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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.

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Some info off twitter

>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.

So likely a Bayraktar distracting on one side while the missiles were camouflaged by the storm waves. Quite cunning really. More info: https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1514498197489659909

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?

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.

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.

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"

No, the Kirovs don't have much in the way of guns. The main armament is 20 P-700 missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov-class_battlecruiser

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.

All US Navy battleships were completely decommissioned years ago. There is no possible way to reactivate any of them.

But, what if aliens start attacking Hawaii? Could we reactivate one of them then?

I think I recall watching a documentary on that topic. Very enlightening stuff

We should've reactivated one to shell the studio that greenlit that movie.

IDK. It's a bad movie. But as bad movies go, it's a pretty good bad movie.

It would have been a better bad movie on 1/10th the budget. And a different script. And a different premise. Oh well, the actors tried...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(film)

Why would you use an old battleship when you have submarines (torpedoes and missiles), airpower, smaller surface ships with lots of missiles?

(I think you may have confused this with the 1980s refit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa-class_battleship#1980s_re....)

> 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.

> 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.)

>>I overstated the degree to which the Kirov class' designation is misleading

I could not figure it out easily - looks like Moskva was NOT a Kirov class, but a class down?

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.

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.

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.

As all programmers know, naming things is hard.

"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.

> it originally referred to the mission rather than to the ship

That’s basically what I said.

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.

>Corsair

Corvette.

Woops, there goes my Starcraft part of my brain corrupting my military part of my brain. Thanks for the correction, I just edited it in.

At least carriers are obvious :)

USN oliver perry class frigates have a CWIS system. in fact it seems the majority of USN ships have a CWIS system.

> its a better idea to just make a slightly bigger ship, but with twice the RADAR / twice the defense of a singular Destroyer

Why? Wouldn't two destroyers be more flexible and also harder to hit than one big ship?

Cause Navy guns don't scale that way.

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.

> Corvette/Frigates

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.

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...

You wouldn’t want to be in a holding pattern at bingo fuel while the one runway on the carrier has some problem preventing landing.

You’d have twice as many carriers though, so would generally have a second carrier (or more) in the battle group.

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.

---------

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.

Huh? US carriers only have 1 landing runway.

According to Wikipedia:

"Modern cruisers are generally the largest ships in a fleet after aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships."[1]

So it looks like they're larger than destroyers but have a similar function.

A discussion of current U.S. and Russian cruiser capabilities can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruiser#Current_cruisers

Moskva is a Slava-class cruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava-class_cruiser

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruiser

> 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.

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.

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.

> The Zumwalts are cancelled now.

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 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.

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.

Ha, no one is right.

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.

> Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets

It looks similar to what they did with their tanks: fight with insufficient infantry support (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/15/in-ukraine-...)

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?

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.

Somebody needed a chalet instead

Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.

Sure!

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.

Thank you! Comments like these are the reason HN is so great.

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?

And would a ship of that size carry nukes?

The Moskva is nuclear-capable, but I don't think anyone publicly knows whether it was nuclear-armed in this particular conflict. My bet would be no.

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...

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

So by the wonders of Bayes' formula we can conclude that the F-35 that sank in the South China Sea carried nuclear warheads?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60607784

No. The F-35 has modern tech that the enemy likely hasn’t (fully) seen.

That makes it worthwhile to try and prevent the enemy from seeing that tech.

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.

I admit that I'm triggered by Less Wrong, though.

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.

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.

In some cases, everyone just kind of hopes the problem goes away.

SS Richard Montgomery comes to mind. Tsunami threat directly off the southern coast of England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=R9u41aeItss

> Warships don't just suddenly catch fire

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Miami_(SSN-755)#2012_fire

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sailor-ryan-mays-court-martial-...

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?

> Warships don't just suddenly catch fire

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.

This is more of an infotainment than proper data, but one could simulate it in DCS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg for a rough demo what it can do).

Note that DCS is (at least partially) Russian, so maybe don't install it on a trusted machine.

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y, lol.

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?

Defense-in-depth includes obfuscation of position, signals warfare, first-strike, and strategic deterrents.

If you put a carrier group in a pond and lob missiles at them, I'm not confident in the outcome either.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine

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.

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.

>But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.

... Traveling a few dozen knots faster is an "ace up the sleeve"?

Submarines can't approach if the Carrier is faster than the Sub.

Its a stupid strategy, but it seems to check out. The faster a submarine tries to go, the easier it would be to detect.

I was under the impression that the consensus is the primary threat to American aircraft carriers is not submarines but supersonic cruise missiles.

It is if you don't expect it.

> Traveling a few dozen knots faster is an "ace up the sleeve"?

Very possibly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo

Maximum speed: 55 knots

Effective firing range: 21-27 nautical miles

If your carrier can do anything near 55 knots away from the torpedo, it's safe.

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.

http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-028.php

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.

Isn't this why aircraft carriers are also escorted in real-world situations to give them the support they need to operate within their means?

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.

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.

Ukrainians claim that they took out the ship's anti-missile radar first with an UAV before firing the missile.

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.

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 ...

Distance from the shoulder fired missiles?

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.

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.

"Territorial waters" were long defined by the range of guns.

3 mile, 12 mile. 200 is roughly the range that's reasonably patrolable via aircraft.

What you own is defined by what you can defend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters

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.

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?

> But what good is a bunch of ships steaming around hiding?

Exactly. A carrier group that's not within 500nm of enemy territory might as well not exist.

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.

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.

> More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing")

Fun fact: in early modern English, "towing" was the correct passive participial form, and "being towed" was ungrammatical.

Wow, TIL! How would the early English have expressed "towing" in the active sense though?

The same way. You'd have to make the distinction through context.

read (a little) more: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903

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