Russia Loses Last Black Sea Missile Ship
Russia Loses Last Black Sea Missile Ship
Putin urges increased protection for the fleet against long-range missiles, after Ukraine eliminates another missile ship in Sevastopol, forcing Moscow to move the fleet to mainland Russia.
According to the open-source intelligence (OSINT) site Molfar, Ukraine has sunk or damaged nearly 60 ships of the Russian Navy.
How, for fuck sake, Russia managed to lose 60 ships to a country that has NO NAVY ?!?
Holy! Shit!
Because it is easier to deny your enemy terrain than it is to keep it.
And Ukraine does have a navy. It is just made up out of very angry remote controlled low observable high speed boats that carry a ton of explosives and don't have to come home because they want to hug your ship and make it sad.
This is a whole paradigm shift, and it's not new.
So you have a billion dollar aircraft carrier. How many million dollar missiles can you shoot at it before it sinks? Generally, it's not a thousand.
Same deal all down the line. A tank is fantastically more expensive than an antitank rocket.
Just the way the world works. You can iterate and improve a small munition way faster than a huge ship.
That is the meme, but when I talk to military people they point out Russian incompetence. They do not believe NATO ships are that vulnerable. Ukraine is using a lot of tanks, but because they are using them according to good military doctrine they are not taking nearly as many losses. Note that Ukraine and Russia both got their tank instructions from the old Soviet playbook not a NATO book (though Ukraine as had NATO training as well), there is nothing about using a tank well Russia shouldn't know, but they are failing to follow their own book on how to use tanks.
It's not that simple. If it was the American military wouldn't be effective because manpads, javelins, and torpedos would have taken out all the aircraft, tanks and ships.
The military is a fighting unit and protects itself very well. At least, it does it it's working right. When you have a military being destroyed by a vault interior opponent, it's because they are fucking to their military...or someone is trying to occupy Afghanistan.
This shift happened in the 1930's. Land based naval bombers prevented the Germans from operating surface ships anywhere near the English coast. Japanese carriers routinely ferried bombers to support naval landings. And of course the US built their entire Pacific fleet around carriers.
A landmass isn't anything more than a giant, unsinkable, carrier in naval strategy.
Tanks aren't about to go out of style, though. The goal is to not let anti-tank weapons in range of your tanks - as it has been since WWII, just moreso as time goes on. Maybe ditto for ships that aren't Soviet rustbuckets crewed with drunks, although I think even that is in question these days.
Also, funny enough, the average weapon is getting more complicated and expensive as time goes on. At least for the West, a skilled soldier continues to cost more than whatever they operate, so survivability is worth it even if it means less volume.
Marine drones. Basically remote control exploding speed boats, some with rockets on them. They basically attack like hyaenas bringing down a zebra.
I think it was a rhetorical question...
That question was not a question but more like a "Lol, world's second greatest navy lost to a country with no navy, lmao"
A kamikaze hyena
Ukraine has a navy. The navy just -- for the moment -- doesn't have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.
while true.. in alpha male mil circle a navy is AIR CRAFT CARRIER, NUCLEAR SUBMARINES, DESTROYER, AMPHIBIOUS LANDING SHIP etc
which is ironic considering Ukraine did take out some destroyers or corvettes or whatever without a "navy"
That is genuinely amazing, losing 60 ships to a country without an actually big navy. Invading Ukraine to have warm waters for your navy, and you still lose.
This is Russia's "don't invade Russia in winter". Don't launch a naval assault on Ukraine, apparently.
To be pedantic, they have a navy, just no large ships in said navy.
You really gotta count how many cheap boat Ukrainians lost trying to sink 60 ships. Ofc they (suicide boats) are much, much, much cheaper and cause no crew casualties being remotely controlled. So it is super cost effective, And most importantly safe, but if you count pure numbers i am sure Ukrainian losses of those boats are massively higher.
But the fact that russians can still use their missles ships to launch missiles is a big issue. Even if there are fewer of those ships, its not 0 :(... Yet
In the time it would take the current Russian defense industry to build and deploy one of these new missile ships, Ukraine could build and deploy a thousand of these little RC Boat Bombs from 1/1000th the cost.
They're literally making these boats out of rebuilt engines and 3d printed parts. Russia won't recover from this war in our lifetime as long as they embrace Putin style leadership.
Oh sunk! I wanted to try and find it. So they probably know where it is then. Okay 👍.
That's impressive.
I'm now wondering how fucking useless the Russian navy would be fighting a nation that also had a navy.
For an amusing read on how well their navy did against the Japanese, in 1905, check out Battle of Tsushima.
The Russians lost 5.045 and 21 ships (more captured and/or damaged). Japan lost 117 and 3 torpedo boats.
Here's an entertaining video on their journey to Japan.
There's also the longer form Drachinifel version
I don't think Russia has ever had a positive naval experience in anger lmao
There's a long history of the Russian Navy being humiliated. I don't think there's been any positive stories at all.
They didn't suffer any losses during Operation Preying Mantis
He [Putin] also said that the fleet is being replenished with new ships, equipped with modern weapons, and that domestic shipbuilders will hand over more than 40 vessels to the Defense Ministry this year.
Sure, do that.
Is 40 a lot? That seems quite ambitious but I have no idea how long it takes to build one.
Edit: Russia's built ~16 of these Karakurt-class ships since 2018 lol. So no, it won't be 40 missle boats.
Russia's built ~16 of these Karakurt-class ships since 2018 lol.
Meanwhile the Netherlands alone has 24, and the U.S. has over 600.
Russia's high tech side of their military industrial complex is incredibly weak compared to the old USSR days, and even their low tech side is struggling.
Depends. 40 RC sail boats? No, not very impressive. 40 supercarriers? Yes, very impressive.
At this point, I wouldn't put it past Russia to claim 40 RC sail boats as "new ships in the fleet".
No way they're replacing the bigger ones, like the Moskva. That one was built in a yard that's now in Ukraine, and Russia hasn't gotten that part back. Even if they did, Ukraine hadn't really maintained it.
It was also launched in 1979, and they haven't built anything that size since the USSR fell.
They'd have to rebuild the infrastructure needed to build the ship. These losses are irreplaceable.
iirc they did build one for Admiral Kuznetsov. It also left that dry dock not that long ago so it's open now. They're having trouble funding anything larger than the Adm. Gorshkov class though. Which is about 50 meters shorter. So even if they did decide to throw down a 180M long guided missile cruiser they wouldn't be able to fund it. In fact they've been trying to get something called the Lidar class going and the Russian Navy is just like, "Nyet."
I'd be willing to take a wild guess and say that at least 30+ of those new vessels are small support boats.
We put Kalashnikov on Sergey's rowboat, Ukraine cowers before invincible Russian engineering!
Well, they seem to be replenishing their submersible fleet in the Black Sea with lots of new under water vessels: for every ship they lose they get a new sub...
Ships are expensive as hell and drones are comparatively cheap. Missiles too. Ships also take a month off Sundays to build in very obvious places because manufacturing lots of big stuff is pretty obvious to any intelligence analyst posting attention.
Yeah, except that per the Montreux Convention, because Turkey has recognized that Russia is “at war”, Russia is not allowed to transit any warships through the Bosporus Strait, so any new combat ship they make has to be made in the Black Sea.
Good thing Putin is just as confused as whoever the next US President will be. Good thing these guys are in charge of the nukes.
Are they building them in the black sea?
Fuck russia
ohh NO
ANYWAY
I know they're saying Ukraine sunk those ships......but the headline makes it sound like Putin is saying "Now where did I put that military ship? Was it in the baltic sea? Did I harbor it in the Atlantic? Oh who can keep track of these things???"
There's this one time my brother was playing some Total War (I think?) And he told me he lost his army. I gave my condolences and he said "No, I lost lost it. I don't remember where I placed them and now I can't find them."
Yu zunk my buttlezhip!
Sounds more like: You drank my bottleshop.
You love to see it! Every little bit helps.
Russian Propaganda: "Our Glorious Nation has acquired a brand new submersible to help its fight against NATO in Ukraine"
We've mined this very specific location with very powerful ordinance!
Fuck yeah Ukraine. We love to see it :)
Sink, motherfucker.
Hey, Russian Warship, go fuck yourself.
How big is the black sea... can't we just give them missiles to cover it?
They have missiles that cover the Black Sea. We could give them the tomahawk but we're only just now getting AShM versions back out to our own fleet. The best we could probably do is support their production of Neptune missiles. Which are really actually pretty good. It puts them in a pretty small club as far anti-ship missiles go. Which is probably at least part of why the Russians can't keep anything afloat in the Black Sea.
It's an area of 168,500 sq mi.
A patriot battery can cover 300 sq mi.
The operative measurement is flight distance. Which, with a dogleg to avoid Crimean Anti-Air sites would max out around 680Mi. Neptune flies 621 miles at max range.
They already have the Black Sea covered.
Meanwhile US defense contractors are probably busy developing bolt on CIWS for their littoral combat ships.
"A close-in weapon system (CIWS) is a point-defense weapon system for detecting and destroying short-range incoming missiles and enemy aircraft which have penetrated the outer defenses, typically mounted on a naval ship. Nearly all classes of larger modern warships are equipped with some kind of CIWS device."
interesting point - I don't know of any russian CIWS systems (and boy do they have 'em!) meeting success vs. drone attacks. If their systems were capable of taking them out I think they'd have crowed about any shoot downs, but what I see is a russian navy at the bottom of the sea.
Yes, add USVs to the treat list.
The type of threats these things pose are a lot more similar to missiles than they are to a Rib filled with goons. Low observable and fast, close to shore means that a high level of automation might be needed. Aka.. a ciws.
And why I think there might be add ons, is the type of threat is new and existing systems might not suffice. Magura is armored a plane or missile is not.
Wut?
That the US and her defense contractors see this and are very busy developing solutions against this very potent threat against their own ships. Since the rest of the Wold als sees this.. and that includes some people/groups/countries that might want to sink some American ships. If anything this shows how dangerous Iran could make the Persian gulf for American ships.
Magura proves how vulnerable ships can be, especially against modern wolf packs.
So I hypothesize that they will come up with some form of "after market" installable Close In Weapon System (aka.. a bolt on CIWS) to deal with these kind of threats.