Russian Naval Construction Plans and Numbers

The Ministry of Industry and Trade named the reasons for the constant disruption of the construction of warships

LMFS wrote:

The Ministry of Industry and Trade named the reasons for the constant disruption of the construction of warships

The ministry said that "the fundamental problem with the renewal of the fleet of the domestic fleet is the imperfection of state planning"

http://tass.ru/ekonomika/5344257

Russia lacks long term planning for its navy.

walle83 wrote:

LMFS wrote:

The Ministry of Industry and Trade named the reasons for the constant disruption of the construction of warships

The ministry said that "the fundamental problem with the renewal of the fleet of the domestic fleet is the imperfection of state planning"
http://tass.ru/ekonomika/5344257

Just would like to add that this is exactly what I said a few months ago and I was was critized for saying it. Russia lacks long term planning for its navy.

Isos wrote:

Russia lacks long term planning for its navy.

They lack interest in navy compared to ground and air forces.

Militarov wrote:

Isos wrote:

Russia lacks long term planning for its navy.

They lack interest in navy compared to ground and air forces.

Yes, lack of interest coz there is no money, no facilities and sadly often lack of know-how. You would not be interested in building swimming pool if you had a spoon on your disposal now, wouldnt you? If they had 30 billion a year to spend on building of new ships and 2 or 3 shipyards capable of dispatching on average 20.000t of displacement a year they would be interested as Hell.

Tsavo Lion wrote:Better translation & 2 pics here: https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2018/july-2018-navy-naval-defense-news/6346-russian-navy-to-get-two-upgraded-molniya-class-missile-boats.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantul-class_corvette#Project_1242.1/1241.8_'Molniya'

Even under the most optimistic projections, the  Russian Navy will not have a serious expeditionary capability for at least 15 years. Planning for large amphibious ships and aircraft carriers is still very much in the early stages.  Whether the Navy should build either type of ship is still highly disputed among both the expert community and military planners. If they are built in the numbers currently being discussed and in the most likely timelines, then the United States may have to be prepared to deal with expeditionary Russian forces in the mid-to-late 2030s. It is far more likely, however, that financial and industrial limitations will lead to the cancellation or significant reduction of plans to develop a naval expeditionary capability.
..The construction of a fairly sizeable fleet of small missile ships and corvettes equipped with land attack cruise missiles, combined with a strong layered coastal air defense capability, obviates to a large extent the need to build a sizeable fleet of large combat ships. Russian missile ships will be able to target most of its smaller neighbors and a large part of Europe without leaving the relative safety of enclosed seas where Russian forces are dominant.
In summary, although the Russian Navy will continue to have problems with its platforms, its offensive capabilities will increasingly not be dependent on the size and range of its ships. The new generation of ships will allow the Navy to mount new generations of long-range cruise missiles in a modular fashion on a variety of platforms. While the Navy will not be able to project power globally or reach the levels of the U.S. Navy, it will be able to target U.S. allies in Europe and states it wants to influence on its borders. Since these countries are likely to be its primary targets in any case, Russia’s naval capabilities will be good enough to achieve Russia’s main maritime military goals in the short to medium term.
https://russiamil.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/russian-naval-shipbuilding-is-it-possible-to-fulfill-the-kremlins-grand-expectations/

RUSSIA’S NEW AND UNREALISTIC NAVAL DOCTRINE
https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/russias-new-and-unrealistic-naval-doctrine/:

Most interestingly, the doctrine spells out the priority areas for Russian naval development. These include ensuring the Russian Navy secures its place as the second most powerful naval force in the world. Given that Russia has no pretensions to overtaking the U.S. Navy, this passage suggests it will focus on remaining stronger than the rapidly expanding Chinese navy. As part of this effort, Russia will seek to further strengthen its navy’s ability to strike targets on land with both conventional and nuclear missiles. It will also seek to improve the sustainability of its naval forces in order to ensure continued presence in strategically important maritime regions around the world regardless of distance from Russian home ports. In times of war, the doctrine highlights the Russian Navy will be able to defend itself and Russian territory from opponents equipped with advanced high-precision weaponry in all spheres of naval warfare (anti-air, anti-ship, anti-submarine, and anti-mine), in both coastal and blue water environments.
The doctrine seems particularly focused on the role the Navy can play as an instrument of deterrence. Russia’s leadership seems to be particularly worried about the U.S. military Prompt Global Strike concept, which would use hypersonic glide vehicles to strike targets anywhere in the world about an hour after launch. They see as aimed squarely at neutralizing Russia’s nuclear deterrence capability. The Russian Navy is described in the doctrine as a potentially particularly effective tool at deterring such conventional global precision strike attacks. This effectiveness is characterized by a combination of a high level of readiness with the ability to deploy to any part of the world and to remain there for an extended period of time without requiring permission from other states. Using its recently developed long-range high-precision conventional weapons, the Russian Navy can threaten high-value military and dual use targets from the sea. The doctrine argues that this capability will allow Russia to deter global strike or other conventional attacks against itself.
To achieve these goals, the doctrine states the Russian Navy is to build a balanced force, both maintaining its existing strengths in ballistic missile submarines and developing a qualitatively “new look” for its conventional forces so that the latter are to be able to fulfill the conventional strategic deterrence mission. In order to carry out this mission while also being prepared for regular naval warfighting missions, the doctrine calls on the Navy to procure the full range of possible naval equipment including multipurpose nuclear and conventional submarines, multi-purpose surface combat ships, naval aviation, coastal defense forces, and even ground effect vehicles.
What is it Really About?
Here we get to what most likely is the real purpose of the naval doctrine document. It appears to be yet another salvo in the ongoing rearguard action by the Russian Navy to protect its procurement budget in the context of pressure to reduce naval procurement in the next State Armament Program, which is expected to be finalized later this year. What’s more, the Russian Navy is seeking to ensure its procurement priorities are enshrined in official documents for the long term. To this end, the doctrine states that while through 2025 the main conventional armament of the Navy will consist of high-precision long-range cruise missiles, subsequently these will be supplemented with hypersonic missiles and various automated systems such as unmanned underwater vehicles.
The problem with this plan, as has been pointed out by a number of Russian analysts, is that it is entirely unrealistic. (One commentator has described it as “riddled with nostalgic reminiscences of late Soviet naval construction.”) In the real world, Russian surface ship construction remains woefully slow. No combat ships larger than a frigate have been built since the 1990s and none are likely to be completed in the next ten years. While nuclear submarine construction remains a strong suit, the development of a new generation of non-nuclear powered submarines remains hampered by the lack of a working air-independent power system, leaving the fleet dependent on existing diesel engine-based designs. .. And the current economic environment means financing for military shipbuilding is likely to decline in the next decade.
What’s more, all the talk about the important role the Russian Navy could play in conventional deterrence may well be designed to mask the lack of need for larger combat ships given the essentially defensive nature of the Russian Navy’s actual primary missions. Thus, although the newly approved doctrine on the surface seems to indicate Russia is primed to rebuild its surface combat fleet, the reality is that this doctrine is poised to join many other similar pronouncements on the Russian Defense Ministry’s already rather full shelf of unfulfilled aspirational documents. The likelihood that Russia will retain its position as the world’s most powerful navy after the United States until 2030 remains quite low.

The Russian navy will get a total of 26 new ships in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week at a reception honoring Moscow’s fleet.

In raw numbers, the Russian navy is adding ships faster than the U.S. and Chinese navies are doing. Putin is preparing for a naval war. But the kind of war Putin is preparing for might not be the same kind of war the United States expects.

At one level, Russia’s official shipbuilding numbers are deceptive. Putin included small boats and support vessels in his tally—ship types the U.S. Navy, for one, rarely bothers to include when it counts its own warships.

What’s more, Russia’s new ships on average are much smaller than new American and Chinese vessels, and are less capable of traveling long distances to fight overseas wars.

But all that might not matter. Experts told The Daily Beast that Putin’s new fleet is well suited to his increasingly aggressive foreign policy along Russia’s borders. “They are a land power after all,” Michael Kofman, a Russia expert with the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., told The Daily Beast.

There are big vessels as well. The Russian navy still possesses large, Cold War-vintage warships that it’s upgrading, including an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered battlecruiser that’s one of the biggest surface warships in the world, plus an impressive force of submarines.

“The Kalibr, a rough analogue to the U.S. Navy’s own Tomahawk cruise missile, is central to Moscow’s efforts to build a fleet of small but powerful warships.”

Many of these big old ships may be unreliable—they’re what Moscow deploys when it wants to make an impression—but Russia’s new warships, by contrast, are small, nimble, relatively anonymous, and surprisingly heavily armed with new Kalibr cruise missiles.

“What they are doing is selectively dipping into the best of the old vessels—surface ships and submarines—and giving them more powerful weaponry while accelerating the build rate for smaller combatants with relatively big punch,” Iain Ballantyne, author of The Deadly Trade, a history of naval warfare, told The Daily Beast.

To that end, this year the Russian fleet is accepting into service four surface warships armed with the latest Kalibr cruise missiles, plus three support ships and 19 other vessels, Putin said. By comparison, the U.S. Navy bought 14 large warships in 2018. The Chinese navy doesn’t release official ship counts, but observers counted at least 18 new vessels entering service with Beijing’s fleet in 2016.

In all, the U.S. fleet includes 284 frontline warships plus another 124 support and transport ships that technically belong to the Defense Department’s Military Sealift Command. In 2015 the Chinese fleet numbered around 300 large ships, according to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence.

The Russian fleet also possesses around 300 ships. But nearly half are patrol boats and corvettes—smaller vessels that rarely exceed 1,000 tons displacement. The U.S. Navy operates just 13 similar small surface warships, and doesn’t even include them in its official count of frontline combat vessels.

America’s most numerous warship type is the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, a $2 billion, 10,000-ton vessel capable of independently sailing thousands of miles from its home port while carrying scores of long-range missiles.

Today the U.S. Navy possesses around 100 Burkes and other large surface warships. The Chinese fleet operates around 80 ships of similar size and armament to the American destroyers. Unsurprisingly, the Russian fleet includes just 29 such ships.

Geography favors Russia’s approach to naval warfare. Where the United States must deploy ships across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in order to wage America’s wars and China is steadily expanding its own influence across the Pacific, Russia’s conflicts for the most part are along its own land borders.

The Russian fleet can easily reach from Europe to Asia while still deploying from home ports. Russian territory stretches from Europe’s Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait, where the Russian mainland and the U.S. state of Alaska are only 55 miles apart.

The high cost of big, long-range ships has made it difficult for the United States to quickly grow its fleet. President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to increase the size of the U.S. Navy to as many as 355 frontline ships. But the Navy recently admitted it could take until the 2050s to reach that goal. In favoring small, short-range ships that cost tens of millions of dollars apiece instead of billions, Russia can grow its own fleet more quickly than the United States can do.

In recent years the Russian fleet has directly supported ground operations in Crimea while putting pressure on NATO along the alliance’s eastern flank. Moscow’s fleet is busiest in the confined, relatively shallow waters of the Black, Baltic, and Caspian seas. Russian warships rarely venture more than a few hundred miles from their home ports.

But the ships don’t have to sail far in order to give a major boost to Russian military operations. In early 2014 Russian ships quickly cut off and wiped out the Ukrainian navy in the Black Sea as part of Moscow’s invasion of Crimea.

The short range of Russian warships helps to explain why Putin was keen to intervene in Syria starting in late 2015. As part of the intervention on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Putin’s fleet gained access to Russia’s only ports on the Mediterranean Sea, giving Russian ships their only direct access to southern Europe’s maritime borders.

In October 2015, Russian corvettes sailing on the Caspian Sea fired 26 Kalibr missiles at targets in Syria, more than a thousand miles away. It was the combat debut for the 30-foot-long, precision-guided munition. “This is Russia demonstrating on a global stage that it has a lot of reach,” one U.S. military official said of the missile strike.

Corvettes armed with Kalibrs “can form a small fleet that would be able to come close to an enemy, deliver a missile strike and immediately leave the area,” Russian state media noted.

The Kalibr, a rough analogue to the U.S. Navy’s own Tomahawk cruise missile, is central to Moscow’s efforts to build a fleet of small but powerful warships. “Why build a huge surface combatant with all the complexity and expense that entails?” Ballantyne asked rhetorically. “You can churn out smaller vessels with Kalibr missiles and then distribute them to your crucial spheres of interest.”

Russian naval modernization efforts are only just beginning, following years of inadequate funding and industrial dysfunction. “We will continue taking measures aimed at strengthening and developing the fleet, making it better equipped,” Putin said.

As the Russian fleet rebuilds, small ships with big missiles will probably become an even more significant part of the overall force. With a single corvette costing just $30 million, “it’s easy to keep shipyards full of corvette and light frigate orders,” Kofman said.

LITTLE RED CORVETTES? Russia’s Building Warships Faster Than America—or even China

One thing that surprised me is construction pace of Bykov-class patrol ship. They are being built at decent speed. One of the reasons for it is probably lighter equipment load but whatever.

walle83 wrote:Is it any news of the old Kerch cruiser in the BSF? Will it be scrapped after the fire or could it see some more active duty?

Singular_Transform wrote:http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14648/this-video-about-the-navys-decaying-shipyards-makes-its-355-ships-goal-seem-laughable

...Regardless, these facilities are an embarrassment. We expect to see this type of thing in Russia, not in facilities that are critical to supporting the world's most powerful and technologically advanced Navy. ...