. But what good is a bunch of ships steaming around hiding?
Reportedly the Moskva's radar system only covers 180 degrees, so the Ukrainians used the drone to distract the radar system, this combined with the high turbulent seas causing artefacts on the radar make it very hard to defend against anti ship missiles.
I presume most more modern ships don't have radars that can only cover 180 degrees so they would be as vulnerable to this attack.
Couple of questions that I remain curious about now that sinking has been confirmed:
1. Did it go to a bottom with some nuclear warheads onboard? What is going to happen to these? (Slava class is nuclear strike capable[0])
2. It was the flagship of the BS fleet. This I have been told implies admiral and their staff on board. Any news of the fate of the fleet staff?
3. Is there any news beyond 'all were evacuated' of the fate of the crew? Some news said Turkish navy managed to rescue ~50 sailors. What about the rest ~450[1]?
Regarding (1), any nuclear weapons may just remain on the sea floor.
For one, we've had nukes lost before by accident (called a "broken arrow" incident in US military) and its estimated around 50 have been lost at sea and never recovered[0].
The thing is, water is a really good radiation shield, and nuclear weapons must execute an extremely precise series of actions to detonate.
By any measure, the war is going very badly for Russia. None of its claimed aims have been met, and the sinking adds to a long line of apparent military defeats.
This raises the question of what comes next if this kind of thing keeps happening. What does Russia do? Russia appears to have staked the farm on this operation. Can it afford anything less than total victory?
The Russian military has made a sizable investment in tactical nuclear weapons with allegedly 2,000 of them on hand [1]. These small weapons can be detonated in ways that produce minimal fallout but lots of destruction [2]:
> A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon which is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war.
With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
The world stage doesn’t really matter to Russia. It’s pretty clear that their propaganda and words are being aimed at Domestic audiences and allies. And unfortunately it’s working.
If they wanted to use tactical nukes they would have likely used it to take Kyiv. That they did not suggests they aren’t going to use them. Their goal now seems to be annexing/liberating parts of eastern Ukraine and bullying zelenski into neutrality.
I disagree. The "western world", that is Anglo-American centric world order, doesn't matter, but the Kremlin (not its ultra-nationalists calling for total war) knows it needs its ex-Soviet satelites plus China, India, etc.
So far, Western economic sanctions have hastened the decline of the use of the US dollar as a means of exchange, especially among Russia, India, and China.
This transition has severe short-term disruption for Russia, but a wartime (sorry, "military exercise" time) sacrifice is much easier for its citizens to accept.
>So far, Western economic sanctions have hastened the decline of the use of the US dollar as a means of exchange, especially among Russia, India, and China.
Western economic sanctions literally prevent Russian financial accounts containing US dollars from being accessed, right?
Framing this as a problem for the dollars is odd; it's hard to put my finger on why.
All of the economic data shows the dollar is significantly weakened though, not just due to this, but money printing and more. Meanwhile, the Ruble has mostly recovered to prewar levels already https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD
That doesn't tell the whole story of course, but it does appear we are witnessing a larger decoupling from the US Petrodollar standard that has been dominant for decades. That wouldn't be possible if the dollar weren't already weak, I don't think.
How about looking at the longer term performance of both currencies in terms of Swiss Francs, on xe.com. It looks to me quite clearly the opposite of your view.
That doesn't tell us what precisely you are mistaken about, and clearly many people have been agreeing with you for years and years, but something is off here.
I mean obviously India and China had to switch to other currencies to trade with Russia, cause Russia can not send or receive dollars and euros, but did it actually have any effect on India <-> China trade?
Has the US or NATO even threatened to go to war if Russia starts using tacnukes in Ukraine? I haven't seen any reports to suggest so, and I've been following the news on this war closely.
(The US has threatened more sanctions if Russia uses WMDs. That threat was in response to signs Russia was getting ready to use chemical weapons.)
OK, but even when detonated high enough above the ground that no appreciable fallout is produced, nukes are quite destructive. In fact, for many kinds of targets, cities being one, the altitude that maximizes destruction is high enough.
My uneducated guess is that the primary goal of the latest rhetoric about the possible use of chemical weapons is intended to make this more clear. If "we" (not the US yet, but other countries that are nearer) are signalling a readyness to respond kinetically if chemicals are used, surely the message is that nuclear would trigger an even greater response.
The UK has stated that "all options are in the table" if there is a chemical attack. The implication to me is that a kinetic response would then be a possibility, since everything else is basically being done at this point..
If a tactical nuke is used, then it is proof that escalation to nuclear weapons does not imply the global nuclear holocaust that has been acting as a deterrent.
It eliminates the logic of not going to war.
Not that "logic" has any connection to "appetite" or that excuses require it.
The elimination of large chunks of the Ukrainian army in a single detonation could lead to the stated goal of the invasion, which was regime change in Kyiv.
It would be a calculated risk that the response from the West would be much like it has been so far. We're not talking "The Day After," but more like a really big bomb and 2,000 more where that came from. The response to the invasion has been fragmented at best, and it's not unreasonable to think that would continue, especially given a county that has demonstrated a willingness to use nuclear weapons in battle.
I'm not saying this is likely, but more speculating as to what series of events would cause the scenario to play out.
There's no massive army operating in one place. It's a bunch of units running around in the woods, hills, towns and cities. Their largest forces are probably near the largest Russian forces, so sure, if they're willing to cull their own.
> The elimination of large chunks of the Ukrainian army in a single detonation could lead to the stated goal of the invasion, which was regime change in Kyiv.
I don't know, I'm quite worried. I don't think this is as cut and try as people make it out to be.
If Russia did launch a limited tactical strike on Ukraine, let's say super low-yield, honestly not much more than the MOABs we fired off in Iraq, is the USA really going to risk Berlin, or US cities getting vaporized to defend a non-NATO country?
> If Russia did launch a limited tactical strike on Ukraine, let's say super low-yield, honestly not much more than the MOABs we fired off in Iraq, is the USA really going to risk Berlin, or US cities getting vaporized to defend a non-NATO country?
The Baltics and Poland have already been pushing for NATO intervention because they want Russia checked because they don't want to be next; Article 5 is nice, but they’d rather stop Russia before it's on their land.
Nuking Ukraine, even a tiny little nuke, ratchets that up enormously and forces the US and Western European NATO powers to decide how to secure the eastern flank of the alliance.
Ukraine has also not yet attempted to hit Moscow (the city, not the ship) with missiles.
Once a nuclear bomb is used, a lot of gloves will come off, not just the Russian ones, and so far Ukraine appears to have a lot of extremely competent military partners and Russia has a reluctant Belarus.
What missiles capable of striking Moscow does Ukraine have? It's 500km from the closest point within Ukraine's borders. That's at the limit of long-range variants of Iskander, and Ukraine only has older stuff like Tochka.
Something can be a problem without it making sense to worry about it.
If Russia is using nukes, it becomes particularly absurd to continue to follow rules purported to appease them so they don't use nukes.
At best it's a transparently nonsensical excuse that conceals some other motivation.
When important people say they are against doing X, Y, or Z because of the risk of nuclear war, we can at least pretend they are serious as long as no nukes have been used yet.
But is there any other motivation they could have? There's one that seems very obvious to me, especially when I saw the reaction to Lindsey Graham's comments about regime change.
> With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
I believe any use of nuclear weapons would end Russia as a state, tactical or otherwise. They know this, why is why they resort to their conventional (although brutal) warfare methods.
They have been threatening nuclear weapons since the start of the war for various reasons, and thats because nuclear weapons _only_ work as a threat.
> What does Russia do? Russia appears to have staked the farm on this operation. Can it afford anything less than total victory?
I haven't been tracking developments very closely, but a minimal set of objectives would be claiming land up to the Donetsk/Luhansk oblast boundaries under DPR/LPR flags, which can be framed as a victory. Nukes are unlikely compared to simply changing what "victory" means.
They've destroyed the dams blocking the canals supplying Crimea, established a land bridge between Crimea and the Donbass and cut off most of Ukraine's black sea access. That's enough for a "victory" in terms of domestic propaganda (especially if they have footage of captured Azov battalion soldiers), which might be why they gave up on Kiev and are manoeuvring to solidify their gains in the east.
>With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
I've been thinking about this possibility for a while:
* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.
* The weapon is a dud.
I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!
Quote from the Moscow-based think tank, the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies:
“The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva cruiser, was indeed attacked by the Neptune anti-ship missiles from the coastline between Odessa and Mykolaiv,” it said, adding that a drone distracted the ship before the missiles hit. [emphasis mine]
As the ship was host to a S-300F system, roughly analogous to the US's AEGIS missile defense, getting distracted by a single drone sounds like it should be yet another black eye in this whole chain of events.
The analysis I saw noted that their air defense only had a 180-degree range. So a drone could be used to distract their defense, get it pointed away from the Neptune launcher, then fire from the ship's blind spot.
What if, just hypothetical, it was a swarm. (I don't think it was in this case).
I mean private persons can use drone swarms to put pictures on the night sky.
And while they are rout pre-programmed, it's not hard to use a template to very fast pre-program a drone swarm to fly some pseudo randomized pattern around a ship of which the position is known.
Yes, the drone was used to provide the precise ship's position to the missiles, and that allowed to almost immediately turn off the main radar of the missile launching battery, thus not allowing Russia to learn about its position and to strike back.
It is not even a speculation, it's a nonsense. Strike distance was between 50 and 150 km, ground based radar is useless against surface targets on that range. Neptune has an inertial+GPS navigation system with active radar on the final approach[1]. This is how anti-ship missiles are working.
To put things in perspective, this was the only capital ship being operated in the Black Sea (by any navy). Russia is the only Black sea power that fields cruisers (or even destroyers), and the only warships they now have officially on duty in the Black Sea are frigates or smaller. In terms of capital ships, this leaves them with one battlecruiser and two cruisers in operational condition, none of which have access to the Black Sea. (Their sole aircraft carrier is under repairs).
The only other loss of a warship of comparable size in combat since WW2 was the ARA General Belgrano, a slightly smaller cruiser sunk by a British sub in 1982. Losing a surface ship to enemy action is just not common these days. For a little more context, the only currently commissioned US naval vessel to have sunk an enemy ship is the USS Constitution, which sank the HMS Java (and more famously the HMS Guerriere) in 1812.
Turkey’s closed the Bosporus to military ships under the terms of the 1936 Montreux Convention. It’s not as if any Russian ships could even get into the Mediterranean anyway.
That is indeed interesting. But I would assume that the satellite coverage over the area is at least as good if not substantially better and that that data reaches Ukraine as fast as it can be collected and passed on.
The following paragraph in a Guardian article caught my eye:
“It is the most significant naval vessel to be sunk since the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano was torpedoed by a British submarine, HMS Conqueror in 1982. It is the first time Moscow has lost a cruiser since German planes sunk the Chervona Ukraina (Red Ukraine) in 1941 at Sevastopol – the same Crimean naval base which the Moskva was being towed towards when it sank.”
Just some notes.
It was a flagship of black sea fleet.
It had crew of approx 500.
After the event, russian ships started keeping greater distance from Ukraine.
Seeing as it sank many hours after it first caught fire, I’d imagine it was its own ammunition that caused the big fire (alongside fuel, lubricants etc).
What set its own ammunition on fire is the follow-up question. Seems like the Ukrainian missile, though after what we’ve seen, nothing would surprise me.
Any answer besides "Ukrainian missile" is going to be even more embarrassing for Russia. At least a missile strike is enemy action. Any alternative explanation for the sinking of your flagship is just incompetence.
Fires on ships are very harsh and dangerous environments. The US recently lost an entire carrier while in drydock with the maximum resources available, not even out at sea. Once it gets going, it's extraordinarily difficult to get under control.
That fire was set by sabotage and the saboteur disabled many of the fire control systems before setting the fire[0]. Embarrassing for sure, but not quite maximum resources.
Damage control was turned off because of maintenance.[0] A single 19-year-old junior sailor being able to single-handedly cause billions of dollars of damage in normal conditions would have been a very bad design flaw itself, anyway, but from what I've read, that wasn't the case here.
Anyway, until the trial occurs, I wouldn't be so hasty to judge whether the sailor was actually responsible for deliberately setting the fire, or just the scapegoat for a multifaceted failure.
To be fair, the ship was considered to be not worth repairing, but did not sink. It could have been repaired. But your point is accurate that it in drydock and it is embarrassing that the fire couldn't be put out sooner.
Any insight as to why fires on ships are hard to control? I hear it and believe. On the other hand I've been inside of military ships before and they are partitioned, with lots of metal doors to section off and contain damage, so I don't understand the difficulty.
Flammable materials like paint, lubricants, furniture, sailors are quite common inside those metal rooms. I have read of cases where the fires were so hot as to cause combustion through the bulkheads by radiant heat, regardless of the compartments being shut to section off the fires. The weight of water from firefighting efforts can cause stability issues, especially if it starts to slosh and compound any damage-related listing.
On top of these reasons, the segmented and compartmented nature of ships tends to intensify and concentrate heat. The segments that can burn, will burn hotter, much hotter, especially if they can establish a direction of airflow.
Flashover is always a major concern, everything emits flammable gasses nowadays when heated to sufficient temperature, and ship fires absolutely reach sufficient temperature readily.
I highly encourage everyone to watch this video, this is not just important on this but it's really important to understand the rapidity of fire progression in general. It's worth a watch from the start but I'm going to link to the point where it gets colorful. Imagine this is all taking place in a steel blast furnace with locked bulkheads - it's literally a matter of 30 seconds between "my trash can fire is out of control" and "everything in the room is literally on fire".
Literally in this same thread people are referencing a well-known case of sabotage on an American ship not that long ago. Said to have caused severe damage.
On a Russian ship, though, it's as absurd an idea as space aliens?
I don't wish to debate hypotheticals, because I generally am not certain about uncertain things.
On a meta level, though, I am very curious where other people get their certainty from. I would like to hear more about how you identify paranoid fantasies.
On a Russian ship currently actively involved in a war that was claimed to have been hit by a missile that stands off-shore way over the horizon yes, sabotage is just as absurd as space aliens.
>On a Russian ship currently actively involved in a war that was claimed to have been hit by a missile that stands off-shore way over the horizon yes, sabotage is just as absurd as space aliens.
I don't understand what you are saying at all.
Sabotage can't happen during a war?
Or sabotage can't happen on a ship that wasn't hit by a missile?
Or sabotage can't happen on a ship that was hit by a missile?
Or sabotage can't happen to Russians at all?
Or sabotage by Russians can't happen on one of their ships?
> Seeing as it sank many hours after it first caught fire
I may have missed some info, but I think the jury is still out on that. The Ukrainians announced the sinking a day before the Russians did. At least one of them must have been incorrect, I would guess for propaganda reasons.
My money would be on the Russians lying. An Ukrainian lie would be very embarrassing if Russia subsequently invited some journalists over to look at the ship.
The cruise missile tubes are right there on the deck; I don't doubt they exploded after getting hit with a Neptune or two. Neptunes are only rated to take out 5k tonnage ships, and Moskva is 12k tons. I bet you Moskva's own ordnance exploding after being hit by Ukraine's missiles is what actually killed it. Still a point for Ukraine for sure.
It was exactly the ship in that famous phrase of being sent very offensively and very far by the defenders of Zmeiny island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_warship,_go_fuck_yours...) which has become a Ukrainian battle cry since then, and looks like the ship has ultimately reached the prescribed destination.
Interesting that the ship was hit by the Ukraine developed missiles which Ukraine put in service just about a year ago. Looking at this war (and compare it to the fighting in 2014-2015) it is very noticeable how much a progress Ukraine has made in the last 8 years and in particular absorbing all the new developments in the technology while Russia in many areas hasn't progressed since 1945. I see that is a perfect illustration of constant learning and adaptation vs. stagnation.
Anyway, for anybody who likes Odessa and hates its shelling by those Russian Navy ships - the video of the burning "Moskva" with the wonderfully matching occasion soundtrack "Moscow" by GenghisKhan https://twitter.com/i/status/1514481957962657794
> Looking at this war (and compare it to the fighting in 2014-2015) it is very noticeable how much a progress Ukraine has made in the last 8 years and in particular absorbing all the new developments in the technology while Russia in many areas hasn't progressed since 1945.
Even worse than that for Russia. The "Moskova" was created in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.
The warship itself was a creation of the USSR, but has more to do with Ukraine's manufacturing prowess than present-day Russia.
Russia wants to pretend that the USSR's history is Russia and Russia's alone. That's why Russia wants to erase Ukrainian history. But this war is proving that Ukrainian contributions to the old USSR's power was mighty and cannot be ignored.
------
The mighty warship was created by Ukraine, and brought down by Ukrainian missiles. The story here is really about how Russia has forgotten their Slavic brother's contributions to the USSR.
EDIT: It is quite possible that Ukrainians knew some kind of weakness to the ship that they exploited during the attack.
Please don’t call Ukraine Russia’s slavic brother. That’s how russians justify the war - “we are protecting our brothers from the nazis”. Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Let’s not perpetuate russian propaganda.
I recognize its Russia's propaganda, but I enjoy corrupting their propaganda / words into other uses.
There is truth in this matter: USSR was composed of many modern nations. This whole "Moskva ship sinks" thing is almost entirely Ukrainian, historically speaking. Ukrainian-built ship, brought down with Ukrainian missiles, with the Russians renaming the ship to Moskva to try to "steal" its way into history.
I find this entire situation deliciously ironic for the Russians. It really shows how much of a paper-tiger they are, and how much Russia is trying to steal the USSR's name and history for themselves.
> The warship itself was a creation of the USSR, but has more to do with Ukraine's manufacturing prowess than present-day Russia.
It is indeed the product of USSR, which had integrated supply chain and R&D. Very likely some components of it were manufactured in Russia. Ukraine alone would not be able to build and maintain such ship due to budget and resource constraints, but Russia has rebuilt its capabilities in XXI century — their military industrial complex can maintain, upgrade and build such ships. I doubt though they will commission a replacement any time soon, since they are actively building lots of smaller vessels.
>EDIT: It is quite possible that Ukrainians knew some kind of weakness to the ship that they exploited during the attack.
not really. If they could they would hit the cruiser's anti-ship missiles - that would sent the ship immediately down instead of the whole fire/towing story. You just can't always hit that precisely from like 30 miles distance coming at transonic speed, and who knows what defense measures were activated by the ship.
If anything, the weakness exploited here is the Russian poor state of combat readiness. The ship was mostly hanging around there for more than a month. All that time they were supposed to man the radars and keep CIWS/etc. combat ready - no way for Russian Navy. Maintaining combat readiness is a big issue even for shorter time frames - for example in 2008 while guarding the assault ships convoy on the way to Georgia "Moskva" was hit by the very brave and brazen unexpected night attack by Georgian small ships. Fortunately for "Moskva" back then the Georgians didn't have any weapons except small caliber artillery (it is really hard to imagine the courage of those Georgians to perform such an attack - just 4 small ships against that overwhelmingly large Russian Navy force. One of those Georgian ships was sunk by Russian anti-ship missile).
Its a cruiser. Which means the ship was loaded with anti-missile missiles, anti-missile RADAR, and anti-missile CIWS.
The fact remains that the Ukrainians killed an anti-missile cruiser, with... a missile. That's impressive. Something horribly wrong has happened to the Russian anti-missile defense systems.
That suggests that the Ukrainians know about a weakness to the Russian missile defense systems... a blindspot where the RADAR wouldn't pickup enemy missiles perhaps? In any case, maybe its not so surprising, Ukrainians built the ship after all.
What I was hearing earlier is the old anti-missile RADAR that was in use on that ship was not capable of dealing with targets approaching from multiple sides at once, and so the Ukrainians flew a UAV on one side to effectively "distract" it, while the Neptunes struck it on the other side.
> That suggests that the Ukrainians know about a weakness to the Russian missile defense systems... a blindspot where the RADAR wouldn't pickup enemy missiles perhaps? In any case, maybe its not so surprising, Ukrainians built the ship after all.
One of the weaknesses of missile defense systems, is they can only engage a small number of targets at a time.
If you knew the Moskva could engage (say) 12 incoming missiles at a time, you fire 24 all at the same time.
There was some articles on it a few years back, which of course I can't find now. It was regarding virtual wargames, where one commander handily won by, basically, firing everything all at once at the start of the game.
> If you knew the Moskva could engage (say) 12 incoming missiles at a time, you fire 24 all at the same time.
That's the sort of thing that's a classified secret.
None of us know how many missiles the Moskva could handle. But the Ukrainians knew, and fired (at least) +1 missile over its capacity.
Ukrainians are savvy, but they don't have enough missiles to really be throwing "eeeh, maybe 20 at the same time is enough??". Whatever battle plan they did here and implemented was surely based on their intelligence... stuff even USA wouldn't be privy to.
I saw elsewhere that an upgrade was proposed but the budget for it was denied...
I guess it is just a matter of reading the proposal, figure out what needed upgrading, and considering that to be the weakness you can exploit.
An analogy would be finding out the castle you want to conquer was supposed to have a rear gate repaired but the repairs were postponed... it would be quite obvious to attack that rear gate.
>The warship itself was a creation of the USSR, but has more to do with Ukraine's manufacturing prowess than present-day Russia.
>The mighty warship was created by Ukraine
The independent Ukraine with all its "manufacturing prowess" was unable to finish its sister ship Ukraina for 30 years. It got almost sold to Russia in 2010.
>brought down by Ukrainian missiles
With a tinsy bit of help from the NATO radars and surveillance drones.
If you don't have money or strategic reason to finish a ship, or arm it you don't finish it.
Frankly, that kind of ship has no place in a Ukrainian fleet, so to spend billions on it would make no sense. Ukraine as a province of Russian Empire, for that Empire - yes. But not for Ukraine proper.
That ship is designed to take on American fleet in Black Sea and elsewhere.
Ukraine just needs to a small / fast Black Sea fleet and possibly a few micro subs etc..
This is it really. We have no idea how much American / outside involvement going on.
It may not even have been a Ukrainian-made missile. Maybe it was a Harpoon, but they're just saying Ukrainian because NATO doesn't want the public credit.
Russia had 100's of advisors in North Vietnam during the Cold War I don't see why the US shouldn't have support units all around E. Ukraine.
We pretty much know that NATO is helping them immensely with battlefield overwatch there are awacs and other air assets 24/7 in the air around the borders of Ukraine. Harpoon is not yet delivered and the operators are still in training as are the ones for the switchblade system so it was most definitely a Neptun.
Makes me wonder however, where Ukraine's (edit)Neptune missiles where all this time and why Ukraine is getting Harpoon missiles from UK if they have their own.
Harpoons also carry a warhead about 50% larger than the Neptune, increasing the range of targets they can effectively hit. The Neptune is only designed for targets of 5,000 tons, compared to the Moskva being over 10,000. Whether it was a lucky hit on a/the magazine compartment(s), poor damage control, or combinations there of, good job Ukraine and the Neptune.
It’s called Neptune. It only entered service last year, so they probably don’t have many, and it’s possible early Russian strikes may have suppressed the batteries that were operational at the start of the war.
The Economist [0] (paywalled) says the factories making the Nautilus missiles have been heavily bombarded and that the Ukrainian military doesn’t seem to have many of these missiles. I guess they were just very carefully choosing their target and the time to strike?
Very common.. US Ticonderoga class cruisers were first commissioned in 1983, so they're all ~40 years old. We're in the process of decommissioning some of them now, but many will likely still be sailing in 2040. Often times older ships get retrofit with the latest defense/offense capabilities and new propulsion if there's something they'd benefit from.
Ohio and Los Angeles class submarines were mostly built in the 1980s as well and many / most (?) are still active.
Otherwise, the oldest active ship in normal duty appears to be the amphibious command ship USS Blue Ridge (1970), the oldest carrier the USS Nimitz (1975), and the oldest submarine the USS Ohio (1981).
Native Russian speaker here: translation „military“ is correct, because this is how it is positioned in official Russian sources - an operation conducted by military forces (the term operation comes from FSB, meaning that according to Russian propaganda it is more like police or counter-terrorism operation).
Slavic speaker here, “Военная” looks like the adjective derived from the “war” noun. So not “war”, but kind of like, “war-ful operation”, or “combat operation”.
It is indeed derived from „war“, but here it has different meaning, so „military“ is correct translation.
You would use „war operation“ as translation if this operation was an episode of war, but according to Russian propaganda it is not.
Combat operation would be translated as «боевая операция».
Two questions. US ships usually have phalanx defensive systems for anti missle deterrents. I’ve always heard these are pretty effective as long as their active and not overwhelmed.
Does the Russian navy not possess these? Or do they, and it just didn’t work well?
The Phalanx has an effective range of just under a mile. Even a subsonic surface-skimming missile could easily cover that distance in around 5 seconds. So it's very much a defense of last resort. Missiles should ideally be intercepted by anti-missile systems with much longer ranges.
Russia uses a similar system, the Kashtan CIWS. This article (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61103927) indicates that the Moskva did have one installed, though I don’t know why it didn’t help in this case.
Drones are reported to have been used to harass the vessel and keep its air defences distracted before the missiles were fired from a hidden battery near Odessa. At least two of the missiles are then reported to have struck the ship – causing a massive explosion and inferno as they are believed to have detonated one of Moskova’s exposed deckside missile tubes.
Patrick Lancaster is one of the few people who do journalism on the ground in the Donbass region. He shows clear shell damage to civilian targets and interviews people and they say that they are being shelled by Ukrainians.
Even if we were to take that as 100% truth, how would it make Ukraine the instagator? Russia invaded the Donbas region years ago and there has been an ongoing shooting war (albeit a largely stalemated one) ever since. But Russia is still responsible for starting the war.
The current war did not start in a vacuum. Who backed the Maidan revolution in 2014? Who backed the regime change that just happened in Pakistan? Who keeps fighting for regime changes all over the Middle East leading to the deaths of millions? Who is going to be held accountable for all that needless loss of life?
It's an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, waste. The world isn't a nice place, a fact that most of us in the West can happily ignore most of the time.
This comment is at negative 4, apparently a number of people don't agree that war is a waste.
The labor that went to make the ship was wasted, the pollution caused by manufacturing was a needless waste, the materials could have been used for another less wasteful purpose. And unless the ship is raised and recycled, it will just rust in oblivion on the bottom of the black sea.
I should have said dimensions instead of sides. I was not implying equality. But he loss of lives even to the production of war machines and their ultimate destruction is waste of the earth, of humanity and our collective time.
Even the effort spent on this conversation is a waste perpetrated by Putin, in no way should this statement be taken as an insult against you. That is not my intent. The waste of war is a cascading fractal.
Inexpensive autonomous weapons of war are here. The cost to kill for less than a $1 a soul is within everyone's reach.
The war in the Ukraine will have larger implications than WWI or the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Furthermore, for each piece of equipment lost, resources will be allocated to replace it, and then some. And many other countries have decided to increase their military budgets as a result of this conflict.
Think of it as a unfortunate and probably necessary side-effect of life.
Lack of war requires consistency and coherency between all parties to the degree they see themselves as 'one' (politically, economically, etc.) and have the same goals and needs, and are in agreement on how to fulfill them - or an overarching authority to enforce behavior.
For example, Civil war generally happens when an existing entity starts splitting into different political factions because the existing group can no longer agree on goals, needs, and how to fulfill them. Think of this like an animal getting cancer, where the animal is a country. When the countries central authority (think immune system) no longer is strong enough to suppress/control dissent.
War between countries happens when one country sees more benefit capturing/conquering/etc. another country than not. Like an animal killing or eating another animal for food, or territory, or just because.
In any real environment that is constantly changing, it is very difficult to have any sizable group that is consistent, happy, and has the same identity enough that they'll all individually sacrifice when necessary to make the larger group still work. Trying to do it globally with the current human condition would not be pretty.
This is especially true when you consider that all individual members within a group are susceptible to individual pathologies themselves.
Depending on how you define these groups, either we're talking individual countries, collections of countries/allied coalitions, or individual sub-states.
Almost always, some combination of 1) the group expends massive energy removing/silencing dissent, or 2) the group expends massive energy changing, with who benefits constantly changing too. Occasionally, 3) political-social identity aligns well and everyone sees it as a property of their reality, so #1 or #2 aren't necessary (very much). All existing large countries spend a lot of time and treasure on #1 though.
Think of it like the bodies immune system, with #3 being 'a very clean environment'.
So either you end up with a large political entity which wields significant power within it's borders (or is blessed with a very consistent and happy socio-economic identity for a time) to crush dissent, or has a lot of socio-economic 'churn', which rises or falls together (ahem, USSR, CCP, USA, EU, etc.), or many small ones.
Either way, these entities MUST push/pull/defend their interests - which fundamentally always don't align perfectly with others due to their varying socio-economic states and resources - including wars from time to time. The alternative is starvation from a competitor. The only alternative would be to have a larger authoritarian capability which enforces the lack of war and stasis on these various fronts. Drawing an analogy of a world like that to a zoo isn't hard.
That larger authoritarian capability would fundamentally need to be more powerful than any single actor or coalition of actors, or eventually it would be removed or overthrown via war.
'World Peace' is not just a pipe dream, it's a fantasy that it is ever anything we'd want - it would require global stasis, enforced by some kind of extreme global authoritarianism that would keep the 'have nots' in the have-not pile, and the have's in the have pile forever. Or everyone to always be happy with each other, even if that means some of them starve to death due to lack of resources (extreme brainwashing?).
World War sucks too of course, since too rapid change, churn, and turmoil sucks for everyone with massive blood spilled and treasure lost probably far in excess of what normally would occur in a bit more peaceful set of changes. It would be the natural equivalent of a massive famine or the like.
> 'World Peace' is not just a pipe dream, it's a fantasy that it is ever anything we'd want - it would require global stasis, enforced by some kind of extreme global authoritarianism that would keep the 'have nots' in the have-not pile, and the have's in the have pile forever. Or everyone to always be happy with each other, even if that means some of them starve to death due to lack of resources (extreme brainwashing?).
I really do not follow your argument.
Turning it around world peace requires authoritarian enforcement of global inequality.
The argument as presented is a very depressing outlook on humanity. My personal experience is the exact opposite. Wars (and other social chaos) are organised by a small minority. The vast overwhelming majority of us want peace
and how do you propose to identify and eliminate that small minority exactly?
Near as I can tell, every system creates a small minority that drives it, and near as I can tell it’s a fundamental requirement of all human organizational systems for them to be effective.
The scale we are at, everything happens through systems of some kind.
The small number of folks involved are either de jure (by rule) or de facto (in fact) the ones who make the actual decisions required for the organization to respond, move forward, act.
If this is true, then ‘the small number of people organizing the social chaos’ are fundamental to the entire system. Removing them may change things for a time, but not for very long, and may (often if you look at the historic of revolutions) replace them with even worse.
I don’t think it’s depressing, any more than recognizing that zebras get eaten by leopards.
Not recognizing or avoiding it just leads to further chaos and damage. It would not help anyone (including zebras or leopards) to put guards out on the Serengeti to ‘enforce the peace’ for instance. At least not for very long.
Why is there no image of the sinking ship? Because at sea in war zone? Wouldn't Ukrainian army want to show image from their drone after hit? New satellite image coming soon?
Apparently it sank during a storm so probably getting visual confirmation to share was though. The drone was used to distract the radar, probably got shot down.
(Publicly accessible) satellite images weren't immediately available because of cloudy conditions, from what I read on news reports about the incident.
You're right, TASS is a Russian state press agency transmitting official propaganda but what this is an example of is Russians admitting their own loss. It rarely happens in this war, which makes this all the more interesting.
Because the fact that it is relayed by a pro-putin newspaper is significant.
This was is also an information war, so analysing who reports the news is almost as important as what is reported.
TASS is a news agency, like Reuters or AP, not a newspaper.
While it's significant, it's also propaganda. At the very least, WP has a policy to maintain a neutral point of view and to only put things on the site which can be reliably sourced.
We should be sensitive to the power of a site like this in relaying harmful propaganda.
> The missile cruiser "Moskva" sank while being towed to its destination in a storm due to damage to the hull received due to a fire from the detonation of ammunition. [Translated]
So many different ways to avoid saying that a Ukrainian missile sank it.
A missile cruiser is going to have a lot of hypergolics on board. If you don’t know what you’re doing that’s an easy way to blow yourself up, like what happened with the submarine Kursk.
So it’s plausible that it wasn’t the Ukrainians, but then again it would surely be more honourable to get blown up by a Ukrainian missile than by your own incompetence. So if Ukraine is falsely claiming credit they should be taking it as a propaganda godsend.
There were a lot of reports many hours before the russians acknowledged anything that the Ukrainians did it. From many different sources. Then there was the SOS captured by hundreds of regular users on the websdr source. Also, there was a captured conversion by the russian military discussing how it was done – Bayraktar took out the ship's radar and took attention away from the missiles that were launched from the shore.
Everything fits, there's no reason to believe russian propaganda now. They are just trying to save their non-existent face.
That’s probably right. It just sounds so outlandish to make up a lie to make yourself look bad.
Maybe there’s something about Russian military culture that the rest of us don’t understand, where being killed by the enemy is a much bigger loss of face than killing yourself.
Their current war is based on the propaganda of Russian superiority over Ukrainians, military superiority specifically since Russians built their whole modern ideology on winning WWII. Admitting that Ukrainians are capable of anything is therefore undercutting this foundational national idea.
First claims of missile strike was from Ukrainian side way before even radio monitoring OSINT kicked in. So it seems that Ukrainians knew about that cigarette fire on the ship the moment it started 50-150 km from the shore and reported it as their war victory. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Good point. From what I can find their missiles are indeed solid as well. But they do have hydrogen peroxide torpedoes, which could have been the culprit, as with Kursk.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information presented as fact, either intentionally or unintentionally. Disinformation is a subset of misinformation, that which is deliberately deceptive.
Yes, well in my opinion, speaking as a published researcher in mis and disinformation: I have seen better definitions, usually something to the effect where it’s false information that runs contrary to known fact at the time of the claims being made. At the time, they thought the personnel were dead.
I'm struggling to parse what you're saying: are you saying that's the definition for misinformation or disinformation? Because misinformation is a very old word that just means incorrect information [0] that sounds a lot like relatively new word [1] disinformation that means intentionally spreading misinformation.
EDIT: Just to circle back here and really make my point clear. It appears we agree that the claim is 'misinformation' because it is incorrect. But that is not what you stated in the GP comment (which is what caused me to point out the mis/dis distinction in the first place)
Disinformation is where the information being propagated is done with the intent to deceive.
Misinformation is whereby the information being propagated is not done with the intent to deceive BUT it does run counter to what is widely known as true.
The soldiers being alive, whilst being announced as dead was not done with intent to deceive (presumably), and did not run counter to widely known information, therefore it was neither disinformation nor misinformation. It was simply incorrect due to the chaos of war. Not all incorrect statements are “misinformation”.
Your definition of misinformation runs counter to almost every source I can find.
If you have a published work that makes it more clear maybe that would help, but it seems wrong that “widely known” is the litmus test, especially when, by definition, the status of those people was not widely known at the time.
It seems like your definition of “misinformation” is very susceptible to the “appeal to authority” fallacy and therefore makes it a not very useful word (i.e. does one Russian general saying something incorrect make the information not misinformation?)
EDIT: sorry to hammer the edit feature, but to that end, if more than 50% of humans believe that God punishes those who sin, does saying “God did x to punish y group” then not equate to misinformation?
Not directly related, but I find Safari’s automatic translation invaluable for following this war - because I can read the “other side’s” media instead of looking for “our media” to pick up a story.
The one built into Telegram is useful too, but terribly unreliable. And boy, what’s happening there… Russians are getting increasingly aware of the situation, and they are calling for blood. And I don’t mean (just) Ukrainian blood.
A cruiser is distracted by an unmanned drone and then taken out by one or more guided missiles, resulting in the most significant loss of a naval vessel in decades. War is technology, more so than the work most of us do.
There was also severe weather, and the Neptunes are sea-skimming. Sounds like the Ukranians waited for the perfect shot, as there aren't many of the things.
This will be (should be) a wake up call for the rest of the fleet and keep them much further from the shore, which in turn has impact on the amount of air control the Russians can exert on the southern parts of Ukraine as apparently they have been leaning on navy vessels to provide SAM cover.