In response to that Pyongyang announced early this week that it will be sending troops in the form of a military engineering unit to support Russian forces on the ground in the Donetsk region. The troops are expected to arrive on the battlefield as soon as next month.
One engineering unit isn't much, but perhaps there is more to come. It didn't say anything in the article about future commitments.
Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian member of parliament told the UK’s Daily Express that North Korea has become an important bridge between the Kremlin and China. Beijing can indirectly transfer military equipment to Moscow through Pyongyang without falling foul of Western sanctions.
As he explained: “North Korea is one of key Russian partners and the meaning of the rationale behind them becoming such a partner is because they are acting as a bridge between China and Russia.
“Essentially all the military equipment that is delivered from North Korea was developed for the North Koreans by the Chinese.
Perhaps this is less about North Korea then it appears on the surface. I wonder what Russia is giving China for this help?
Sometime back kim was crying so that women make more babies, now he is sending men to his friend. And we know the mortality rate of North Korea. I have never seen a country run out of people, I think I will see it soon
Ain't this a good thing the more fudder sent to the front lines the high chance NK will have less capable soldiers in their country. Unless people being sent to front lines were potential issues in NK. I bet US intelligence would be interested on seeing how NK soldiers operates in actual combat.
So does that mean that NATO can also start deploying troops there? I mean, so far we've kept out to not escalate this, but if actual foreign troops will set foot on that front line, you can only wait so long for the other side to do the same...
No, because Ukraine is not a NATO member because they cannot join while already at war. If the USA got involved directly then the international community in the UN and even NATO itself would have mixed responses, perhaps even leading to NATO withdrawals and economic sanctions.
However, the USA have started allowing private mercenary companies to participate directly in the conflict, and they've had indirect support specialists from the US Military in the region for a long time.
He [Putin] also said that the fleet is being replenished with new ships, equipped with modern weapons, and that domestic shipbuilders will hand over more than 40 vessels to the Defense Ministry this year.
Russia's high tech side of their military industrial complex is incredibly weak compared to the old USSR days, and even their low tech side is struggling.
Yeah I can believe they're getting 40 vessels in the next year if they include literally everything they're getting. They certainly aren't getting 40 corvettes.
It really depends on the kind of vessel though. China for instance has a ton of ships but less than tonnage than the US, and if you restrict that to ships that could realistically conduct long range opperations that tonnage is buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo even lower than the UK and Japan (not combined). So Russia could just be launching 40 new patrol boats next year, or maybe 2 actual ships and 38 patrol boats.
No way they're replacing the bigger ones, like the Moskva. That one was built in a yard that's now in Ukraine, and Russia hasn't gotten that part back. Even if they did, Ukraine hadn't really maintained it.
It was also launched in 1979, and they haven't built anything that size since the USSR fell.
They'd have to rebuild the infrastructure needed to build the ship. These losses are irreplaceable.
iirc they did build one for Admiral Kuznetsov. It also left that dry dock not that long ago so it's open now. They're having trouble funding anything larger than the Adm. Gorshkov class though. Which is about 50 meters shorter. So even if they did decide to throw down a 180M long guided missile cruiser they wouldn't be able to fund it. In fact they've been trying to get something called the Lidar class going and the Russian Navy is just like, "Nyet."
Ships are expensive as hell and drones are comparatively cheap. Missiles too. Ships also take a month off Sundays to build in very obvious places because manufacturing lots of big stuff is pretty obvious to any intelligence analyst posting attention.
Well, they seem to be replenishing their submersible fleet in the Black Sea with lots of new under water vessels: for every ship they lose they get a new sub...
Yeah, except that per the Montreux Convention, because Turkey has recognized that Russia is “at war”, Russia is not allowed to transit any warships through the Bosporus Strait, so any new combat ship they make has to be made in the Black Sea.
The operative measurement is flight distance. Which, with a dogleg to avoid Crimean Anti-Air sites would max out around 680Mi. Neptune flies 621 miles at max range.
They have missiles that cover the Black Sea. We could give them the tomahawk but we're only just now getting AShM versions back out to our own fleet. The best we could probably do is support their production of Neptune missiles. Which are really actually pretty good. It puts them in a pretty small club as far anti-ship missiles go. Which is probably at least part of why the Russians can't keep anything afloat in the Black Sea.
"A close-in weapon system (CIWS) is a point-defense weapon system for detecting and destroying short-range incoming missiles and enemy aircraft which have penetrated the outer defenses, typically mounted on a naval ship. Nearly all classes of larger modern warships are equipped with some kind of CIWS device."
The type of threats these things pose are a lot more similar to missiles than they are to a Rib filled with goons. Low observable and fast, close to shore means that a high level of automation might be needed. Aka.. a ciws.
And why I think there might be add ons, is the type of threat is new and existing systems might not suffice. Magura is armored a plane or missile is not.
Please try not using initialisms that a general audience won't know. That's why i had to look up the previous one and quoted the info so other people wouldn't have to look it up also. USV doesn't even show up in a googling
interesting point - I don't know of any russian CIWS systems (and boy do they have 'em!) meeting success vs. drone attacks. If their systems were capable of taking them out I think they'd have crowed about any shoot downs, but what I see is a russian navy at the bottom of the sea.
That the US and her defense contractors see this and are very busy developing solutions against this very potent threat against their own ships. Since the rest of the Wold als sees this.. and that includes some people/groups/countries that might want to sink some American ships. If anything this shows how dangerous Iran could make the Persian gulf for American ships.
Magura proves how vulnerable ships can be, especially against modern wolf packs.
So I hypothesize that they will come up with some form of "after market" installable Close In Weapon System (aka.. a bolt on CIWS) to deal with these kind of threats.
Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)
It wouldn't surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.
I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it's quite the experience.
Yes, very much so. The reason I think there might be add ons is due to the nature of the threat.
Very angry, low visible, high speed, armored, unmanned surface vehicles that hunt in packs.
The Rim116 might not be usable because by the time you see them you might not want to / can not use a missile anymore.
The gun based ciws (midas/goalkeeper/phalanx et al.) might not have enough penetration. They are built for engaging unarmored targets.
We can make fun of the Russian expansion of their submarine fleet in de black sea all we want.. but if these maguras where an easy threat to deal with they would. No reason to think any NATO surface combatant would do any better when suddenly confronted with a similar threat.
They are.. gun based ciws can easily be used against ribs and such. I just don't know if a drone boat ban be armored enough to withstand the onslaught.
I have no clue what kind of penetration a phalanx has, but Magura is armored.. there I also don't know if this is just against small arms but I'd imagine a bit more. Also a drone boat is not shaped like a normal boat. It is flat with a sloped top so even chance of glancing blows.
So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn't make sense when all factors are considered.
It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:
Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what's going to happen to you in response. That's at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers' naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it's not like that's new. Once it does go past the level of "we don't want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we're scared of the response," and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They're hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It's not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn't necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.
I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.
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