Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

Where do you think those big missile barrages are coming from - Black Sea dolphins? You clearly spend too much time on reddit - sure, their carrier, Mosvka and that sub were ancient. But their recent boats are capable and pack a lot of offensive punch. One of their new corvettes could probably disable a carrier battle group. Only fools and immature people play the "the other side is incompetent and has shitty gear" game. I can assure you, the Pentagon and other Western militaries take it all very seriously.

View on HN

Russian navy is objectively shitty.

For one simple statistic - USA has about 2 times the number of nuclear submarines Russia has. Despite that Russia/USSR has lost 7 nuclear submarines and USA have lost 2. You cannot dismiss accident rate higher by order of magnitude as propaganda or bias.

Russian fleet is good enough to launch missiles at a country without fleet from long range. It's not good enough to do it without significant loses. It's also not good enough to do it while keeping the sea in question under control.

There's a reason Russian Black Sea fleet left Crimea and rebased to a port in occupied Georgia.

The US has more than twice the population of Russia and didn't collapse in 1991 and have to crawl back from sub-Saharan Africa economic conditions, so of course America has more. And there's a reason the US Navy backed off from Houthi antishipping missile and drone range. All surface ships are sitting ducks to antishipping missiles (read about the boats the UK lost in the Falklands). In in a hot war, all of the carriers and other capital ships in the theatre would be sunk with a week, probably faster (on all sides).

USSR alone lost 5.

We can make excuses all day long, some are even true, but the hard cold facts remain - russian navy sucks.

Ah, you're Polish (or Ukrainian?). Now I get it.

I'm Russian, and I agree with them. It's not even exactly a secret in Russia itself. The country has always seen itself as a land empire, not a sea one. You can even see it in little things like, which parts of the armed forces are considered more "elite" compared to the common infantry (it's paratroopers in Russia, not the marines). See also Dugin with his "tellurocracy vs thalassocracy" etc. From this perspective, it makes sense that center of gravity of its military is the army, not the navy.

> there's a reason the US Navy backed off from Houthi antishipping missile and drone range

Well, yes. If I can shoot you without your shooting me, that’d obviously better. Just because you have armor and defences doesn’t mean you want to always use them (or broadcast their capabilities and limitations).

The task of Russian navy was to invade Odessa and sabotage Ukrainian grain trade. They didn't even attempt Odessa desant, because they knew it was futaile. And they failed at sabotaging Ukrainian grain trade, but not for a lack of effort.

Otherwise these ships served as missile lunchers, but even then they had to widraw to ports far away from Ukraine, because of drone attacks.

Ukraine won the naval battle at tiny fraction of the Russian navy cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com