The Cuban Missile Crisis was the first large-scale clash between the Soviet and American fleets, in which weapons tracking, pursuit and the willingness of participants to use weapons against each other, including nuclear, were carried out.
As you know, the crisis ended in favor of the United States, which ensured that all Soviet transport ships that were at sea at the time of Kennedy's decision to impose the blockade returned back, and missiles, bombers and fighter aircraft were withdrawn from Cuba. The Americans themselves removed the Jupiter missiles from Turkey with a delay, and soon deployed the George Washington SSBN on alert in the Mediterranean Sea. They were going to withdraw "Jupiters" from Turkey anyway due to their obsolescence (they did not know about it in the USSR). The only thing the USSR really achieved during the crisis was a guarantee that the United States would not invade Cuba. This, of course, was an achievement, but the task was more ambitious - both the immediate withdrawal of the Jupiters from Turkey and the organization of a permanent and open presence of the USSR Armed Forces in Cuba. It turned out only with guarantees.
Today, there is a consensus among serious researchers that a more intensive use of the fleet would help the USSR more effectively achieve what it wants from the United States. What is important is that the Americans think so, those who look at the world through the eyes of the enemy and think like him. This means that it really was so, at least with a high degree of probability.
Today, when Russia's naval power is literally at the bottom, and its policy in the world is still very active, it is more important than ever for us to learn how to use the navy correctly, both from a purely military point of view and from a political point of view.
Consider the options that the USSR had during the Cuban missile crisis.
Prerequisites for failure
Elementary logic calls for considering military operations on other continents in conditions when an adversary with a navy, including naval ones, is trying to disrupt their conduct. This is understandable, so that tankers and infantrymen began to act, they must get to the theater of operations. If this is possible only by sea, and if the enemy's fleet opposes this, then it is necessary that its fleet provide transportation in one way or another. In war - by conquering domination at sea, in peacetime - by preventing the enemy's fleet from acting against its transports by demonstrating force or otherwise.
This understanding was lacking in planning the transfer of troops to Cuba.
Let's remember the stages of preparation.
By a decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU of May 20, 1962, preparations began for the transfer of troops to Cuba. The operation was planned by the General Staff, it was named "Anadyr".
The key to the success of the operation, the General Staff took the secrecy of the transport of troops.
It was also assumed that a Soviet squadron would be deployed in Cuba consisting of 2 cruisers of project 68-bis (flagship - "Mikhail Kutuzov"), 4 destroyers, including 2 missile (pr. 57-bis), division missile submarines (7 ships of project 629), brigades of torpedo submarines (4 ships of project 641), 2 floating bases, 12 missile boats of project 183R and a detachment of support vessels (2 tankers, 2 dry cargo ships and a floating workshop).
Initially, it was assumed that the transport ships would go on their own, without attracting attention to themselves. No escort. And so it happened, and at first the secrecy paid off.
In September, the Americans finally realized that something was wrong here - Soviet transports scurried across the Atlantic with unparalleled intensity. On September 19, 1962, an American destroyer intercepted the first Soviet transport, the dry cargo ship Angarles. American patrol aircraft began to fly over and photograph Soviet ships.
At this moment, it was necessary to bring in the surface forces. But on September 25, the Defense Council decided not to use surface ships in the operation.
The rest is known - after the blockade, the transport turned back, three of the four submarines that went to Cuba were found by the Americans and forced to surface.
The reasons for refusing to use NDT in that operation are still debated. In the domestic literature, one can find assertions that the secrecy of the transfer of troops would suffer, but it was already lost at that time. There are opinions of the military who were sure that they could not withstand a battle with the Americans. It was half-truth. And this will be discussed below. There is an opinion of American historians who are inclined to believe that Soviet sailors were unable to plan military operations in the open ocean. This is clearly not true.
Let's formulate a hypothesis. Surface ships were not used for a complex complex - attention - subjective reasons. It was based on Khrushchev's personal conviction that surface ships were outdated, the maniacal desire of the generals to crush the fleet under the ground forces (finally realized only under Serdyukov) and the natural pogrom of Russian naval thought in the 30s, accompanied by the execution of many leading military theorists … We will come back to this later, but for now let's look at what opportunities the USSR had at sea at the time of the crisis.
Cash Fleet
In any case, large ships are required for ocean operations; they are the means of giving combat stability to any naval group. How to adequately assess what ships the Navy could actually dispose of by the start of the Cuban missile crisis? And what could they give?
As you know, the Navy just by those years finished going through the "Khrushchev pogrom". It is worth assessing its scale.
We look at the statistics - that's what Khrushchev managed to destroy really valuable. Various pre-war trophy scrap metal is not counted. Also not taken into account "Stalingrad", which stopped building even before Khrushchev.
Yes, a serious pogrom. It's a shame how, in fact, the ships put into operation were just destroyed.
But what matters to us is what remains at the time of the decision to deploy troops to Cuba, right?
Here's what was in stock. Cruisers that were previously transferred to training cruisers were counted as combat ones, since they could be used in battle.
Here it is necessary to make a reservation - not all ships were combat-ready at the time of the decision. But - and this is an important point - before the start of the operation, most of them could have been returned to service, and even the coursework problems would have had time to pass. And some were already combat-ready.
Suppose that the USSR could use in an operation three cruisers of different projects from the Northern, Baltic and Black Sea fleets - only 9 units, of which, for example, 7 would belong to the 68bis project.
But besides cruisers, ships of other types are also needed, right? And here we have an answer. By that time, six Project 57bis destroyers were in service in the fleets in the European part of the USSR. With anti-ship missiles "Pike" as the main weapon. Whatever "Pike" was, and not to take it into account in their plans, the enemy simply could not.
And, of course, the destroyers of Project 56, which were the main naval ships in terms of numbers, capable of operating in ocean areas. The navy could allocate several dozen of these ships for the operation in any case. The fact that the ships were hopelessly outdated was irrelevant in this case, which will be discussed below.
What could these forces do?
If you rely on the knowledge of how the fleet works in principle, then first it was necessary to pull the American forces apart in different theaters of operations. And an example was in front of my eyes - you can simply count how many forces needed by the allies in the Pacific Ocean, the "Tirpitz" was pulling on itself in Norway. For example, the battleship "Washington" during the Battle of Midway was engaged in the protection of convoys in the USSR from "Tirpitz". But this battle could have gone completely differently, McCluskey was in many ways just lucky, like the Americans, in principle. What if not? Then even one battleship would be more than "out of place", but they were engaged in "containment" of "Tirpitz", and in fact … with the help of the Red Army, if we finally call a spade a spade.
Was this example available for study in 1962? More than. Are the others the same? There were a lot of them in that war. They were too.
So, it was possible to form a naval strike group from the Pacific Fleet and send it, for example, to Hawaii, demonstratively maneuvering ships near the border of the territorial waters of the United States, showing American aerial reconnaissance mines on destroyer decks, for example, approaching merchant ships, and so on.
Assuming that the USSR could use its Pacific forces to divert the attention of the United States (at least intelligence), we do not fall into the trap of afterthought, but operate only with the information that was available in those years. And the Pacific Fleet had the capabilities.
What's next? Then everything is very simple. Ship strike groups consisting of cruisers of projects 26bis, 68K and 68bis - all that could be prepared for the campaign by this moment, would have to be in combat service in readiness to immediately assemble scattered Soviet ships going into the Atlantic in convoys and escort them to Cuba, so that the Americans could not count on the fact that a single destroyer could intercept a Soviet ship and take it to their port.
It is one thing to force a dry cargo ship to stop. Another is to win a KUG in battle from a couple of artillery cruisers, a couple of missile destroyers and, yes, a dozen torpedo destroyers.
Let us examine the possibilities that the Americans had to defeat such groups at sea. Firstly, neither a separate cruiser, nor a couple of the problem would have been solved. Most likely, even a separate battleship. Since you would have to simultaneously conduct an artillery battle with cruisers, repel a strike with cruise missiles (no matter how bad they are), and then also shoot back from destroyers, even if they are outdated. In such a battle, torpedo destroyers became a significant factor - it is by themselves that they would not get close to a high-speed artillery ship, but to a "wounded" after an exchange of volleys and an anti-ship missile strike - easily. And this, too, would have to be taken into account.
Only a rather large detachment of warships could solve the problem of defeating such a convoy guard with an acceptable level of reliability and acceptable losses.
What if all Soviet forces acted as a single unit? Then, without options, it would be necessary to attract aircraft carriers, and more than one. Simply because, without nuclear bombs, air defense groups of several "Sverdlovs" and a dozen weaker ships would have to be pierced by rather large forces. Project 68bis cruisers were even shot down by target missiles based on the P-15 anti-ship missiles during the exercises; they could also cope with aircraft.
And this is where the inconsistencies begin in any "game for the Americans". On the one hand, it seems that the United States has more than enough forces to defeat the Soviet squadrons. On the other hand, this is a full-scale war, which the United States did not want then. Stopping the Soviet convoy would require a military operation, in scale and losses commensurate with the battles of World War II. This could not but be a deterrent.
Today we know that Kennedy intended to attack Cuba if any American plane was shot down. But when it did happen (U-2 was shot down, the pilot was killed), the Americans changed their minds. Then, of course, no one in the USSR knew this. But the fact that an attack on Soviet surface ships would lead to the Americans losing surprise in their attack on the USSR was obvious to us and to the Americans themselves.
In the United States, they learned about the presence of missiles only in the first decade of October. Before that, it was about suspicious Soviet activity. The presence of naval ships, firstly, immediately excluded the blockade from the American arsenal. They would not have had the opportunity to escalate the situation the way they did it in reality. Now they would have to choose between nuclear war and negotiations, and all at once. All planned transports to Cuba would have to be swallowed. Or start a war with the loss of surprise.
In reality, they chose to negotiate.
And when we got into this business, we were sure that they would choose negotiations. I had to go all the way. They wouldn't attack. They didn't really attack even when our fleet was in the bases. When he was at sea, they would not attack even more.
And this on condition that, in general, they would not have missed the situation, chasing the KUGs of the Pacific Fleet.
The USSR also had one more trump card.
Strategic submarines
By the time the decision was made to deploy missiles in Cuba, the Northern Fleet had received 15 Project 629 diesel-electric submarines of various modifications. These submarines were armed with D-1 missile systems with an R-11FM ballistic missile with a range of 150 km and partially (development was beginning) D-2 with an R-13 missile and a range of 400 km. In addition, 5 submarines of the AB611 project were in service, each of which was also armed with two R-11FM ballistic missiles.
For all the primitiveness of these submarines, the Navy was able to deploy at least ten missile-carrying submarines off the coast of the United States, and most likely more.
What would be their chances of success? And here we again recall surface ships - they could well cover the deployment of submarines, firstly, by diverting huge reconnaissance forces, and secondly, preventing the surface ships of the US Navy from working.
Submarines would be a big factor. Even thirty nuclear missiles that reached the United States, firstly, would lead to the loss of tens of millions of people, and secondly, they would disorganize the air defense for at least several days, which would give good chances for bombers. To find all the boats without melting the surface ships, the United States, again, would not have had time, and by attacking the ships, they would have lost their surprise and were exposed to a retaliatory strike. And that would be obvious to them.
The deployment of such forces (impossible without the participation of surface ships) would give Khrushchev much more trump cards in any negotiations.
Naturally, with the right diplomatic presentation.
Gunboat diplomacy
What position should the USSR take?
First, it would be necessary to make the Americans understand that the USSR is ready for war. In reality, Khrushchev, as the Americans later said, “blinked first” when faced with their harsh reaction. And this is not surprising - there was nothing to cover the USSR with, there were no forces at sea that could hinder the actions of the Americans against Cuba. The crazy idea of sending four diesel-electric submarines against all the US Navy in the Atlantic could not and did not give the USSR any benefits, even taking into account the B-4 that eluded the Americans.
The presence of surface forces capable of preventing communication with Cuba without starting a real large-scale war and ensuring the deployment of missile submarines off the coast of the United States, the presence of missile submarines themselves capable of retaliating against American territory, would well become a trump card if presented correctly. It is worth remembering that then the United States did not have such an anti-submarine defense, as after, in the 70s and 80s, it would have been difficult for the Americans to detect the quiet "diesels"; it would be impossible to continuously track them in the presence of a surface fleet.
As the crisis went to its peak, it was necessary to show the Americans other things - refueling in the air of the Tu-16, which was then already and made it possible to strike Alaska with these aircraft. Launch of a Kh-20 cruise missile from a Tu-95K bomber without specifying its exact range. One could hint to them that the USSR has the majority of such missile-carrying aircraft (which was not true, but here all means would be good).
As a result, President Kennedy should have received a message with the following content:
“The USSR has deployed carriers of nuclear weapons and warheads in Cuba, in quantities that you do not know, and in places that are completely unknown to you, and the commanders of Soviet units are authorized to use them if they are attacked.
In parallel, we have deployed ballistic missile submarines off your coast. Our bombers are scattered and ready to retaliate. You know that they can strike your territory with missiles without approaching it, and your entire defense is useless. We will not strike the United States first, but we are ready to respond to your attack with all our might.
No matter how strong the blow from the United States to the USSR, our retaliatory blow will in any case put an end to the existence of the United States. To prevent these terrible events, we offer you the following …"
That would be the right approach - getting involved in such games had to understand what they would be and, in modern terms, "not to leave the topic." The actions of the fleet would significantly strengthen Moscow's position in any negotiations with Washington. And of course, it was foolish to hide what forces the grouping in Cuba could actually use to strike. It is impossible to intimidate the enemy, hiding the threat from him, this is not true even from the point of view of logic.
The Soviet Union could well impose on the United States much more equal negotiations and withdraw troops on completely different conditions than it was done. The Navy, if it was used correctly, even in its then state, would help to achieve this, if it was applied correctly. But it was not applied correctly. And everything that followed was the result of this mistake.
How did it happen? Why did the USSR behave so strange and illogical? And most importantly, what does it matter to us today?
Land Power and Continental Thinking
And here we come back to subjective factors. The history of the Russian fleet after the end of the Civil War, on the one hand, is not replete with any wars and battles, but on the other, it is very dramatic. Dramatic due to the pogrom of military science, initiated by a group of young careerists who wanted to make a career for themselves and are ready to bring under repression those who held their desired positions. We are talking about the so-called "young school", the most famous representative of which was A. Alexandrov (Bar).
These events are described in great detail and intelligibly in the essay of Captain 1st Rank M. Monakov "The Fates of Doctrines and Theories" in the "Marine Collection", starting with issue 11 of 1990. The archive of the "Marine Collection" is available link (numbers are not all).
There is no point in retelling this essay, you need to confine yourself to the main thing. The adherents of the “young school” chose the most destructive method of reprisals against their competitors - they were able, using the press of the time, to declare the theories of combat use, developed by the teachers and the head of the Naval Academy B. Gervais, as sabotage and out of date.
It must be said that the critical theories of the "young school" were frankly poor. But the main thing these people achieved - in the early thirties, almost all the color of domestic naval theorists were repressed and later shot. B. Gervais managed to survive, but at the cost of public humiliation - in order to survive, he had to write a penitential article in which he declared the need to fight for domination of the sea, which he had been promoting earlier, was wrong. Seriously experiencing arrest, being in prison, repression of associates, public humiliation and the collapse of his career, B. Gervais soon died. He was lucky, many of his colleagues could not live to see their death. For those who do not understand what it was, an example is how to declare it a crime to fight for air supremacy for aviation and shoot the generals-pilots who demand it.
There is an opinion, and apparently not unfounded, that MN Tukhachevsky was behind all these events, for whom it was a struggle for the budget.
The consequences were dire - the fleet lost its purpose. And when there is no purpose, there is no way to organize the training of command personnel - simply because it is not clear what they should do.
The reckoning came during the war in Spain - Soviet advisers to the republican fleet (including N. G. Kuznetsov) showed their inability to wage war at sea. Stalin's order to deploy the fleet in the Mediterranean Sea and to protect the communications of the Republicans, the fleet could not fulfill - not at all. Stalin reacted to this with a new wave of bloody repressions, which simply finished off the fleet completely.
The way "pale" the fleet "performed" during the Great Patriotic War is due precisely to this. In fact, he still played an important role in it, much more important than is commonly thought today. But with the forces and means that were available on June 21, 1941, much more could be done.
After the war, restoration began. The anathema was removed from the preparation for waging a real war, and the development of tactical and operational issues of the use of the fleet in modern warfare began. Tactical, fire and technical training has also improved.
But then the army generals arrived:
"Already in 1953, speeches were made at a military scientific conference held at the Higher Military Academy, which spoke about the illegality of recognizing naval strategy, since its existence allegedly contradicted the principle of the unity of military strategy."
“In October 1955, in Sevastopol, under the leadership of NS Khrushchev, a meeting of members of the government and the leadership of the Ministry of Defense and the Navy was held to work out ways of developing the fleet. In the speeches of the head of state and defense minister Marshal of the Soviet Union G. K. Zhukov, views were expressed on the use of the Navy in a future war, in which preference was given to the actions of the forces of the fleet at the tactical and operational levels.
Two years later, the question of the illegality of the existence of naval strategy as a category of naval art was raised again. The point in its development was put in 1957 after the publication in the magazine "Military Thought" of an article by the Chief of the General Staff of Marshal of the Soviet Union V. D. In this regard, V. D. Sokolovsky noted that one should speak not about the independent strategy of the Air Force and the Navy, but about their strategic use.
Guided by these instructions, the scientists of the Naval Academy prepared a draft Manual on the Conduct of Naval Operations (NMO-57), in which the category of "naval strategy" was replaced by the category of "strategic use of the Navy", and from such a category of naval art as "war on the sea”, completely refused. In 1962, the theoretical work "Military Strategy" was published, edited by the Chief of the General Staff, which argued that the use of the Navy should be limited to actions "mainly on an operational scale." Link
It can be seen that having "hacked" the naval strategy, the generals immediately "hacked down" their own notion - "strategic use", relegating the fleet from the type of the Armed Forces, which, in principle, is intended specifically for solving strategic tasks, to the operational-tactical level.
All this was not due to any rational reasoning. The entire experience of the Second World War has shown the colossal importance of the fleets. Even the Red Army would not have been able to wage a war if the Germans had cut the Lend-Lease at sea, and in the south would have reached the Turkish border. And without the fleet they would have made it - there would have been no exhausting and slowing down the blitzkrieg landing forces, nor would there have been obstacles for the Germans to massively land troops from the sea, at least in the Caucasus. What to say about the Western theaters of military operations and the Pacific Ocean! Would Soviet troops have been able to reach the Kuril Islands if the Imperial Navy had not been defeated by the US Navy? All of this was ignored.
Let us add here the fanatical conviction of NS Khrushchev in the obsolescence of the surface fleet and the omnipotence of submarines (the Cuban missile crisis just showed the unrealism of this dogma) and, in general, his low ability for logical thinking (to frighten the Americans with nuclear weapons, which they were not told about and did not show), and ask ourselves the question - could this political system properly use the fleet? No, because that would require recognizing its usefulness.
Would the political leadership of the USSR have recognized it if it had at least roughly guessed what the Cuban missile crisis would be? One can fantasize about this by looking at the military-theoretical works that came out after the Cuban missile crisis.
Above mentioned was the "Military Strategy" edited by Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky. Its next edition came out in 1963, after the Cuban missile crisis. There, in the chapter on the development of the armed forces, the priorities in the development of the armed forces are set in the following order:
- Strategic Missile Forces. This, in general, is understandable and does not raise questions.
- Ground troops. But this is already causing. Soviet generals could not understand that if the enemy was overseas, then infantry could not reach him. To justify investing in "their" type of the Armed Forces, a continuous build-up of the power of Soviet troops in Europe was carried out. It made sense as an instrument of deterrence until reaching nuclear parity, and then not - in the event of aggression, the West could be subjected to a total nuclear clean-up, and for this tens of thousands of tanks were not needed. But this did not bother anyone. We are a land power, there is no other way.
- Fighter aircraft of air defense and air defense in general. It is logical for the side that is going to defend.
- The rest of the aviation. But in terms of supporting the Ground Forces. There are no words "air supremacy" with "military strategy", no independent tasks for aviation are envisaged. It is briefly stipulated that in some cases aviation can perform strike missions, but without specifics.
There is a strategy that in the nuclear missile age with hundreds or thousands of intercontinental bombers, with the main enemies (USA and Great Britain) overseas, is still built around infantry and tanks.
The fleet is in the last place on the list of priorities. Among his tasks are the disruption of enemy communications, the destruction of its surface forces, strikes on bases, the landing of assault forces, the main forces - submarines and aviation.
The same thesis is defended in the section describing the military-strategic features of a future world war.
At the same time, neither the need to conduct anti-submarine defense, nor the possible role of the fleet in nuclear deterrence and nuclear war (submarines with missiles are already in service) are not mentioned. The fact that submarines are already in practice, and ships are theoretically mobile carriers of missiles with a nuclear warhead and can influence the outcome of even a ground war with their strikes, is not mentioned.
There is no mention of protecting your communications - nowhere at all. But the Americans cut them off with the blockade. It feels like no conclusions have been drawn from the Cuban missile crisis, nothing about the reissue.
And, of course, there is not a word about disrupting a nuclear strike from sea and ocean directions.
At the same time, the contribution of the army commanders to the failure of the submarine campaign was decisive - it was Defense Minister Grechko who set the boats speed at the crossings, which led to their detection.
Analysis of the fact of surfacing is also "impressive", take at least the "legendary" phrase of the Minister of Defense:
“What kind of battery charging? What kind of batteries? Why didn't you throw grenades at the Americans when they surfaced?"
It was necessary to throw grenades on a US Navy destroyer. And then, having found out that it turns out that the boats were diesel, not nuclear (after the operation in which he gave orders!), The minister smashed his glasses on the table in a rage.
Awesome management quality, isn't it?
The General Staff of the Navy, of course, was also to blame, too frequent contact was his fault. But where would specialists in naval warfare come from in the navy, which the leadership of the Ministry of Defense is simply spreading rot? Nowhere. Now, by the way, the same problem arises.
In the end, this is what the reasons for the fact that the fleet was not used for its intended purpose in the Cuban missile crisis look like - ground thinking, which makes it impossible to understand the results that can be achieved by using the fleet for its intended purpose. And in some cases - a stupid struggle against reality, which does not fit into someone's ideas, ideological attitudes and dogmas.
Outcomes
After the Cuban missile crisis, some positive shifts have taken place. Formally adhering to the previously announced strategic postulates, the military-political leadership of the USSR nevertheless "untied the hands" of S. G. Gorshkov, albeit a little, and thought about using the forces that it had.
So, a year later, the project 629 K-153 submarine with three R-13 ballistic missiles entered the first combat service. The boat was covered by three Project 613 B-74, B-76 and B-77 torpedo submarines. There is no evidence that these boats were discovered. The same could well have been done in 1962 to bolster Soviet actions. But, at least after being under the threat of a devastating American nuclear attack, the Soviet leadership began to use part of the naval forces as intended.
In the Navy itself, a little later, in 1964, an extensive tactical discussion began on issues of conducting missile warfare. The Navy began to contribute to nuclear deterrence with its submarines and, in general, began the path that would lead it to a psychological victory over the US Navy in the 70s.
But all this was without official recognition of the erroneousness of past approaches (at least in the specialized military press, in the same "Military Thought" and "Sea Collection"). And without admitting mistakes, no work on mistakes is possible. And it was not in full.
Conclusions for our time.
We live in a similar era today. Army generals again, as it was some time before the Great Patriotic War, liquidated the fleet as an independent branch of the armed forces. Details are described in the article “Destroyed management. There is no single command of the fleet for a long time … Next in line is the Aerospace Forces, which already has an army commander. “Continental thinking” is gradually spreading in the media, and the Ministry of Defense is investing in a submarine that simply will not survive a collision with an “American” type of theater anti-submarine warfare system - whoever deployed it. Again, we have no vision of what and how the Navy is being used. The General Staff again commands the fleets, building on the experience that the General Staff officers received in the Ground Forces in the main.
There are also problems that did not exist in the early 60s.
There is nowhere to raise the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy - the High Command has been turned into a supply structure and is engaged in purchases and parades, the General Staff of the Navy is not a military command body in the full sense of the word and does not participate in the planning of military operations. As a result, the future Commander-in-Chief simply has nowhere to gain experience commensurate with the tasks that he will have to perform. For many years now, Commanders-in-Chief have been appointed immediately from the commander of one of the fleets. For contrast, let us recall V. N. Chernavin, who came to his post, already having experience working as the chief of the General Staff of the Navy and the first deputy commander in chief. This was not a system in our country, but now there is basically no such possibility - in the current General Staff of the Navy, the potential new Commander-in-Chief will not learn anything.
In such conditions, we can easily find ourselves in a position somewhat similar to the position of the USSR at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis. Moreover, it can be aggravated by a banal shortage of ships and almost completely dead naval aviation. On the one hand, today the Russian leadership understands the use of the fleet clearly more than the Soviet one during the time of NS Khrushchev. The fleet has made its contribution to preventing the destruction of Syria until 2015, and no small one. Now the Navy is also used for its intended purpose, for example, providing supplies of Iranian fuel to this country. The fleet is used in the actions of intimidation of Ukraine, more or less successfully, despite its terrible condition. The Russian leadership will not make such gross mistakes as the Cuban missile crisis. Current at least.
But on the other hand, the problems described above, making the construction of a combat-ready fleet impossible, can easily lead to the same ending, which led to the lack of understanding of naval issues by the leadership of the USSR in 1962: the need to deviate from the declared goals, and explicitly and publicly - with all the resulting political damage.
It is clearly time for us to work on the bugs.
