The Russian Fleet: All Ahead Slow

Russian military moves have been a hot topic lately. Whether it is the announcement of the intent to build aircraft carriers, the announcement of intention to refocus attention in the Mediterranean Sea, the larger Russian fleet buildup plans, or bringing back the memories of the cold war it is hard to ignore the information coming out of Russia regarding its intention of a maritime buildup. However, like all things, the devil is in the details, and it may be the plan will be much slower to evolve than the rhetoric implies.

In a recent Moscow Times interview with Mikhail Barabanov, an expert with the Center for Strategic and Technological Analysis, several questions of the Russian maritime buildup get answers, and the picture isn't quite as rosy as the Russian Admiralty makes it out to be.

Moscow News: How would you assess the present situation in the Russian military shipbuilding industry?

Barabanov: It is a rather mixed picture. On the one hand, in the past few years, the Navy leadership has developed a fairly coherent shipbuilding program. New shipbuilding projects have been launched, including Project 955 Yury Dolgoruky-class nuclear powered submarines, Project 20380 Steregushchy-class corvettes, and Project 21630 Astrakhan-class small artillery ships.

Work is in progress to complete projects that were launched back during the Yeltsin or even the Soviet era and were stalled for long periods. In all, since 2001, construction has started on 30 new warships, boats and auxiliary vessels. This is lifting the St. Petersburg-based Northern Shipyard and the Severodvinsk Machine-Building Enterprise [a shipyard that makes nuclear-powered submarines.- Ed.] from the doldrums.

On the other hand, funding for the ongoing projects is evidently insufficient. The deadlines for completion of the majority of ships, whose construction was launched in recent years, have been extended beyond 2010.

There are at least another two imbalances. The first is a bias in favor of new warships at the expense of existing ones, especially their maintenance. As a result, the available fleet is getting rusty, while all the money is being funneled into ongoing construction projects, but no one knows exactly when they will be ready; furthermore, in the majority of cases, we do not have appropriate weapon systems to fit them out with.

The second problem is that a disproportionate volume of funding that is being sunk into strategic nuclear forces at the expense of general purpose forces.

Read the whole thing. In particular I found it interesting that of 13 billion rubles earmarked this year for new warships, 10 billion will go to submarines, with almost the entire amount due to be spent on three Project 955 missile carrying submarines. That leaves very little for anything else, including both the existing fleet and the new ships under construction.

This tends to point out Russia's shipbuilding plan will proceed very slow, starting with the most expensive part of the required fleet (ballistic missile submarines) while upgrading infrastructure to support the fleet to be built in the future.

And while some of the infrastructure moves make sense, like closing the Baltic shipyard and building a giant new yard in St Petersburg to support construction of large nuclear powered ships, one of the more curious moves is the expansion of the naval base in Sevastopol, Ukraine, despite the fact the lease expires and isn't expected to be renewed in 2017.

In the meantime, and yes Skippy called it, Russia will join the 1000-ship Navy next month.