Romeo Squared

Defense with a Baltic edge

Posts by Anders Puck Nielsen

Ukraine adopts warship pennant number system from NATO

By Leave a Comment

Ukraine has adopted NATO’s standard system for numbering warships. This is the originally British pennant number system that most NATO countries use. By this system the number is preceded by a letter to identify the kind of ship (A = Auxiliary, F = Frigates or corvettes, P = Patrol vessels, M = Minelayers or mine hunters, L = Landing ships, etc.). That writes the Russian defense blog bmpd.ru with a link to ukrmilitary.com.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine made their own system of numbering warships whereby all numbers were preceded by the letter “U”. However, at a celebration in Odesa on 29 April 2018 it was noticed that some ships have changed numbers. Some patrol boats now show the letter “P”, and some auxiliary vessels have the letter “A”. The numbers themselves are unchanged, so only the letters are new.

This is a possible source of future confusion. The Ukrainian training vessels Chygyryn, Smila, and Nova Kakhovka have received the numbers A540, A541, and A542. Incidentally these are also the pennant numbers of the Danish royal yacht Dannebrog (A540), and the hydrographic surveying ships Birkholm (A541) and Fyrholm (A542).

NATO’s pennant number system was originally invented in the British Royal Navy in 1910. It was revised in 1948, and in 1954 it was adopted as a common system for the European NATO countries. However, it is not really a NATO standard. The United States, Canada, and some countries that became members after 1992 still use national systems.

15,000 troops make Siil 2018 the largest exercise ever in Estonia

By Leave a Comment

Exercise Siil 2018 is unfolding in Estonia these days, and it is the largest military exercise since the country regained independence in 1991. More than 15,000 troops take part including 2,000 allied troops from 15 countries. Previously the record was held by Siil 2015 where 13,000 troops participated.

The international units in the exercise come from U.K., U.S., Denmark, Germany, Poland, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Georgia, Ukraine, and Ireland.

hedgehog
A hedgehog.

Beginning on May 2 and lasting through May 14 the exercise takes place in three stages. On May 2-4 the units will form and prepare for battle. Estonia is mobilizing reserves for the exercise so there is a bit of work to do before their units are ready. During the second phase on May 5-7 the 1st and 2nd Brigades will train together with the volunteers from the Estonian Defense League Kaitseliit (EDL). This time will also be used to prepare minefields and to deploy anti-tank weapons.

The last stage on May 8-12 will be a bigger war scenario where the 2nd Brigade and the EDL forces will defend Estonia against an adversary played by 1st Brigade and the NATO forces from the Enhanced Forward Presence battle group. This part of the exercise also involves military maneuvers in Northern Latvia.

Siil literally means hedgehog in Estonian. Supposedly the hedgehog symbolizes a small animal which can offer substantial resistance if threatened. Personally, I mostly think of them as cute semi-domestic animals that are frequently run over by cars at night. I would have expected the military planners to come up with something more fearsome. The Estonian nature also features bears, wolves, and lynx, so there are several impressive animals to choose from. Heck, even “tick” would have made for a more terrifying name than hedgehog.

The exercise focuses on the land component of territorial defense, but some 20 aircraft also take part. In addition to military troops, there is participation from the police, the Border Guard, and the Rescue Board.

More than 30 observers from foreign countries and organizations will monitor the exercise, including from Russia and Belarus.

Nuclear Notebook publishes status on Russian nuclear forces, 2018

By Leave a Comment

Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris have published an examination of Russia’s nuclear forces in their Nuclear Notebook column in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This is a very comprehensive overview of Russia’s nuclear weapons. It includes informed estimates of the numbers of both launchers and warheads, and there are nice status updates on Russia’s different nuclear capable platforms. For example one can learn that Russia has a total of 4,350 nuclear warheads, of which 1,600 are deployed and ready for use, and 2,750 are in reserve. To this comes 2,500 retired warheads awaiting dismantlement.

Russia is in the midst of a modernization program of its nuclear forces. This was well overdue, as many of their nuclear weapons were getting old and needed replacement. I think some Western observers exaggerate the significance of the modernization program. For some this has led to almost hysterical interpretations of Russia’s intentions. I think that the right way to understand Russia’s nuclear weapons program is that they want to maintain the capabilities that they already have.

Dnepr Launch vehicle
Drepr launch vehicle which carries the SS-18 *Satan* ICBM. According to Kristensen and Norris, Russia has 46 of these missiles with up to 460 warheads. Photo: ISC Kosmotras.

Russia is a nuclear great power and intends to remain as such. A conflict between nuclear powers like the United States and Russia will be fought with nuclear weapons. Assuming that a confrontation could be held at the non-nuclear level is naive.

So where some analysts interpret Russia’s nuclear posture as increasingly aggressive, I will point to two other movements that I find more accurate:

  1. Russia invests in the development of nuclear weapons that can defeat a Western missile defense. The goal is to maintain a second strike capability that Russia has had for many years, but which they fear they can lose if the missile defense technology gets good enough.
  2. Fundamentally the new technology for Russia is in the non-nuclear field. Long-range high-precision missiles give Russia more options than nuclear escalation. At the same time this raises the nuclear threshold and makes armed confrontation more likely because the (illusion of) surgically accurate control of destruction makes it easy for politicians to resort to using such weapons.

The Russian nuclear forces, 2018 review includes a summary of the different positions in the debate about Russia’s nuclear strategy. Unfortunately there is an inclination to the views in the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, which I think gets many things wrong about Russia. But with the two points above in mind, I think that Kristensen and Norris’ column is an outstanding reference about the state of Russia’s nuclear weapons.

What to expect for naval parade in Saint Petersburg on 29 July 2018

By Leave a Comment

Russia celebrates Navy Day on the last Sunday of July, and last year a new tradition was established with a grand naval parade in Saint Petersburg. Ships from the Baltic, Northern, Mediterranean, and the Pacific fleets and from the Caspian Flotilla take part in the Grand Naval Parade.

In 2017 the parade got a lot of attention, and Vladimir Putin personally took part in the celebrations. Of particular interest was the participation of the Akula-class (Typhoon) submarine Dmitry Donskoy and the battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy. China also sent a few ships for the parade and a subsequent naval exercise in the Baltic.

Putin on Naval Day 2017
Grand Naval Parade in Saint Petersburg 2017. Photo: Kremlin.ru.

Now details are starting to emerge about the program for the 2018 show. The parade will include 41 ships, 25 aircraft, and more than 4,000 troops. Among the more notable participants are an Antey-class submarine (Oscar II class) and the missile cruiser Marshal Ustinov. There will also be a display of the newly commissioned missile corvette Uragan (Karakurt-class) and the frigate Admiral Makarov.

So although we will not see the world’s biggest submarine or battlecruiser this year, there should be plenty of other things to look at when the grand naval parade takes place on 29 July 2018.

Lessons for Western armies from the war in Ukraine

By Leave a Comment

Liam Collins has an interesting look at the lessons armies can learn from the war in Ukraine on the website of The Association of the United States Army.

He describes the war in Ukraine as “World War I with technology” – a kind of frozen situation where the greatest threats facing a Ukrainian soldier are snipers and Russian artillery, but where modern technology is applied in that process.

Collins identifies several things that armies can learn about fighting a near-pear adversary. Some of these are lessons that need to be relearned after almost a generation of counter-insurgency operations, and others are truly new.

The list includes:

  • Electronic warfare: Russia has deployed a range of EW technologies. Armies need to relearn to minimize radio transmissions, and tactical operation centers must run their antennas hundreds of meters away to avoid artillery fire. This will make communications much more complicated, and commanders will have to get comfortable with not knowing the status of their units at all times. Soldiers need to rely less on GPS, so skills related to navigation with a map and a compass will be important again.
  • Information operations: The West needs to get used to information operations again. 1 The fact that Russia has targeted individual soldiers and their families creates a new challenge in information operations.
  • Air superiority: We can no longer expect undisputed air superiority.
  • Camouflage: With the proliferation of UAVs, camouflage is essential for survival. A unit may find itself in a rain of artillery shells just minutes after being spotted with a drone.
  • Cyber: Russian hackers have been extremely active in Ukraine. The list of networks and technologies that have been penetrated is impressive. This is a challenge for an army which is used to sharing a lot of information on many different networks.
  • UAVs: Developments in UAV and counter-UAV technology will push the boundaries of our understanding of the concept of air superiority.
  • Dense urban terrain: The West needs to get better at managing urban warfare.

The article is well worth reading. It is the first piece in a recurring column that the Modern War Institute at West Point will make where they examine the implications of “modern war”.

  1. Collins seems to be of the opinion that the West has not conducted information operations since The Cold War. I think this is a problematic assumption. But I do agree that we largely stopped preparing our own societies against the information operations of our adversaries. ↩

Delivery of Russia’s first Borei-A class submarine postponed to 2019

By Leave a Comment

The delivery of Russia’s first Borei-A class nuclear submarine Knyaz Vladimir has been postponed to 2019. The construction of the submarine began in 2012, and at first it was expected to enter service in 2017. Then it was postponed to 2018, but now it is clear that it will take even more time before the submarine is ready. That reports FlotProm.

Borei-A is an improved development of the Borei-class. The first Borei-class submarine, Yuriy Dolgorukiy, entered service in 2013, but the construction started already in 1996. There are now three operational Borei-class submarines in the Russian navy, and five Borei-A class ships are under construction.

Borei class
Borei class submarine. Photo: mil.ru.

The Borei class is a nuclear powered submarine which carries 16 Bulava intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. They are the cornerstone in Russia’s future submarine based nuclear deterrent, replacing the Kalmar-class, Delfin-class, and Akula-class submarines (NATO-names Delta-III, Delta IV, and Typhoon).

Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has earlier announced that Russia is also working on a Borei-B class, but that is still in early development.

Delays are a common phenomenon in Russian warship construction. Current examples include the landing ship Ivan Gren and the frigate Admiral Gorshkov. Ivan Gren will be commissioned on 9 May 2018 after being under construction since 2004. Admiral Gorshkov has been under construction since 2006. It was originally expected to enter service in 2011, but the frigate is still not ready for duty. The latest prognosis is that the navy can take over Admiral Gorshkov in August.

Who cheated whom in Russian-British submarine duel?

By Leave a Comment

After the missile attack in Syria on 13 April, The Times reported that Russian naval forces successfully managed to suppress a British nuclear submarine which prevented it from launching its Tomahawk missiles. Supposedly, one or two Kilo-class submarines, two frigates, and an anti-submarine aircraft made it too difficult and dangerous for the British Astute-class nuclear submarine to move within firing distance from its targets in Syria. Allegedly the British submarine got support from American P-8 Orion maritime patrol aircraft which were tasked to track Russian surface and subsurface naval units.

Unsurprisingly, Russian media picked up the story. However, they cited the British story and did not provide more details from Russian sources.

Astute submarine
Astute class submarine. Photo: Royal Navy.

The whole story is a bit strange, and Michael Peck asked the apt question in The National Interest, Did Russia’s Diesel Submarines Really Hunt Down a British Nuclear Sub? Peck’s analysis focuses mostly on the technical feasibility of such an endeavor. Traditional military calculation would argue that the nuclear submarine has the best odds in a duel, even though the Kilo-class is a worthy competitor. Peck concludes that we just don’t know whether the Russian ships actually tracked down the British submarine, and that we also don’t know whether this prevented the British submarine from launching its weapons.

My take on this is that I don’t think the point of the submarine was to fire any missiles in the first place. Often a submarine is deployed not to deliver weapons but to keep the adversary busy. The mere knowledge that there is a submarine in the area forces the opponent to commit resources to finding it.

I guess that the United Kingdom sent the Astute submarine to keep track of the Russian ships in the area. A well placed news leak made sure that everyone knew about the presence of the submarine. Russian threats to shoot down both missiles and launch sites in case of an attack on Syria didn’t matter much because the submarine wouldn’t be a launch site.

That would have made it the job of the submarine commander to draw as many resources as possible from the Russian pursuers. In other words to be challenging yet achievable.

I don’t know whether this is what happened. But it does seem more plausible than the notion that the Royal Navy hit a streak of bad luck and had their mission blown by an unfortunate news leak and a masterfully executed Russian ASW-operation.

Lessons from Ukraine’s decision to give up nuclear weapons

By Leave a Comment

Mariana Budjeryn and Polina Sinovets have an interesting look on Ukraine’s decision to give up their nuclear weapons in War on the Rocks.

The Soviet nuclear arsenal was distributed among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus and Kazakhstan quickly agreed to hand over their nuclear weapons to Russia, and after some hesitation Ukraine followed suit in 1994. This makes Ukraine an example of a successful nonproliferation effort, as in the end only one nuclear state emerged from the Soviet collapse.

Budjeryn and Sinovets identify three insights from Ukraine’s denuclearization that may be relevant in today’s nonproliferation debates.

  1. Don’t focus too much on supply-side drivers for nuclear acquisition: Ukraine inherited some nuclear weapons, but they were tied into the old Soviet command system, and it would take some work to develop an independent nuclear capability. Ukraine also inherited substantial know-how and the military-industrial capacity to complete such a project, but there just wasn’t the political will to choose to do so.
  2. Nuclear weapons are nice, but a good reputation is better: Ukraine aspired to become a part of the Western-led international order. If they had insisted on building a nuclear capacity, they would undoubtedly have been subject to sanctions and international isolation which would have been counterproductive to the country’s desire to become a liberal democracy. The lesson is that states not only relinquish nuclear weapons because they want to get or avoid something, but also because they want to become a certain kind of state. So if we want nonproliferation, we should not forget to encourage those voices in potential nuclear states who see the benefits of joining the international community.
  3. Not everyone thinks about nuclear weapons as a deterrent: Analysts in both America and Russia often become prisoners of the concepts and modes of thinking that are familiar to them. But traditional deterrence theory has difficulty explaining why anybody would renounce a nuclear option. For Ukraine’s leadership, the nuclear weapons were rather seen as an entitlement to a fair deal than as a deterrence. The military-industrial lobby focused on keeping the production lines busy, but it didn’t matter much whether the missiles were nuclear or conventional. And the military thinking in Ukraine did not support the idea of nuclear deterrence as a credible road ahead. Instead of focusing on nuclear weapons as a possible insurance against a conflict with Russia, the Ukrainian leadership saw nuclear weapons as inapplicable in those kinds of conflict that could arise.

Finally, Budjeryn and Sinovets conclude that future nonproliferation deals will be much more expensive than with Ukraine. For any prospective nuclear state, it is hard to look at Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas as anything but a violation of the security commitments that were pledged to Ukraine in exchange for denuclearization. So it must be expected that future deals will come at a higher cost and will require much more robust security commitments.

Ships from Russian Baltic Fleet rotate on deployment

By Leave a Comment

The Russian Baltic Fleet rotates some ships on deployment to the Mediterranean.

The frigate Yaroslav Mudry and the tanker Lena have left the Baltic and will join the Russian maritime forces in the Mediterranean. Yaroslav Mudry is a Neustrashimyy-class frigate, which has been in service since 2009. The last long deployment of Yaroslav Mudry was in 2016.

At the same time, the landing ship Minsk is returning from deployment. Minsk is a Ropucha-class ship from 1984, and it left Kaliningrad on 4 October 2017. During its deployment the ship has participated in the unofficially termed operation “Syrian Express” which brings logistical supplies to the Russian forces on the Khmeimim Air Base and to the Syrian government forces.

Minsk conducted a port stay in Lisbon in Portugal before setting course for home on Wednesday 18 April.

Leadership culture and a reckless instructor led to U.S. Navy plane crash

By Leave a Comment

The U.S. Navy has finished investigations of a plane crash with a T-45C Goshawk aircraft from the Training Squadron 7. The accident happened on 1 October in Tennessee. That reports Navy Times.

Investigators found that the crash happened as the result of recklessness on the part of the pilot-instructor. The instructor flat-hatted just before the crash, which means to fly low in an airplane in a reckless manner for the thrill of it.

The official report found that the instructor was overly confident, nonchalant, and aggressive at low altitude training with limited awareness of the performance capabilities of the aircraft.

At the time of the accident, the instructor had decided to deviate from the approved route and simply follow the terrain. 10 seconds before the crash he directed the student to perform a hard right turn at low altitude. Unfortunately the speed was too slow for the rising terrain in front of them, and the attempted recover maneuver was beyond the limitations of the aircraft which entered into a stall. Due to the low altitude there was not enough reaction time for the aircrew to eject safely.

I find it commendable that the report points to cultural explanations for the crash. The reckless instructor was himself a product of a leadership culture which allowed the safety standards to slip. Apparently it had become commonplace in the squadron that instructors lacked sufficient qualifications, and that students were challenged with techniques that were too advanced for them to handle.