Project 971: Akula class

Yes, who did it, who helped cover it up.

Probably easiest to follow the money.

Technically you are talking about the Schuka-B or Bars Class as mentioned in the thread title.

The Akula class is called Typhoon in the west and is a very large third gen SSBN.

For the state of the Navy try here:

http://russian-ships.info/eng/today/

And it should be kept in mind that different upgrades will suit different vessels in different ways.

For instance to be a research vessel has certain requirements that are not as demanding as the requirements to be a successful SSN or SSBN or SSGN in 2025.

Well, lets fact it, most attack subs will likely have vertical launch tubes for Kalibre fitted, so there wont be SSNs... just SSGNs most likely.

ASW is incredibly expensive and requires a lot of very specialist skills to actually be effective as well.

They will know it has been there for weeks because they probably tracked it leaving port on the surface and probably could guess what its likely mission was... especially if its mission included listening to certain activities and probing defences.

Needless to say you have a few sensors detect a presence of "something" and then you detect a presence of "something" somewhere else a few days or weeks later, and then finally after a couple of weeks you bump into a Bars sub it is not rocket science to put two and two together... especially given the scrutiny of the Russian fleet... their exits and returns to port... if there are only three or four Bars subs on patrol and one is in the Indian ocean and two are somewhere else but you can't account for the other one...

Of course it is one thing for this sort of thing to happen, it is another to release this information to the public.

I rather suspect the reason for releasing this information was to save their budgets from cuts, or in fact get increases of funding.

Trillions are spent on making subs quiet... if that wasn't effective then they wouldn't bother.

I would suspect it was true because the consequences of being caught lying in an attempt to get extra funding would be rather worse than saying nothing at all and losing the funding.... ie higher ups would lose their cushy well paid jobs which is what they really care about.

And nor would they release such information.

The most important information you can have is what information the enemy has about you.

The Military doesn't spend money for fun.

A good example is tank gun ammo. There is no prize for having the most powerful tank ammo. Developing ammo and deploying it costs money so your ammo is generally designed to penetrate your primary enemies tank frontal armour from 2,000m most of the time.
The job of the people building your tank is to make sure that your tanks frontal armour will stop the enemies best tank round and most of his missiles within reason.

The US will not bother to develop armour for the Abrams that will stop the 317kg shaped charge warhead of the Kh-29 family of medium missiles because no level of mobile armour will help... these missiles are designed to undermine the concrete foundations of bridges and other heavy structures so no level of tank armour will be good enough.

The point is that if the US had never learned about the performance of several ERAs the Soviets and Russians have developed they would not have developed the higher penetration rounds that they have because there would have been no requirement.

Equally the Russians, if they had money during the 1990s would have already had longer rod penetrators in service as they were needed. They have developed a larger calibre gun to allow for future armour protection increases in western tanks but have decided there is room for further growth with 125mm rounds that will make it effective for the foreseeable future.

Improving ammo is not cheap... it is actually quite expensive and includes production of enough rounds to get it into service in significant numbers to make the cost worth it, but it is still cheaper than introducing a new calibre.

A new larger calibre would make guided rounds and HEAT rounds more effective.

In other words what I am saying if the Russians can detect and track new US subs it is not in their interests for the US to know that because it might be some trick they are using that could easily be defeated.

I remember one time reading about a western force that transmitted IFF signals to enemy aircraft back when IFF systems were new. They could use the IFF responses to detect the aircraft type and location without using radar. IFF systems got more sophisticated and only started responding to specific signals... but you see what I mean about sneaky tricks?