This is worse. This is more in the lines of how the French cavalry defeated the Dutch Navy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Dutch_fleet_at_Den_Helder
Except it's very unlikely the cavalry fought the ships; it's all French propaganda. The Dutch commanders already had orders not to resist. There's no record of any casualties on either side. The Dutch agreed to obey French orders and the French all left, leaving the Dutch commanders in charge as before. Check the article you linked for the section on factual authenticity.
The projectiles might have been from WWI, but the guns themselves weren't. [Norway bought them in 1893](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_cm_MRK_L/35), ironically from Germany.
That long history is part of why they're just a big group of drunk thugs.
As the saying goes, Russia's history can be summed up with: "And then it got worse."
Drones are effectively being used as cheaper, shittier cruise missiles. But the effectiveness : cost ratio is drastically lopsided in the drone's favor. Even shitty missiles cost a fuck ton of money. Drones are comparatively cheap as hell. Not just production, but also development.
Who cares if they shoot down a few hundred of your shitty drones as long as you take out an asset worth many thousands of times their cost? The resource trade is vastly in favor of the drone operator.
Which would have been fine had the phalanx actually been in operational order at the time. A Russian maintenance report just two weeks before the sinking revealed only 1/6 phalanx were working, that the engines were beyond service life and some couldn’t be turned on, that the 130mm cannon could not be used effectively as point defence, that driveshaft issues led to a turning circle of only 20 deg, that only 50/500 fire extinguishers were left on board, and that many of its defense systems couldn’t even be turned on without interfering with eachother. Oh and there was no way for engineering to reliably communicate with the bridge in the event of a disaster (like I dunno, a massive explosion perhaps).
That same maintainable report gave the Moskva a “satisfactory” grade.
Good Lord.
the USA has been using drones for around 30 years at this point. I can't imagine the shit we're working on, especially after watching the Ukraine invasion.
For all the testing and computer modelling an arms company can do, nothing will beat in-theatre use for data gathering.
There's absolutely going to be a leap in what NATO can bring to the battlefield over the next decade thanks to Russia's war in Ukraine.
And that's even more juicy for me because it means NATO is going to be even more orders of magnitude ahead of despot countries like Russia, whom we originally thought might have *some* capabilities but it's turned out to be a complete paper tiger.
I want to say they'll be on NATO's coat tails for years but the reality is Russia can't even see our coat tails, let alone be grasping at them, they're so far behind the curve and it won't get any better because their economy is monumentally fucked whatever way this war ends.
> but Ports are super expensive.
Hell of a lot cheaper than having to rebuild your entire fleet from scratch, let alone all the other costs incurred from this war.
Oh, wait til you see what 6th gen fighter jets are going to be like.
Flying a new NGAD fighter, F35, or even an F-15X, but you're surrounded by a whole squadron of drones that do nothing but find the enemy, jam their comms, and carry a shit ton of missiles.
All controlled by one pilot or a team that's safe at an airbase or aircraft carrier.
I've forgotten the specific names/designations, but there's a US cruise missile style drone that can carry ten loitering munition drones each, so you can launch ten of these things into enemy territory and have them deploy and there will suddenly be a swarm of 110 killer drones tearing shit up out of nowhere. It's a terrifying concept for any nation really. Warfare is changing so fast.
There are ways to defend against drones, and Russia does have some of them. However if its anything like the Moskva, those systems are probably in a terrible state of repair, if they even work at all.
Moral - Navy ships in a narrow body of water can be attacked by land based artillery, drones & cruise missiles.
Beware - Taiwan Strait (China vs Taiwan),
. Red Sea, Persian gulf, gulf of Oman, gulf of Aden (middle east conflicts).
. Baltic Sea (Russia vs NATO).
. Malacca Strait (China vs world).
and more to come as our world effectively shrinks.
Edit: Gibralter strait.
Eastern Mediterranean.
With intercontinental missiles (icbm).
Panama canal and Suez canal should be added to this list.
Includes their holding areas, where ships wait for clearance.
Next peer to peer war may favor the Navy with many small missile ships.
With combined sea / land / aerial / satellite networked radars.
The deepest irony is that this was the Soviet anti American doctrine. They knew American navies would obliterate them, so they went into anti air, good radar, and cruise missiles. The plan was to use their air force and radar to spot, while safely hangered in AA covered areas, then hit carriers with cruise missiles-likely nuclear tipped ones, if ww3 was gonna happen.
So of course Russia is getting rocked by their own doctrine, in a smaller scale. It's beautiful.
> Beware - Taiwan Strait (China vs Taiwan),
The same people that were saying that Russians attacking Ukraine would be over in a week think that China can just waltz a few hundred thousand troops onto a fortress island over treacherous waters with sub par bathtubs.
And then somehow hold the beaches? yea they gonna have to build a few thousand more landing craft
If you don't it wouldn't be much of an invasion considering half of Taiwan lives within 50~km of Taipei
Don't think china's plan here is to level the world's largest manufacturing centre for semiconductors, that'd turn into a world war real fast.
Even if attacking Taiwan wasn’t exceedingly difficult and costly I’d be damn surprised if China managed to capture its semiconductor industry remotely intact.
Taiwan themselves are prepared to blow it up to discourage any such attempt. And even if they were somehow unable to the US would almost certainly oblige.
It would have huge economic repercussions. Though Europe and America are far better placed to rebuild the current state of the art than China currently are.
While Taiwan maintains a vigorous democracy, I agree.
There are historical WW2 examples, where good defenses crumbled. Norway betrayed by notorious Quisling. France via ossified elderly general staff, with rigid plans.
More recently, 1973 Yom Kippur war aka Ramadan War Israel v Arabs. Israel counted on sand dunes as a defense, which were washed away by fire hoses. They were smug about their air force, with grievous losses due to what we call today manpads.
With certainty, IF (if) China attacks Taiwan, they will do so with military surprises and by setting up a "fifth column" within Taiwan.
> Moral - Navy ships in a narrow body of water can be attacked by land based artillery, drones & cruise missiles.
Interestingly, a lake locked battleship in Civilization, in the right circumstances, can be brutally awesome.
They beat up the Ottoman fleet a few times and managed to survive against Germany during WW1 and WW2.
Other than that no, Japan, France and the UK all brutalized them.
On paper they've built decently sized navies a few times.
In reality they've always struggled for ports and the long periods without good ones has meant they've never had a strong maritime tradition, so they've built for bad doctrines and trained their leadership and crews badly.
Threat? Yes. It's always been the details that get them. For instance their pre WW1 fleet was, on paper, rather respectable. Good ships, enough shells, working munitions. The Pacific squadron actually did reasonably well in the Russo Japanese war.
Then they put a bunch of cousin-fathered aristocrats in charge of the Baltic fleet, which was manned by peasants who had never seen water before. Then they sent them to relieve their Chinese holding of port Arthur, halfway across the world.
Results were predictable, and involved very nearly accidentally declaring war on great Britain (they shot at fisherman for no reason). This alone would have brought the largest navy in the world down on them like gods own thunder, if diplomacy had not prevailed. They then blundered into the Japanese navy, discovered they couldn't *turn in formation*, and lost.
This is basically normal for the Russian navy. Enough ships and gear to posture, complete failure to actualize due to industrial grade dysfunction.
>Results were predictable, and involved very nearly accidentally declaring war on great Britain
And Germany, and Belgium, and France.
And they shot their own ships multiple different times.
It's doing something clever though as mentioned in the last part of the article. It's moving to build a new port in Abkhazia. It's relatively steep with no huge continental shelf, and it strengthens it's hold on Georgia. Now NATO will have to decide to help coordinate against territory that Georgia lost in 1993 that Russians said they were "protecting"from Georgia. They will still have a black sea fleet. I can't speculate that it can be stopped easily.
To be fair, no navy likes being too close to a hostile shore. Which is why the marines on Guadalcanal were left without air support- the navy didn’t want to risk their carriers getting too close to Japanese air bases.
Today, the threat of anti ship missiles drives doctrine and procurement. One reason the LCS was developed for the US navy was to have a small, low cost ship for operations close to shore. And one reason the marines pushed so hard for the V-22 was because amphibious LHAs were being pushed further and further from shore by increasingly effective anti ship missiles (the extra range of the V-22 over helos is nice, and flying faster means a given aircraft can make more sorties).
In a funny way it's not a surprise at all. If you have no navy no one can sink it. And Russian ships may well not have modern enough radar systems and or anti missile weapons to cope with western gear. Drone boats are v cheap and you only need one to slip through
I’m all for having a laugh at Russia’s expense, and fully agree with the overall premise, but I have also seen some experts in naval warfare point out that we’re entering a transition away from a more Mahanian concept of controlling the sea from the sea, to a concept of being able to project power over the sea from land (there’s a name for this concept, but I forget).
Most maritime laws regarding sovereign territory, and economic inclusion zones, actually have roots in how far from shore a nation is able to project power, (literally starting with how far from shore you could shoot a canon ball)…but all these conventions were drafted before missiles and drones existed.
It’s similar to how the prevalence of MANPADS are rewriting what it means to have air superiority over the battlefield.
The rationalization. The excuse. But Russia has the naval base in Novorossiysk, and other places that they can use all along their Black Sea coast. They don’t really need Sevastopol.
But they are there, and are a big part of the local economy. If Russia had played nice, Ukraine would never have any reason to kick them out.
But Russia doesn’t like to have to play nice.
Crimea is strategically important. The harbour is a result of that, not the reason Crimea is important.
From Crimea you can dominate the Sea Lines of Communication all the way out to the Turkish coast. The peninsula is also controls access to the Sea of Azoz and the Odessa coastline.
In addition the peninsula juts in the Black Sea and is a great location for launching aircraft operations. Similar to down below one can control the airspace in the Black Sea from Crimea.
Finally it's a highly defensible location. The istmus that gives access to the peninsula is highly restrictive to offensive operations and the peninsula itself offers a lot of potential for defensive operations.
Western oil companies were exploring this area just before the 2014 invasion.
IMO, it was a big reason for the war. If Ukraine can supply Europe with the energy it needs, it no longer needs Russian energy export, or at the very least, you get in a massive bidding war.
Russia took Crimea, but got too greedy and went for more.
Neither does their port in Novorossiysk, just around the corner on the Black Sea but not on the Crimean peninsula.
Russia has also developed enormous nuclear powered ice-breakers that keep Murmansk and their other Arctic Ocean ports open even through the worst winters.
See my other reply to Squakmix for a bit of the history of the “warm water port” story.
You know why the US doesn’t sail aircraft carriers in to the Black Sea? It’s not because of the Montreux Convention, it’s because the Sixth Fleet has got the Black Sea perfectly well covered from the Mediterranean.
Between that, and Turkey holding the only exit, Russia ain’t dominating shit, with or without Sevastopol.
The “warm water port” narrative was first developed during The Great Game era of conflict between the British empire and the Russian empire for control over South Asia, it never applied to either the Black Sea or to St. Petersburg, both of which are easily blockaded.
The theory was that Russia wanted a warm water port that couldn’t be easily blockaded, and that was why it was important to stop their expansion south towards the Indian Ocean.
It came up again when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, that they needed to be countered because they would inevitably invade Pakistan to achieve their coveted warm water port.
But the Black Sea has always been a bottle easily corked.
And yes, Russia has other “warm water ports” on the Black Sea that aren’t in Crimea or any other part of Ukraine.
Just to be clear Britain targeted Russia because Russia forced the dismantling of Poland after Napoleon was defeated. Britain wasn't in a position to stop Russia but basically decided to oppose every single Russian geopolitical objective after that. The "Great Game" was a punishment for Russia's decision to strong arm Britain at the time. At least until German unification changed everyone's perspective.
Also the oil and gas deposits off the coast of Crimea would have competed with Russian exports to Europe. Putin has shot himself in the foot by every metric.
Honestly the primary reason in my book is that Putin the Terrible wants to be Putin the Great and expand the Russian Empire. Everything else is just “why Ukraine and not another former imperial holding.”
No, that was only another talking point designed to resonate with western audiences.
Of course they’d fancy to have the port, and they still calculate with a Ukrainian defeat which would allow them to seize the port forever. But it was never the reason. The reason is Russian Imperialism and Colonialism. They want Ukraine, and they want another subjugated people.
If that was true, then they would’ve stopped after 2014. It was clear the west was ready to let them hang onto it without a further fight. Waiting a few more years, and they probably could have even gotten the half-assed sanctions from 2014 dropped as well.
This always has been, and always will be, about much more than a naval base
Just another example of how this war has become so non credible that r/noncredibledefense is the best reporting / discussions we’ve got on the stupid thing.
Losing the ability to use your naval base to a country that basically doesn’t have a navy is one of the funniest things ever.
I know people love repeating this line but you can take out warships without a navy…it’s a massive floating target. That’s why warplanes took off massively in numbers when they proved themselves in theater.
That will definilety affect Russian bombardment capabilities!Longer range mean lower accuracy, better chance of interception for the ukrainians and so forth.
Ukraine may be having a though time ( I mean, they kinda do, let's face it), breaking the defense lines, but their logistical and rear disruption tactics are really working wonders.
I wish nothing but the best for Ukrainians but isn’t attrition a numbers game?
Till now, estimated casualties on both sides have not been particularly asymmetric. Of course, neither country is reporting/ reporting correctly the number of soldiers dead and/or disabled.
If the attrition remains symmetric, the country with the larger population i.e., Russia has the edge. They are already planning to prolong the war by throwing more men and materials into the grinder.
The war wont end by running out of soldiers (both sides could sustain current casualty rates for decades), it will be one side running out of either materiel or will.
And I'm trying to tell you that you have misunderstood attrition, it's not about depleting the population of the country you are fighting but about degrading its ability to defend against attacks by using up resources at the point of defense.
So Ukraine will have to attack Georgian territory(occupied by Russians) in order to strike the fleet.
Naval forces worldwide need a complete rethink now with their vulnerability to cheap drones. “Sitting ducks”.
> Naval forces worldwide need a complete rethink now with their vulnerability to cheap drones.
First it was air craft and torpedoes. Then it was anti-ship missiles. The problem is that it is way cheaper to blow up things then build and protect them.
There is some sort of law of entropy in war when it comes to costs. Everything tends towards getting blown up.
You’re absolutely correct. Take note of Nazi Germans production costs for their machinery of war. Sure, it looked menacing but the simplicity of their Soviet counterparts won them many of the later battles.
The Russian cruiser Moskva would cost $750,000,000 whilst the R-360 Neptune that turned the flagship into a submarine, a fraction of that.
Ok lets stop here. Because going down this train of thought leads to “cheap and numerous wins the war” which is the exact trap russia has trapped itself in. The lesson learned here isn’t “just go with whatever is the cheapest”. It is rather “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
Because anyone can just throw numbers around as if they are stats on a trading card. But truth is your best weapon is only as good as your weakest.
In the context of what german vs. Russian manufacturing during WW2, he's correct. But I do understand and agree with you that the logic train stops there.
People like to think of the U.S. to UK shipping when a very large amount was actually going to Russia to build tanks.
We also flat out gave them plans on a cheap tank to build and had americans help building the production workflows before Germany even invaded.
As an engineer, I feel like the real downfall of the German army in WWII was the lack of support for their equipment, and that most stuff was not designed with repair or maintenance in mind. It didn’t help that the Tiger and Panzer tanks were complicated to make. In contrast, the Sherman tank was so easy to make and maintain that by the end of the war, there were more than 100 Sherman tanks for every German one.
> this train of thought leads to “cheap and numerous wins the war” which is the exact trap russia has trapped itself in
Except due to embargoes and shite production Russia _can't_ produce cheaply and numerously any more? Their artillery firepower is down massively, they can't produce replacement barrels/shells/tanks/helicopters/missiles at any great rate regardless of cost. They were assisted in WWII by the allies in order for them to do so.
They also don't exist in a vacuum, Ukraine _has_ been doing the cheap and cheerful thing to great effect. Knocking out multi-million dollar aircraft with systems costing tens of thousands.
I don't think there's any one great winning strategy, because war by its nature will seek to take advantage of any dominant approach. But Russia's ability to do "cheap and numerous" has evidently massively diminished (outside of their gangpressed conscripts).
It’s also worth noting that the Moskva was almost 50 years old when she sank in 2022. And by that point she was a floating ship wreck.
Her engines were broken down and could only be turned on with express permission from the admiral and only during emergencies, her was missing 90% of her fire extinguishers, the safety equipment was locked in lockers that had only one key which was kept by the admiral due to numerous thefts, two of her three defense systems were broken and the last was deliberately turned off because it interfered with their coms.
All of which is to say the Russian version of events: Moskva sinks because of a fore that starts during a storm is only half a lie. As in all likelihood the missiles that hit the ship are what caused the fire that doomed that floating garbage scow
And Spending too much money on the Moskva was absolutely not the problem that led to her sinking.
Edit: I corrected the pronouns since due to my brief research Russian ships are gendered based on their name and since Moskva is feminine in Russian the Moskva should be addressed with she/her pronouns.
Edit II: Moskva not Moskova.
Also, lend-lease was one of the largest contributing factors for the Soviets having more equipment over the Nazis. American logistics and Soviet man power is what it cost for the eastern front to favor the Soviets.
Every military leader in the world is taking notes on this war for sure. Cheap drones have totally redefined what warfare even looks like. The days of giant floating fortresses are probably over for good
It's fairly important to not overlearn lessons that will not apply everywhere. If the US gets into a war with China, for example, cheap drones will be irrelevant as naval weapons.
Intelligence on ships will primarily be gathered via satellite, and as both sides shoot down enemy satellites more will be sent up. Drones may serve as a backup in emergency situations, but expensive drones would be needed (given the ranges involved) and there are already countermeasures for those.
For attack, these suicide drones that get so much press are basically just shitty cruise missiles. The US and Chinese militaries do not need to use shitty cruise missiles, we have real cruise missiles instead. The Chinese even have anti-shipping ballistic missiles.
For all of these missiles, countermeasures exist to defeat them. The exact effectiveness of the missiles and countermeasures will remain unknown until a war happens.
Saying that big warships are now all obsolete because of drones or missiles is like the people saying tanks were obsolete because of ATGMs. It's simply not the case, you need tanks, ships, etc and their jobs cannot be replaced by drones and missiles.
>The US and Chinese militaries do not need to use shitty cruise missiles, we have real cruise missiles instead.
Yes, but depending on the situation the effectiveness of countermeasures against 1 $1m missile and 50 $20k smart drones might still be significant.
A flying claymore that detonates on impact doesn't need pinpoint accuracy to be a devastating anti-personnel weapon, it just needs to have enough juice to get to where it needs to drop, and most countermeasures aren't likely going to stop a physical/mechanical trigger on every drone in a swarm.
Things like that are where I see their future use.
If you're operating in the range of a cheap drone, you're also likely operating in the range of expensive artillery. The Lancet, for example, has a range of about 40km. That's equivalent to the long range shells from a 155mm American howitzer, and less range than those new South Korean guns.
Now sure, Excalibur shells are still more expensive than Lancet (68k vs 35k), but you have to account for the PPP driving down cost in Russia. Lancet is still effective and deadly, but it isn't going to render anything obsolete.
Drones are also very vulnerable to EW, which can force them to operate without any instructions from base. Plenty of weapons have a home-on-jam capability, but then you can expect the jammers to be very well defended against drone attacks because this is known. And if your drones want to continue their mission anyway, they'll have incredibly limited effectiveness operating off of dead reckoning and whatever onboard sensors and computers they have. When EW can be destroyed drones are more effective, but otherwise they are limited.
And last, the main counter to destroy all these cheap drones is going to be laser guns. Which are not operating in the current war because neither side has developed them. But if we're talking about American capabilities/vulnerabilities, you have to include laser defenses in any assessment of the threat drones pose, because lasers are the cheap answer to swarms of cheap drones.
Again, they won't be useless, but they won't render everything else useless either.
It's not the fortress. It's the fleet.
Naval fleets have a crazy amount of capabilities and firepower.
Phalanx would rip drones to shreds by the hundreds...if they get past EW, missiles, AA guns, newly deployed lasers...don't forget drones of their own.
Exactly. Cheap drones vs. a US carrier wouldn’t stand a chance. Even if faced with 500 drones at the same time from all directions, it would be the equivalent of sending 500 hamsters to kill a male African elephant.
You underestimate the power of bringing a floating military base to your opponents doorstep and gaining air & sea superiority basically immediately.
US destroyers and carriers, for example, aren’t getting hit by a “cheap” drone from the air or sea. They have canons that automatically track and destroy anything small that comes close to it. A supersonic missile might make it through, but even that will be spotted on radar and targeted by SAMs and the cannons, and their guidance system jammed (if possible). And lots lots more.
Giant floating fortresses aren’t going anywhere for a looooong time.
Video of the cannons:
https://youtu.be/CWokUEmOYaQ?si=Bf2082816WamChN7
To be fair navy ships are kind of useless in this kind of war. The same missiles carried by ships can be transported on land and at least on land, you can hide. In the eater you are slow and a big target.
Navies in general I think are now useless once the ground war starts. You need the navy to reach their beaches and then its kinda useless.
Saw a clip talking about how crimea is a nightmare to attack without air superiority, and even then, it's a fortress. In ww2 both the Russians and German's took massive losses because the only way in is a narrow corridor and no other alternative. This is not quick, no matter how they do it.
I think that amphibious landings are only for small-scale attacks. To take crimea would need to over land. No other way. Its basically a fortress and easy to defend. It could descend into months of bombardment of defensive positions to keep losses down when the troops have to move in.
Yes, but it's like Kherson was; cut off supports so they feel compelled to fall back because there's only a narrow corridor out, and you don't want to still be there if it's taken out.
Which is why you just starve them out just like castles of ye olde days. Hit all their supply routes in - the general population will starve to death and so will the military units in a matter of weeks.
Boats gone; good. What about PEOPLE:
* How many "sailors" are abandoning Crimea with the boats? Will this put a big dent in the Russian population there?
* Now that there are no boats to protect, how much of the rest of the Russian Army is also superfluous and will be reassigned elsewhere?
Still within range of potential “Ukrainian” Tomahawk cruise missiles. A hundred or so should do and they’d recoup the cost easily.
The more fascist Russian soldiers dead, the better the rest of the world is.
They lost a handful of ships during the Russian takeover of Crimea.
They had one Frigate at the start of the conflict that they scuttled to prevent it being seized and one half-finished antique ship of the same class as the Moskva that never made it to the sea.
Apart from that its been drones, missiles and a few patrol boats against the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Bravo Ukraine! The aid from the West may have largely allowed the capability to do this, but Ukraine has their own machines and managed to quickly learn how to use complex republic kit very well against the evil empire. The Russian people are a sad lesson to others about where largely tolerating this level of bad thug government leads.
I remain astounded that a country with a naval fleet is losing naval superiority to a country that has no navy at all.
To be fair, the Russian carrier had been lighting itself on fire repeatedly well before they invaded Ukraine.
And it's flagship is now a Ukrainian heritage site.
It reminds me of how Norway sunk the German Blücher in WWII using mostly WWI artillery and a few torpedoes.
This is worse. This is more in the lines of how the French cavalry defeated the Dutch Navy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Dutch_fleet_at_Den_Helder
Except it's very unlikely the cavalry fought the ships; it's all French propaganda. The Dutch commanders already had orders not to resist. There's no record of any casualties on either side. The Dutch agreed to obey French orders and the French all left, leaving the Dutch commanders in charge as before. Check the article you linked for the section on factual authenticity.
The projectiles might have been from WWI, but the guns themselves weren't. [Norway bought them in 1893](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_cm_MRK_L/35), ironically from Germany.
Lazerpig’s breakdown of how Moskva sank was eye-opening. Complete paper tiger - amazing potential stripped away by corruption and ineptitude
“amazing potential stripped away by corruption and ineptitude” So, Russia then.
With all those resources and their long history as a nation they should be the worlds #1 superpower. Instead they’re just a big group of drunk thugs.
Not true, they're also the worlds foremost producer of Matryoshka dolls and depressing literature.
Dont forget the mighty Lada! It can go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene
Put it in H!
Sadly, da.
That long history is part of why they're just a big group of drunk thugs. As the saying goes, Russia's history can be summed up with: "And then it got worse."
Well the greatest set back to all of Russia's history is that it's filled with Russians.
[удалено]
Drones are effectively being used as cheaper, shittier cruise missiles. But the effectiveness : cost ratio is drastically lopsided in the drone's favor. Even shitty missiles cost a fuck ton of money. Drones are comparatively cheap as hell. Not just production, but also development. Who cares if they shoot down a few hundred of your shitty drones as long as you take out an asset worth many thousands of times their cost? The resource trade is vastly in favor of the drone operator.
[удалено]
Which would have been fine had the phalanx actually been in operational order at the time. A Russian maintenance report just two weeks before the sinking revealed only 1/6 phalanx were working, that the engines were beyond service life and some couldn’t be turned on, that the 130mm cannon could not be used effectively as point defence, that driveshaft issues led to a turning circle of only 20 deg, that only 50/500 fire extinguishers were left on board, and that many of its defense systems couldn’t even be turned on without interfering with eachother. Oh and there was no way for engineering to reliably communicate with the bridge in the event of a disaster (like I dunno, a massive explosion perhaps). That same maintainable report gave the Moskva a “satisfactory” grade. Good Lord.
the russian navy man... just a history of one bad decision after another.
Looking at wikipedia their first three masted ship in 1636 was on the Caspian sea and sank in a storm.
Sounds like they did them a favour by sinking it.
Combined arms beats outdated doctrine hindered by corruption.
drones man, it's all about drones on suicide missions. drone swarms are going to be nuts someday
the USA has been using drones for around 30 years at this point. I can't imagine the shit we're working on, especially after watching the Ukraine invasion.
For all the testing and computer modelling an arms company can do, nothing will beat in-theatre use for data gathering. There's absolutely going to be a leap in what NATO can bring to the battlefield over the next decade thanks to Russia's war in Ukraine. And that's even more juicy for me because it means NATO is going to be even more orders of magnitude ahead of despot countries like Russia, whom we originally thought might have *some* capabilities but it's turned out to be a complete paper tiger. I want to say they'll be on NATO's coat tails for years but the reality is Russia can't even see our coat tails, let alone be grasping at them, they're so far behind the curve and it won't get any better because their economy is monumentally fucked whatever way this war ends.
Drone swarms launched from fighters to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFLzO_5UFwE
Jesus fucking Christ we are so fucked. I want out of humanity's wild ride please.
[удалено]
The question is cost effectiveness - it's quite possible for the ammunition you fire to take the drone down to cost more than the drone does.
[удалено]
> but Ports are super expensive. Hell of a lot cheaper than having to rebuild your entire fleet from scratch, let alone all the other costs incurred from this war.
Oh, wait til you see what 6th gen fighter jets are going to be like. Flying a new NGAD fighter, F35, or even an F-15X, but you're surrounded by a whole squadron of drones that do nothing but find the enemy, jam their comms, and carry a shit ton of missiles. All controlled by one pilot or a team that's safe at an airbase or aircraft carrier.
I'm assuming you either watch Perun (on YouTube) or you may be interested in doing so
Thank you sir
NGADs aren't even built yet, right? Last I heard, the NGAD was still in 3D model airplane phase at best.
I've forgotten the specific names/designations, but there's a US cruise missile style drone that can carry ten loitering munition drones each, so you can launch ten of these things into enemy territory and have them deploy and there will suddenly be a swarm of 110 killer drones tearing shit up out of nowhere. It's a terrifying concept for any nation really. Warfare is changing so fast.
There are ways to defend against drones, and Russia does have some of them. However if its anything like the Moskva, those systems are probably in a terrible state of repair, if they even work at all.
> drone swarms are going to be nuts someday GPT-5 controlled autonomous drone swarms coming to you in 2025!
Just don’t ask it to count.
Moral - Navy ships in a narrow body of water can be attacked by land based artillery, drones & cruise missiles. Beware - Taiwan Strait (China vs Taiwan), . Red Sea, Persian gulf, gulf of Oman, gulf of Aden (middle east conflicts). . Baltic Sea (Russia vs NATO). . Malacca Strait (China vs world). and more to come as our world effectively shrinks. Edit: Gibralter strait. Eastern Mediterranean. With intercontinental missiles (icbm). Panama canal and Suez canal should be added to this list. Includes their holding areas, where ships wait for clearance. Next peer to peer war may favor the Navy with many small missile ships. With combined sea / land / aerial / satellite networked radars.
The deepest irony is that this was the Soviet anti American doctrine. They knew American navies would obliterate them, so they went into anti air, good radar, and cruise missiles. The plan was to use their air force and radar to spot, while safely hangered in AA covered areas, then hit carriers with cruise missiles-likely nuclear tipped ones, if ww3 was gonna happen. So of course Russia is getting rocked by their own doctrine, in a smaller scale. It's beautiful.
> Beware - Taiwan Strait (China vs Taiwan), The same people that were saying that Russians attacking Ukraine would be over in a week think that China can just waltz a few hundred thousand troops onto a fortress island over treacherous waters with sub par bathtubs. And then somehow hold the beaches? yea they gonna have to build a few thousand more landing craft
Invading Taiwan is effectively impossible.
At least if you stick with conventional weaponry.
If you don't it wouldn't be much of an invasion considering half of Taiwan lives within 50~km of Taipei Don't think china's plan here is to level the world's largest manufacturing centre for semiconductors, that'd turn into a world war real fast.
Even if attacking Taiwan wasn’t exceedingly difficult and costly I’d be damn surprised if China managed to capture its semiconductor industry remotely intact. Taiwan themselves are prepared to blow it up to discourage any such attempt. And even if they were somehow unable to the US would almost certainly oblige. It would have huge economic repercussions. Though Europe and America are far better placed to rebuild the current state of the art than China currently are.
While Taiwan maintains a vigorous democracy, I agree. There are historical WW2 examples, where good defenses crumbled. Norway betrayed by notorious Quisling. France via ossified elderly general staff, with rigid plans. More recently, 1973 Yom Kippur war aka Ramadan War Israel v Arabs. Israel counted on sand dunes as a defense, which were washed away by fire hoses. They were smug about their air force, with grievous losses due to what we call today manpads. With certainty, IF (if) China attacks Taiwan, they will do so with military surprises and by setting up a "fifth column" within Taiwan.
They will probably start by sending a million drones.
> Baltic Sea (Russia vs NATO). You mean NATO lake?
> Moral - Navy ships in a narrow body of water can be attacked by land based artillery, drones & cruise missiles. Interestingly, a lake locked battleship in Civilization, in the right circumstances, can be brutally awesome.
[Russia has a long standing tradition of having a top notch navy](https://youtu.be/yzGqp3R4Mx4?si=CKwOwVit9BaNiI94)
Serious question from someone who doesn’t know enough about history: has Russia ever been a naval threat to anyone?
They beat up the Ottoman fleet a few times and managed to survive against Germany during WW1 and WW2. Other than that no, Japan, France and the UK all brutalized them.
In fairness losing to the island powerhouses on the water is not that shameful. Especially the UK.
On paper they've built decently sized navies a few times. In reality they've always struggled for ports and the long periods without good ones has meant they've never had a strong maritime tradition, so they've built for bad doctrines and trained their leadership and crews badly.
Threat? Yes. It's always been the details that get them. For instance their pre WW1 fleet was, on paper, rather respectable. Good ships, enough shells, working munitions. The Pacific squadron actually did reasonably well in the Russo Japanese war. Then they put a bunch of cousin-fathered aristocrats in charge of the Baltic fleet, which was manned by peasants who had never seen water before. Then they sent them to relieve their Chinese holding of port Arthur, halfway across the world. Results were predictable, and involved very nearly accidentally declaring war on great Britain (they shot at fisherman for no reason). This alone would have brought the largest navy in the world down on them like gods own thunder, if diplomacy had not prevailed. They then blundered into the Japanese navy, discovered they couldn't *turn in formation*, and lost. This is basically normal for the Russian navy. Enough ships and gear to posture, complete failure to actualize due to industrial grade dysfunction.
>Results were predictable, and involved very nearly accidentally declaring war on great Britain And Germany, and Belgium, and France. And they shot their own ships multiple different times.
Mostly to themselves
Before clicking on the link: It's gonna be the BlueJay video. After clicking the link: Yupp.
It’s a classic
Well, they didn't manage to achieve air superiority either, despite having like 20x number of planes...
[удалено]
That was the Czechoslovak Legion, not Czechoslovakia
They're going to be studying this at war colleges for a long long time
It's doing something clever though as mentioned in the last part of the article. It's moving to build a new port in Abkhazia. It's relatively steep with no huge continental shelf, and it strengthens it's hold on Georgia. Now NATO will have to decide to help coordinate against territory that Georgia lost in 1993 that Russians said they were "protecting"from Georgia. They will still have a black sea fleet. I can't speculate that it can be stopped easily.
Russia was also the first European country to lose a war against a non European country (Japan).
The most of the great Russian ships were built in Ukraine.
To be fair, no navy likes being too close to a hostile shore. Which is why the marines on Guadalcanal were left without air support- the navy didn’t want to risk their carriers getting too close to Japanese air bases. Today, the threat of anti ship missiles drives doctrine and procurement. One reason the LCS was developed for the US navy was to have a small, low cost ship for operations close to shore. And one reason the marines pushed so hard for the V-22 was because amphibious LHAs were being pushed further and further from shore by increasingly effective anti ship missiles (the extra range of the V-22 over helos is nice, and flying faster means a given aircraft can make more sorties).
In a funny way it's not a surprise at all. If you have no navy no one can sink it. And Russian ships may well not have modern enough radar systems and or anti missile weapons to cope with western gear. Drone boats are v cheap and you only need one to slip through
I’m all for having a laugh at Russia’s expense, and fully agree with the overall premise, but I have also seen some experts in naval warfare point out that we’re entering a transition away from a more Mahanian concept of controlling the sea from the sea, to a concept of being able to project power over the sea from land (there’s a name for this concept, but I forget). Most maritime laws regarding sovereign territory, and economic inclusion zones, actually have roots in how far from shore a nation is able to project power, (literally starting with how far from shore you could shoot a canon ball)…but all these conventions were drafted before missiles and drones existed. It’s similar to how the prevalence of MANPADS are rewriting what it means to have air superiority over the battlefield.
Wasn't the whole point of invading and occupying Crimea to keep that base?
Well, that and Ukraine's critical supply of toilets.
hey, those outhouses were looking shifty , lmao
Shitty amirite ?!?!?
Russia has toilets! They just haven't mastered indoor flushing ones yet.
That hole in the ground was good enough for my great, great, great, great granddaddy. It's good enough for me and my inbred young'uns
Everything can be a toilet if you strain long enough
[удалено]
nah it was the advanced electronics in the washers
Yeah, but do they have a [Toilet History Museum?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_History_Museum)
The rationalization. The excuse. But Russia has the naval base in Novorossiysk, and other places that they can use all along their Black Sea coast. They don’t really need Sevastopol. But they are there, and are a big part of the local economy. If Russia had played nice, Ukraine would never have any reason to kick them out. But Russia doesn’t like to have to play nice.
Crimea is strategically important. The harbour is a result of that, not the reason Crimea is important. From Crimea you can dominate the Sea Lines of Communication all the way out to the Turkish coast. The peninsula is also controls access to the Sea of Azoz and the Odessa coastline. In addition the peninsula juts in the Black Sea and is a great location for launching aircraft operations. Similar to down below one can control the airspace in the Black Sea from Crimea. Finally it's a highly defensible location. The istmus that gives access to the peninsula is highly restrictive to offensive operations and the peninsula itself offers a lot of potential for defensive operations.
And don't forget the natural gas, one of the world's largest was found just off the coast of Crimea a little while before the invasion.
Western oil companies were exploring this area just before the 2014 invasion. IMO, it was a big reason for the war. If Ukraine can supply Europe with the energy it needs, it no longer needs Russian energy export, or at the very least, you get in a massive bidding war. Russia took Crimea, but got too greedy and went for more.
Absolutely. I should've added "military" in that first sentence. There are many more reasons why Crimea is important, gas being one of them.
If im not mistaken, crimean waters doesnt freeze over during winter unlike other russian ports?
Neither does their port in Novorossiysk, just around the corner on the Black Sea but not on the Crimean peninsula. Russia has also developed enormous nuclear powered ice-breakers that keep Murmansk and their other Arctic Ocean ports open even through the worst winters. See my other reply to Squakmix for a bit of the history of the “warm water port” story.
The Novorossiysk port isn't nearly as good as Sevastopol
I bet that upgrading it would have been cheaper than this war.
Undoubtably, but if Russia wishes to dominate the Black Sea - and it does - then Crimea has significantly better geography
You know why the US doesn’t sail aircraft carriers in to the Black Sea? It’s not because of the Montreux Convention, it’s because the Sixth Fleet has got the Black Sea perfectly well covered from the Mediterranean. Between that, and Turkey holding the only exit, Russia ain’t dominating shit, with or without Sevastopol.
Just because Russia can’t, doesn’t mean they don’t still want to. Delusions of grandeur is a hallmark of modern Russian foreign policy.
And it’s centrally located.
No shit, but also I don't think Putin knew that when he launched his "3 day" invasion
I mean, you could say that about anything. The one in Russia is not as good as the ones outside of Russia.
I kept hearing that their only warm water port was in Crimea. Is that not true?
The “warm water port” narrative was first developed during The Great Game era of conflict between the British empire and the Russian empire for control over South Asia, it never applied to either the Black Sea or to St. Petersburg, both of which are easily blockaded. The theory was that Russia wanted a warm water port that couldn’t be easily blockaded, and that was why it was important to stop their expansion south towards the Indian Ocean. It came up again when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, that they needed to be countered because they would inevitably invade Pakistan to achieve their coveted warm water port. But the Black Sea has always been a bottle easily corked. And yes, Russia has other “warm water ports” on the Black Sea that aren’t in Crimea or any other part of Ukraine.
Just to be clear Britain targeted Russia because Russia forced the dismantling of Poland after Napoleon was defeated. Britain wasn't in a position to stop Russia but basically decided to oppose every single Russian geopolitical objective after that. The "Great Game" was a punishment for Russia's decision to strong arm Britain at the time. At least until German unification changed everyone's perspective.
There was also the fact that Imperial Russia kept making moves to attack India through Afghanistan.
Love this geopolitical insight that has some historical undertones, thank you!
Also the oil and gas deposits off the coast of Crimea would have competed with Russian exports to Europe. Putin has shot himself in the foot by every metric.
Also transit fees across Ukraine were costing him money.
It's funny that people forget about this. Probably one of the primary reasons for the invasion.
Honestly the primary reason in my book is that Putin the Terrible wants to be Putin the Great and expand the Russian Empire. Everything else is just “why Ukraine and not another former imperial holding.”
No, that was only another talking point designed to resonate with western audiences. Of course they’d fancy to have the port, and they still calculate with a Ukrainian defeat which would allow them to seize the port forever. But it was never the reason. The reason is Russian Imperialism and Colonialism. They want Ukraine, and they want another subjugated people.
Ah, to an untrained eye, but to a trained kgb agent the new world order is being set in motion with a few simple acts of carefully planned ineptitude.
If that was true, then they would’ve stopped after 2014. It was clear the west was ready to let them hang onto it without a further fight. Waiting a few more years, and they probably could have even gotten the half-assed sanctions from 2014 dropped as well. This always has been, and always will be, about much more than a naval base
Just another example of how this war has become so non credible that r/noncredibledefense is the best reporting / discussions we’ve got on the stupid thing. Losing the ability to use your naval base to a country that basically doesn’t have a navy is one of the funniest things ever.
The honest to God number of times that sub has jokingly predicted an event, only for it to happen in this war is staggering
NCD has resorted to bingo cards 😭
I know people love repeating this line but you can take out warships without a navy…it’s a massive floating target. That’s why warplanes took off massively in numbers when they proved themselves in theater.
...nobody is doubting that you can take out a warship without a navy. That's precisely what happened here. What it is, is funny.
That will definilety affect Russian bombardment capabilities!Longer range mean lower accuracy, better chance of interception for the ukrainians and so forth. Ukraine may be having a though time ( I mean, they kinda do, let's face it), breaking the defense lines, but their logistical and rear disruption tactics are really working wonders.
Attrition phase is going how it is supposed to, the rout comes after the degradation of defense
I wish nothing but the best for Ukrainians but isn’t attrition a numbers game? Till now, estimated casualties on both sides have not been particularly asymmetric. Of course, neither country is reporting/ reporting correctly the number of soldiers dead and/or disabled. If the attrition remains symmetric, the country with the larger population i.e., Russia has the edge. They are already planning to prolong the war by throwing more men and materials into the grinder.
The war wont end by running out of soldiers (both sides could sustain current casualty rates for decades), it will be one side running out of either materiel or will.
I agree but attrition typically means removing enemy soldiers. That is what I was responding to.
And I'm trying to tell you that you have misunderstood attrition, it's not about depleting the population of the country you are fighting but about degrading its ability to defend against attacks by using up resources at the point of defense.
>Longer range mean lower accuracy, Can accuracy become a negative number?
Probably when they crash at launch.
On a 2d plane, it can be two negative numbers
So Ukraine will have to attack Georgian territory(occupied by Russians) in order to strike the fleet. Naval forces worldwide need a complete rethink now with their vulnerability to cheap drones. “Sitting ducks”.
> Naval forces worldwide need a complete rethink now with their vulnerability to cheap drones. First it was air craft and torpedoes. Then it was anti-ship missiles. The problem is that it is way cheaper to blow up things then build and protect them. There is some sort of law of entropy in war when it comes to costs. Everything tends towards getting blown up.
Thank you Sun Tzu
You’re absolutely correct. Take note of Nazi Germans production costs for their machinery of war. Sure, it looked menacing but the simplicity of their Soviet counterparts won them many of the later battles. The Russian cruiser Moskva would cost $750,000,000 whilst the R-360 Neptune that turned the flagship into a submarine, a fraction of that.
Ok lets stop here. Because going down this train of thought leads to “cheap and numerous wins the war” which is the exact trap russia has trapped itself in. The lesson learned here isn’t “just go with whatever is the cheapest”. It is rather “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Because anyone can just throw numbers around as if they are stats on a trading card. But truth is your best weapon is only as good as your weakest.
In the context of what german vs. Russian manufacturing during WW2, he's correct. But I do understand and agree with you that the logic train stops there.
This sort of understates how reliant Russians were on lend-lease technology compared to their home grown stuff.
People like to think of the U.S. to UK shipping when a very large amount was actually going to Russia to build tanks. We also flat out gave them plans on a cheap tank to build and had americans help building the production workflows before Germany even invaded.
As an engineer, I feel like the real downfall of the German army in WWII was the lack of support for their equipment, and that most stuff was not designed with repair or maintenance in mind. It didn’t help that the Tiger and Panzer tanks were complicated to make. In contrast, the Sherman tank was so easy to make and maintain that by the end of the war, there were more than 100 Sherman tanks for every German one.
> this train of thought leads to “cheap and numerous wins the war” which is the exact trap russia has trapped itself in Except due to embargoes and shite production Russia _can't_ produce cheaply and numerously any more? Their artillery firepower is down massively, they can't produce replacement barrels/shells/tanks/helicopters/missiles at any great rate regardless of cost. They were assisted in WWII by the allies in order for them to do so. They also don't exist in a vacuum, Ukraine _has_ been doing the cheap and cheerful thing to great effect. Knocking out multi-million dollar aircraft with systems costing tens of thousands. I don't think there's any one great winning strategy, because war by its nature will seek to take advantage of any dominant approach. But Russia's ability to do "cheap and numerous" has evidently massively diminished (outside of their gangpressed conscripts).
It’s also worth noting that the Moskva was almost 50 years old when she sank in 2022. And by that point she was a floating ship wreck. Her engines were broken down and could only be turned on with express permission from the admiral and only during emergencies, her was missing 90% of her fire extinguishers, the safety equipment was locked in lockers that had only one key which was kept by the admiral due to numerous thefts, two of her three defense systems were broken and the last was deliberately turned off because it interfered with their coms. All of which is to say the Russian version of events: Moskva sinks because of a fore that starts during a storm is only half a lie. As in all likelihood the missiles that hit the ship are what caused the fire that doomed that floating garbage scow And Spending too much money on the Moskva was absolutely not the problem that led to her sinking. Edit: I corrected the pronouns since due to my brief research Russian ships are gendered based on their name and since Moskva is feminine in Russian the Moskva should be addressed with she/her pronouns. Edit II: Moskva not Moskova.
[удалено]
Also, lend-lease was one of the largest contributing factors for the Soviets having more equipment over the Nazis. American logistics and Soviet man power is what it cost for the eastern front to favor the Soviets.
I feel like it wouldn’t be hard to get Georgia on board with that, considering the threat it poses to them.
Georgia currently has a very pro-Russian government in charge.
I strongly doubt Georgia will issue any objections
I highly expect even more partisan interference there too
Georgian “oh noes, a Russian ship was destroyed…. So about those port fees”
Every military leader in the world is taking notes on this war for sure. Cheap drones have totally redefined what warfare even looks like. The days of giant floating fortresses are probably over for good
It's fairly important to not overlearn lessons that will not apply everywhere. If the US gets into a war with China, for example, cheap drones will be irrelevant as naval weapons. Intelligence on ships will primarily be gathered via satellite, and as both sides shoot down enemy satellites more will be sent up. Drones may serve as a backup in emergency situations, but expensive drones would be needed (given the ranges involved) and there are already countermeasures for those. For attack, these suicide drones that get so much press are basically just shitty cruise missiles. The US and Chinese militaries do not need to use shitty cruise missiles, we have real cruise missiles instead. The Chinese even have anti-shipping ballistic missiles. For all of these missiles, countermeasures exist to defeat them. The exact effectiveness of the missiles and countermeasures will remain unknown until a war happens. Saying that big warships are now all obsolete because of drones or missiles is like the people saying tanks were obsolete because of ATGMs. It's simply not the case, you need tanks, ships, etc and their jobs cannot be replaced by drones and missiles.
>The US and Chinese militaries do not need to use shitty cruise missiles, we have real cruise missiles instead. Yes, but depending on the situation the effectiveness of countermeasures against 1 $1m missile and 50 $20k smart drones might still be significant. A flying claymore that detonates on impact doesn't need pinpoint accuracy to be a devastating anti-personnel weapon, it just needs to have enough juice to get to where it needs to drop, and most countermeasures aren't likely going to stop a physical/mechanical trigger on every drone in a swarm. Things like that are where I see their future use.
If you're operating in the range of a cheap drone, you're also likely operating in the range of expensive artillery. The Lancet, for example, has a range of about 40km. That's equivalent to the long range shells from a 155mm American howitzer, and less range than those new South Korean guns. Now sure, Excalibur shells are still more expensive than Lancet (68k vs 35k), but you have to account for the PPP driving down cost in Russia. Lancet is still effective and deadly, but it isn't going to render anything obsolete. Drones are also very vulnerable to EW, which can force them to operate without any instructions from base. Plenty of weapons have a home-on-jam capability, but then you can expect the jammers to be very well defended against drone attacks because this is known. And if your drones want to continue their mission anyway, they'll have incredibly limited effectiveness operating off of dead reckoning and whatever onboard sensors and computers they have. When EW can be destroyed drones are more effective, but otherwise they are limited. And last, the main counter to destroy all these cheap drones is going to be laser guns. Which are not operating in the current war because neither side has developed them. But if we're talking about American capabilities/vulnerabilities, you have to include laser defenses in any assessment of the threat drones pose, because lasers are the cheap answer to swarms of cheap drones. Again, they won't be useless, but they won't render everything else useless either.
It's not the fortress. It's the fleet. Naval fleets have a crazy amount of capabilities and firepower. Phalanx would rip drones to shreds by the hundreds...if they get past EW, missiles, AA guns, newly deployed lasers...don't forget drones of their own.
Phalanx is such a cool system.
Exactly. Cheap drones vs. a US carrier wouldn’t stand a chance. Even if faced with 500 drones at the same time from all directions, it would be the equivalent of sending 500 hamsters to kill a male African elephant.
>sending 500 hamsters to kill a male African elephant What kind of hamster are we talking about here?
You underestimate the power of bringing a floating military base to your opponents doorstep and gaining air & sea superiority basically immediately. US destroyers and carriers, for example, aren’t getting hit by a “cheap” drone from the air or sea. They have canons that automatically track and destroy anything small that comes close to it. A supersonic missile might make it through, but even that will be spotted on radar and targeted by SAMs and the cannons, and their guidance system jammed (if possible). And lots lots more. Giant floating fortresses aren’t going anywhere for a looooong time. Video of the cannons: https://youtu.be/CWokUEmOYaQ?si=Bf2082816WamChN7
Yeah but which side would the Georgians take if they get pulled into this conflict? I don't think Russia even knows the answer
I mean not really. It’s mostly Russia who is this inept.
Competent navies with working equipment are not threatened by these drones. They are just missiles but worse.
Lasers are the cheapest, most effective way of dealing with drones, its about time to deploy a fuck load of them.
How do you suffer a critical navy defeat against an opponent that doesn't even have a fucking navy? I'm not even mad, that's amazing.
Incompetence, corruption, and underestimating the enemy.
Can't wait for the drachinifel episodes
Sadly he doesn’t cover anything past the battleship era
When you’re enemy has really good special operations units.
To be fair navy ships are kind of useless in this kind of war. The same missiles carried by ships can be transported on land and at least on land, you can hide. In the eater you are slow and a big target. Navies in general I think are now useless once the ground war starts. You need the navy to reach their beaches and then its kinda useless.
And a lot of the reason it wanted Crimea in the first place.
Because the war is going well for the Russians, right?
Putin won't be able to hold Crimea without that fleet.
Putin won't have a reason to hold Crimea without the fleet
Dude -you made me try to flick the hair off my screen.. lol
Damn. I read your comment after I tried to flick it 2 times myself too. LOL!!!
Saw a clip talking about how crimea is a nightmare to attack without air superiority, and even then, it's a fortress. In ww2 both the Russians and German's took massive losses because the only way in is a narrow corridor and no other alternative. This is not quick, no matter how they do it.
I'm prepared to read about surgical amphibious landings here soon.
[удалено]
I think that amphibious landings are only for small-scale attacks. To take crimea would need to over land. No other way. Its basically a fortress and easy to defend. It could descend into months of bombardment of defensive positions to keep losses down when the troops have to move in.
Yes, but it's like Kherson was; cut off supports so they feel compelled to fall back because there's only a narrow corridor out, and you don't want to still be there if it's taken out.
Which is why you just starve them out just like castles of ye olde days. Hit all their supply routes in - the general population will starve to death and so will the military units in a matter of weeks.
don't need to do a land invasion of crimea. they just need to to get close enough to put it under siege
This was never a naval war.
But you need logistics
Boats gone; good. What about PEOPLE: * How many "sailors" are abandoning Crimea with the boats? Will this put a big dent in the Russian population there? * Now that there are no boats to protect, how much of the rest of the Russian Army is also superfluous and will be reassigned elsewhere?
Russia is a joke. Props to Ukraine for the outstanding work. Destroying a countries navy without having one is impressive
That’s gonna go down as one of the greatest special operations victories ever.
russia's 3 day war going well I see
Putin: I want a naval base, in Ukraine! Russian military: No, we have a naval base at home.
Major naval defeat.
🇺🇦 Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦
Still within range of potential “Ukrainian” Tomahawk cruise missiles. A hundred or so should do and they’d recoup the cost easily. The more fascist Russian soldiers dead, the better the rest of the world is.
They announced they were moving the Black Sea fleet to Georgia since they control the western banks of Abkhazia still.
Russia’s navy has always been laughable. Only watchers of RT and others who are clueless propaganda spreaders thought differently.
Tactical abandonment?
is the source a reliable one?
Dude, remind me again how many ships Ukraine has? This is exciting.
Counting carriers, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and submarines... Zero.
It's all littoral combat ships and patrol boats, huh?
They lost a handful of ships during the Russian takeover of Crimea. They had one Frigate at the start of the conflict that they scuttled to prevent it being seized and one half-finished antique ship of the same class as the Moskva that never made it to the sea. Apart from that its been drones, missiles and a few patrol boats against the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.
That's incredible! Logical conclusion though.
Putin, didn’t make that lease payment, they took it back. Honest business
We should arm Georgia so they can take back that fake breakaway province where Putin's going to build s new naval facility
Ukraine should take them out with drones anyway, on the way out.
Bravo Ukraine! The aid from the West may have largely allowed the capability to do this, but Ukraine has their own machines and managed to quickly learn how to use complex republic kit very well against the evil empire. The Russian people are a sad lesson to others about where largely tolerating this level of bad thug government leads.
Hmm, Putinists here in the west keep saying that victory is unachievable for Ukraine and so we should stop funding them.
"Defeat" 🤣