Well, Ain't It Ironic?

 NATO planes shooting down 404 drones in Latvia's air space. 

And they better, because these are Baltic statelets and Finland who provided their air space to 404 while pretending that they know nothing. And then Russia issued warning and something changed. Of course, they will not admit it but Europe understands only big stick, Russia ran out carrots long time ago. Here is how these Baltic creeps feel themselves now. 

Next, is yet another chihuahua from Europe--Denmark--which wants to aid 404 and whose people live on a fanatical hatred of Russia (beats me, trying to rationalize this Danish obsession), but then again--this what Europe is in its death throes, which change nothing in the outcome of the greatest geopolitical shift in the last half-millennium. 

Meanwhile, Admiral Nakhimov is completing her final sea trials and soon will rejoin the fleet. 

As was stated not for once, the fate of Peter the Great is yet to be decided, but it looks like she will be decommissioned. Considering the tempo of the development of hypersonic weaponry in Russia and the start of building of "Super" Gorshkovs (pr. 22350M) with 64 (strike missiles) + 32 (Air Defense missiles) 3S14 UKSK cells and capable of 400 km range air defense. Building two (or even three) such ships for the same price of modernizing Peter makes more sense. Pr. 22350 will have a displacement of around (give and take) 9,000 tons and will have no rivals in terms of strike power and air defense with the exception of said Admiral Nakhimov. To understand why analogy to DDGs of Arleigh Burk-class is erroneous, enough to say that in terms of the range of its land-attack weapon (3M14M, Kalibr-M) it can strike at 4,500 km, while in terms of hypersonic arsenal--that's not even funny to compare. Superficial similarity in terms of the number of vertical cells is where it all ends. 

Some Nations Build ...

... Ferraris (and some of them like Pininfarina's 308 GTB are masterpieces), others make stunning watches. Russians cannot compete here, but they build nuclear missile cruisers instead. 

Nakhimov leaves for another round of sea trials today. The fate of Peter the Great? Oh boy! It is a difficult question. I personally didn't make my mind about it--part of it emotional, part of it--rational and operational. Very difficult to decide. 

Surprisingly Balanced ...

 ... and very good for average Joe in terms of describing the role. Albeit, keep in mind that Nakhimov will not sail alone and apart from own very impressive ASW suite, it will have a screen by other ships and likely a sub, it also has such AD elements as navalized Pantsir which proved its capabilities with flying colors against any targets in SMO and in Syria.  

The only thing which we will have to wait and see is the fate of Peter the Great. Admiral Sergei Avakyants (former Commander of the Pacific Fleet) sees no point in modernization of Peter the Great (in Russian), but others do. So, for now the fate of Peter the Great is in limbo. A lot will depend, I think, on how Nakhimov will perform at its first line duties. It is a fully netcentric machine (as are all Russia's frigates and corvettes) and its strike package is simply without rivals. 

Admiral Golovko Launches ...

 ... 3M22 Zircon at the land target 900 kilometers away. 

Target was destroyed. Meanwhile, this monster is back from the sea trials (tests, one of many coming) where for the first time it tried its propulsion. 

That's a whole lot of Zircons and other means of ... peaceful negotiations. 

1,500 kilometer range at M=10+, remember? I, of course, am not talking about 3M14M with 4,500 kilometer range. But those are classics land attack subsonic missiles, Nakhimov also carries very many of them.  

Meanwhile.

Iranian Air Force Yak-130 with R-73 under the wing. 

R-73M is a short range air-to-air missile with IR homing and the range of 40 kilometers. It is essentially a dog-fight missile but also can be used against ground targets. But that's not all. In major news which are ignored (for now) is yet another egg on the face for media, this time Russian, which reported that nuclear cruiser Admiral Nakhimov will not go to sea-trials this year... well, it just did degaussing and went to sea. The plant (shipyard) and then state sea trials start. Fully modernized Nakhimov carries 80 anti-ship and ground attack missiles. Many of them 3M22 Zircon.

David Axe As A Symptom.

David Axe is an idiot. I speak about this non-stop. As a person who is known for drawing comic books and once shown how events unfold on the ground in Afghanistan, where he got injured, his claim to military expertise is about the same as my claim to Hollywood fame, but that is American for ya. He goes under the title of "military journalist" and, as is characteristic for most journalists, has zero background in the subject he writes about. He is also very butt-hurt, because while he may be making decent living by selling military porn to teenage circle masturbators on shiny military toys, Axe doesn't know the difference between shit and shinola when it comes to military, not to mention Russian military, not to speak of Russian Navy, of which he has as much expertise as I have in quantum physics. 

So, this boy decides not only to pollute tabloids such as The National Interest with his (lack) of any expertise, he ejaculated a truck load of his BS onto Forbes' pages. As a journalist and a professional ignoramus, David Axe loves shiny big things. So, he unloads. 

The Russian navy just got a lot closer to doubling, from one to two, its fleet of Kirov-class nuclear battlecruisers. But don’t get too excited. Even with two giant cruisers, the Russian navy still is outgunned by its main rival.

I don't know what Axe counts as "main rival" but I assume that he means the US Navy. But here comes a fact he, as a professional BSer, doesn't know. I know, the kid never had access to serious classified documents in his life (for that one has to have a very good level clearance, I did) but even in the Soviet times Soviet Navy wasn't trying to "outgun" the US Navy in a traditional sense. Soviet Navy, as well as current Russian Navy has its main objective as sinking US Navy once it gets close to Russia's shores. And in there, the US Navy is not just "outgunned" by Russians, it has no means of defending any of its assets because the United States as a whole lost the arms race in modern strike systems. But the kid doesn't know the difference. Then he produces, butt-hurt, BS again:

Of course, Russia’s dilapidated shipyards aren’t actually capable anymore of building new ships on the scale of the Kirovs.  

I can feel his pain. But let's see. Just recently, the wharf which has built nuclear cruiser Peter the Great, that is Baltic Shipyard, is actually quite proficient in building large displacement platforms, while producing nuclear powered ships, such as nuclear ice-breakers, which are larger still in terms of displacement than project 1144 cruisers. I don't know under what stone this moron slept for the last 10 or so years, but here is a video of backward 33 000 ton displacement nuclear ice-breaker (a series, mind you, one) Arktika being tugged from "dilapidated" Baltic Shipyard, to start her trials. 

Here is the report on the start of construction of the Lider-class nuclear ice-breaker, whose displacement is around 70,000 tons, which is, just to give some perspective, exactly a displacement of the Royal Navy's newest aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and is about the same as a standard displacement of decommissioned in 2007 USS John Kennedy aircraft carrier.  

But David Axe, being a product of American education doesn't know numbers and has issues with basic arithmetic. Of course, he never heard about Zvezda shipyard at Russia's Far East. Yes, also "dilapidated", even before being fully operational after effectively being rebuilt into a new mammoth wharf.  But Axe should know that Russia has already launched first of 12+ Aframax-class tankers (4 additional are already in works) and the dead-weight of these ships is 114, 000 tons. 

But, I guess, our "expert" here is not following the news. But, unlike arithmetic, David Axe has no issues with naval tactics and operations because he simply doesn't know any of them but that doesn't prevent his from writing a teenager level crap like this:

The U.S. fleet can carry around 12,000 offensive missiles. Russia’s fleet packs no more than 3,300 similar missiles. And that number could fall as more large, old warships decommission and smaller ships take their place. Admiral Nakhimov’s return only delays that contraction.

Obviously, Axe doesn't understand the issue of "leaker" (that requires a serious background in math and operational research) and that to deploy 12,000 US subsonic, slow missiles requires a bit more than launching them simultaneously from wherever those carriers of those missiles will be deployed. But Axe's basic operations' knowledge and experience, as I already stated, is non-existent, so we cannot really blame him--ignorance is a bliss. And, of course, them comes this issue of comparison, again, and if Axe thinks that M=0.85 Harpoon or same for LRASM or Norwegian NSM  is the same as M=2.8 by P-800 Oniks, let alone M=4.9 by X-32, not to speak of M=9 for Zircon or Kinzhal, then I have a bridge to sell him. 

In general, US media long ago became a joke, as did their "expert community" which is only good for discussing Beltway rumors or, in case of Axe, pretend that they know something while drawing comic books and inventing self-medicating BS for the consumption of the similar ignoramuses as themselves. And that is why, I think, the US today tries to "extend" START (hint--it will not extend it) by including in it Russia's hypersonic weapons, including of operational-tactical variety, like Kinzhal. And why, one asks, the United States wants those weapons to be included into START negotiations?

Russia is uninterested in broadening the New START treaty to cover new weapons, the country’s ambassador to the United States said Monday. That’s a blow to the last remaining major arms control agreement between the two original nuclear powers. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires in 2021, governs specific nuclear weapons belonging to the United States and Russia — essentially, the ones that existed when the agreement went into effect eight years ago. But Russia has been developing new nuclear weapons and delivery systems such as the Poseidon nuclear-armed submarine drone, the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, and new hypersonic missiles. “I want, ideally, all nuclear weapons to be part of New START, not just the ones that are in the Treaty now,” Gen. John Hyten, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.

Well, I have the answer for this Axe-dude, because US "outguns" Russian Navy so much, that it takes a single Poseidon, even with conventional warhead, or 2-4 Kinzhals or 3M22 Zircons to guarantee a Pkill=0.99 for any US Navy's CVN and I mean not a soft kill, but a complete destruction and sinking. Whole CBG might take more missiles, but for that the arsenal of high supersonic missiles is more than enough. Now, can you imagine what it takes to explain to Mr. Axe what "outgunning" means, what math goes into it, and how this whole thing is calculated. Ah, yes, one should attend serious officer schools to get that right and, surprise-surprise, that requires a lot more effort and talent than drawing comic books and being "military journalist". How this Axe-dude whose military ignorance is startling, wormed himself into the US MSM "military" sphere is one of a complete mystery, unlike it was the rise of a insurance agent with B.A. in literature, whose mediocre, at best, writing and wet fantasies were dragged to the top of US Cold War "literature" by the efforts of then Secretary of the Navy John Lehman (and whatever agencies were behind him) to justify his 600-ship Navy. I, of course, am talking about late Tom Clancy. But then again, we all know that the Top Gun movies are documentaries.  

About Zircon (3M22) Yet Again.....

It is really becoming redundant to talk about it, but I will state it anyway, yet again: we are in the age of missiles. Yes, aircraft carriers are magnificent ships and they carry with them a certain, fairly high, level of prestige for those who operate them but they are....drum roll...not the future of the naval warfare. They stopped being that once the range of the anti-shipping missile became comparable with the range of the carrier launched aircraft. Once Soviet Union started launching these missiles from submerged submarines--the game was over. As Commanders Joseph A. Gattuzo and Lori J. Tanner (both carrier aviators with enormous experience) stated in their Naval Forces In The New Century: 

"Money spent furthering manned aircraft technologies and programs—the CVNX (proposed Nimitz-class carrier replacement) being one of them—is like polishing cannonballs so they will fly a little farther."

 Original by Gattuzo And Tanner
 

So, now Russia announced what have been known for a while: that Russian Navy is about to procure hyper-sonic 3M22 anti-shipping missile known also as Zircon.

Zirkon For Russian Navy  

A lot of rumors circulate about this missile but what is known more or less for sure is the fact that this missile has a speed in excess of Mach=5 and the range varying anywhere from 500 to 1000 kilometers. The procurement of this missile signifies two major facts:

1. Russian material science is pretty good if it ensured that this missile is capable of sustaining the extreme temperatures associated with such speed at very low profiles of flight;

2. The problem of sensors, namely radar head (seeker), operating in a plasma environment, which is the result of this speed, have been resolved. 

These are really bad news for aircraft carrier "trade-unions" (using Elmo Zumwalt's definition) both in US and in Russia. The reason being almost guaranteed inability of current and near-future air defense systems to deal with this threat. It is one thing to intercept ballistic high flying target at the ranges of 100s of kilometers, totally another is to do so in the case of a sea-skimmer which flies with the speed of about a mile a second and whose detection is effectively limited by the radio-horizon, which, depending on the height of the radar antenna and the altitude of said Zirkon, doesn't leave much time at all, if any, to develop a firing solution. Depending on these and other meteorological and radio atmospheric factors the range could vary anywhere from 20 to 40 miles. Obviously, there is always the issue of the AD screen, with ships in the task groups positioned away from the main target, which is carrier, and, of course there are patrols at the remote edges of the Carrier Battle Group. Well, doesn't matter--there are simply no means today, nor there will be any tomorrow, capable to reliably intercept this kind of weapons. Yes, I know, I know, those almighty lasers and other blasters but even they, those mythical weapons which exist mostly in the demonstration videos and the minds of enthusiasts, are not the answer. Why so, I will not discuss it here. Because after all, it is about Zircon and once the first hull capable of carrying this missile (or rather many of them), modernized Admiral Nakhimov hits the waves in 2018 after her modernization (with Peter The Great planned to do so in 2022), the naval warfare as we know it will cease to exist officially. The age of true Distributed Lethality will be upon us, while aircraft carriers will have to change drastically or be relegated to the role of the museum exhibits, for those which will survive.  Tactical, Operational, Strategic and Economic realities, when salvo of 4-8 missiles, with the total cost of about 10 million dollars can sink 20+ billion dollars of hardware, not to speak of denying it the objectives, became such that they are impossible to be ignored anymore. 

Zircons, Onyxes and Kalibrs on the move. 

  

If It Is True...

What Russian Internet is abuzz since this morning, then the radical change of whole naval paradigm is much closer than even most optimistic prognoses predicted. This morning Russian media broke news of  nuclear missile cruiser Admiral Nakhimov, which is currently undergoing deep modernization,  (after the list of state purchases for this modernization was published) to be armed with newest hyper-sonic ASM 3M22, aka Zirkon. 

Nakhimov To Be Armed With Zirkon 

Very little is known about this missile other than it is true hyper-sonic (M=5 +) High Precision Weapon and that it will change naval warfare drastically. The rumors about this missile were circulating for some years and some of them were absolute rubbish. What was clear, though, was the fact that Russia was well on her way in the advanced hyper-sonic R&D. This, at some point of time was confirmed by none other than Dmitri Rogozin. Procurement of the ASM, against which no defense exists, is a true game changer. I will not go into the details of this game-changing but the future of naval warfare looks very different from hyper-sonic vantage point than it was drawn by many contemporary military thinkers. We'll wait and see.....