Hi all and to any one wanting some Romance in his/her life, all the best for the holiday!
Today the Ukrainians sank another major Russian warship and, mostly because of the convenient timing (right before us reporters start waking up), my newspaper was fairly fast and thorough about writing up what happened:
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/28062
There may be a few of the very long-term readers of this blog who still remember that way back in about April or May 2022 I predicted that if the Ukrainians stabilized the line and the West started sending stuff like they were saying they were going to, then the days of the Russian Black Sea Fleet were numbered.
This is not so much to toot my horn now as to point to the pace of and, they are set in motion, how long-term processes involving militaries and nation states take on a certain degree of inevitability. Once you are sure about the factors driving the process, the probable outcome often is not so hard to predict, the only real question is whether the factors on which you’re basing the decision will stay constant, long enough, to deliver the result.
What we are seeing now is the inevitable result of the Russian navy’s pretending it was strategically invulnerable, or perhaps more precisely failing to tell the Kremlin executive branch national narrative guys that there actually are some holes in the Awesome Russian Military narrative, and now we are seeing the Black Sea Fleet get knocked into pieces, bit by bit, much like the the Russian fleets in Port Arthur and Sevastopol got slowly destroyed in their day.
The bottom line is the Kremlin started a war assuming it would not have to fight for control of the sea, and unlike land warfare — where mobilization at gunpoint can deliver combat power to a battlefield in several months — once you are behind the eight ball in naval combat, it’s really hard to catch up. Ships take years to build and training the crews takes just as long. Lose parity and unless you are a hard-ass backed up by superpower’s worth of industrial capacity (*cough* Ernest J. King), then in naval conventional warfare usually you are on the down slant of a degrade that doesn’t ever stop.
As an aside, what with all the hullabaloo about whether or not the Russo-Ukraine War serves America’s national interests, I think it’s worth pointing out that if the Russian army is already about half of what it was two years ago, the navy is orders of magnitude worse off, basically of all those resources Putin is mobilizing nothing is going to Russian naval power. Not ships, not bases, not crew training.
Literally, I have seen multi-million dollar Russian anti-ship missiles fly over my neighborhood, and smack into apartment buildings in Kyiv, because some bright guy in the Kremlin thought that would advance Russian military interests. Who knows, maybe it will, but, it is an anti-ship, multi-million dollar Russian cruise missile that now not only will never be fired, but not even pointed, ever, at the US Navy. Whose predominance on the high seas, has been one of the the top US national security interests for, like, the last two centuries.
Three pix of advocates of US Naval power attached, I’m sure you know who you’re looking at. Bet they would be cheering the Ukrainians right now. You know, along with Ronald Reagan, who is supposedly rolling in his grave over the US Republican party and Ukraine and so forth.
Come to think of it, King would be probably yelling at his subordinates that the Russians were a great example of how NOT to run a navy and if any one in his command tried anything even remotely similar, he would have them keel-hauled. As to the Ukrainians, he would probably tell them not awful peformance so far but the job isn’t close to done, they need to try harder. Uncle Ernie was sort of demanding that way.
Tripoli?
Stefan you educate and entertain with your insightful and ironic posts. Keep up the good work!