A bit of geography for beginners.
From time to time, in discussions of issues related to submarine warfare, or, as it was recently, with the atomic super torpedo Poseidon, some citizens begin to speak out on the topic of “going out into the ocean,” that it is unrealistic to find a submarine or Poseidon in the ocean from - for its size and the like. Sometimes the same things are said about surface ships, about the prospects for their deployment in a particular area of the world ocean in the course of an ongoing war.
Such ideas are the result of so-called "cognitive distortion." The layman believes that the ocean is big, you can "go out" into it. And this despite the fact that most of the people who write and approve of this, perfectly imagine a map of the world and its individual regions. But "cognitive distortion" takes this knowledge out of the brackets, and it exists separately from the idea of "going out" to the ocean.
It makes sense to conduct a kind of educational program: to repeat what everyone seems to know, but what they don't remember. Repeat so that you remember.
Those who are "at odds" with geography or served in officer positions in the Navy will not find anything new in this article and can safely finish reading it at this point. Those who believe in “going out into the ocean” should read to the end.
Because our Navy is not doing very well with access to the World Ocean. Or rather, bad. Or rather, there are almost none of them. This will be the closest thing to reality.
But first things first.
The division of Russia's naval theater of operations has always been its strength and weakness at the same time. Force because in the pre-atomic era, no enemy could count on being able to defeat the entire fleet at once. In addition, in the course of some geographically limited war, reinforcements could approach one of the fighting fleets, which were based so far away that they were, for the time being, invulnerable to the enemy.
The weakness was that any given fleet was almost always weaker than its rivals, after the end of the sailing era, for sure. And formally, the large payroll of the fleet could not keep the enemy from attack, in the conditions of his numerical superiority - an example of which is the same Russo-Japanese War. At the same time, the transfer of reinforcements was fraught with the fact that the forces of the fleet would be defeated in parts - which, again, the Japanese showed us in 1905. But the division of the fleets was and remains only part of the geographic problem of our Navy. The second and more important problem is that our fleets are cut off from the World Ocean, and in fact, do not have access to it. In the event of a major war, this will inevitably affect its character in the most serious way. For example, the fact that we will not be able to transfer reinforcements from the theater of operations to the theater of operations in principle, and we will not be able to go out into the open and fight either. And there are many other things we won't be able to do.
Consider the situation for each of the fleets.
The Northern Fleet is based in the Arctic Ocean. In the Arctic. In peacetime, ships and submarines of the Northern Fleet enter the World Ocean without hindrance, and carry out missions at any point.
And in the military? We look at the map.
The red arrows are the directions in which, in theory, after heavy battles at sea and in the air, as well as on land (!), Both surface ships and submarines can pass. For surface ships, passage is considered possible for at least several months of the year. Blue arrows indicate the directions in which submarines could theoretically pass, and surface ships either cannot at all, or can literally one month a year, with enormous risk, even in spite of icebreaker support. That is, with an unacceptably high risk due to ice conditions.
As you can easily see from the map, in fact, the Northern Fleet is located in a geographically closed area - all exits from it are controlled by the Anglo-Saxons either directly or by the hands of NATO allies and jointly with them. At the same time, such narrows as the Bering Strait, Robson Strait (between Canada and Greenland) or straits between the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago are small enough in width to be mined very quickly. And even without mining, straits a few hundred kilometers wide can control anti-submarine forces consisting of a very small number of ships and submarines, and besides, all these narrows are controlled by aviation.
What is needed to lead ships through the Bering Strait during the war with NATO? At a minimum, to establish air supremacy over a significant part of Alaska, and maintain it for a long time, and this despite the fact that we have one air base for the entire region with a less significant infrastructure - Anadyr, and another concrete runway in the village of Provideniya - and this to an area about the size of Ukraine. Practically unsolvable task.
The exception is the main "road" of our submarines and ships "to the world" - the Faroe-Icelandic border (three red arrows on the map on the left).
It was here that NATO and the United States planned to intercept and destroy our submarines on this very line. From the northern part of Britain, through the Shetland and Faroe Islands, to Iceland and then Greenland, the West actively created during the Cold War, and now began to revive the most powerful anti-cold line, based on an air base in Iceland, and airfields in Britain, where a large anti-submarine aviation, as well as to the Second Fleet of the US Navy, and the Royal Navy of Great Britain, and the Armed Forces of Norway, operating jointly with it, which together must first give our Northern Fleet a battle in the Norwegian Sea, and then, depending on the result, or stop us in the Faroe-Icelandic turn with the help of massive mining, air strikes and attacks by surface and submarine forces, or go to "finish off the bear" in the Barents and White Seas. Taking into account the balance of forces, the second option is much more realistic today.
One way or another, it should be noted that the Northern Fleet is located in a geographically isolated theater of operations, from which there are only a few exits, of which only two can really be used, and only after winning a fierce battle with many times superior enemy forces. But rather, the enemy himself will enter the theater of operations from these directions.
Inside the theater of operations, there are practically no significant targets located on the territory of the United States. That is, assuming that the same "Poseidon" will be released somewhere here, it is worth admitting that there are simply no goals for it.
A similar situation takes place in the Pacific Ocean. When our ships are based in Primorye, there are several exits to the World Ocean for them - the Tsushima Strait, the Sangar Strait and several Kuril straits.
At the same time, the Sangar Strait passes relatively speaking "through Japan" and it is possible to conduct ships and submarines through it either with the consent of Japan, or by capturing Hokkaido, the northern part of Honshu, and destroying all Japanese aviation. And faster than the Americans are drawn nearby. Passing Tsushima is even more difficult - it is necessary to neutralize Japan completely, and to obtain consent for the passage of the second ally of the Americans - South Korea. Moreover, significant American forces will also be deployed faster than the theater of operations.
Taking into account the fact that, as a rule, they are always there, the task looks absolutely insoluble, especially with our existing forces.
There remains an exit through the Kuril straits.
We look at one more card.
The arrows show the directions of the entry of our SSBNs from Kamchatka into the Sea of Okhotsk. In some places on the surface due to shallow depths. The exit of surface ships through the Kuril ridge will be carried out by the same routes, just in the other direction. It is not difficult to see that the United States needs to take control of only a few straits, and our fleet will be locked up in the Sea of Okhotsk. Taking control for the Americans with their deadly effective submarines and the ability to protect their deployment areas from our PLO aviation (very weak and small in number) does not look fantastic.
Let us state that the Pacific Fleet (with one exception, about which a little later) is locked even more reliably than the North.
The remaining two fleets, theoretically capable of operating in the Far Sea Zone - the Black Sea and the Baltic, are generally located in almost inland seas communicating with the world's oceans through a single "window" - in the Baltic through the Danish Straits, completely under NATO control, and in the Black Sea - through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which are also controlled by NATO. In fact, in order to simply prevent the enemy from introducing large naval forces to the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Russian Federation, in the event of a war, would have to occupy Denmark and at least part of Turkey, which, given the current state of the Russian Armed Forces, we have allies (or rather, the absence allies), controlled by the merchant fleet and amphibious forces, is unrealistic.
In the event of a hypothetical neutrality of Turkey, our fleet will still be trapped leaving the Black Sea, it will fall into the Mediterranean, from which, again, there are only two exits - Gibraltar (under NATO control) and Suez, next to which is militarily powerful pro-Western Israel.
Conclusion: the Russian fleet is able to operate in the World Ocean only in peacetime, while in wartime all the few communications that it uses to enter the World Ocean pass through narrows that are either now completely controlled by the enemy (and to strengthen control over which the enemy has simply fantastic forces, both in quantity and quality), or they can easily be taken under his control.
This fact is well known to the Anglo-Saxons. For many centuries they built just such a security system, for centuries seizing control over all the narrows and important straits (remember the seizure of Gibraltar, for example), and this control now gives them the opportunity to control the ocean, makes it possible to cut off other countries from access to the world's oceans, if such a need.
An exception that does not fall under these restrictions is Kamchatka. It is there, in Avacha Bay, that our only point is from which our ships and submarines enter the World Ocean immediately, bypassing narrows and straits. It is not hard to guess that the US Navy is incredibly tight in control of this harbor, tracking the movements of any ships from and to it, and especially submarines. It must be said that by exercising powerful and provocative pressure on the Soviet Navy in the late 80s of the last century, the Americans largely neutralized the potential of Kamchatka - at least, the Navy has not dared to launch SSBNs on combat patrols in the open ocean areas for many decades, and for a reason. In addition, from a purely military point of view, Kamchatka is very vulnerable - if the Americans land a landing on it, it will be unrealistic to repulse it, for this we have neither a fleet, nor ground communications, nor an airfield network (for example, for the Airborne Forces) of the required scale. Kamchatka cannot be supplied by land, nor can there be reinforcements by land. In fact, this is an isolated region, which is simply impossible to defend in the event of a war.
Our fleet is locked, albeit inside very large waters, but still locked. And there will be no exits from these locked waters in case of war. This, among other things, means that we either have to accept the transfer of initiative to the enemy, that is, he will be able to enter and leave our closed theater of operations at will, since he controls the entrances and exits, or, alternatively, we must be ready to conduct offensive operations, carried out at such a pace that the enemy simply would not have time to react to them, the purpose of which would be either to seize control over narrow areas, or to deprive the enemy of the opportunity to exercise such control, by any available means, including the most radical ones.
This is a fundamental point.
At the same time, in the case of adopting a passive defensive strategy, it must be clearly understood that it means not just a numerical superiority of the enemy over us in each theater of operations, but an absolute, overwhelming numerical superiority, fraught with a very rapid loss of territories (the same Kamchatka and the Kuriles), even if even temporary. And for offensive actions, offensive forces are needed. And the sooner we understand this, the better.
By the way, we are not alone. Let's see how the Americans see "containment" of China.
So, "island chains" are barriers to Chinese influence.
It is with these "defensive" lines, as well as its ability to "plug" the Strait of Malacca from the Indian Ocean, that the US plans to "plug" China where it is now, stopping by force, if necessary, Chinese expansion. The Anglo-Saxons are masters of such matters, treating the maritime theaters like a grandmaster with a chessboard. And, as you can see, for the Chinese, too, everything is not easy with access to the ocean. How do they react to this? Building offensive forces, of course. And this is a much smarter reaction than ours, which consists in a complete lack of reaction at all.
However, with a population that, imagining a map of the world, at the same time believes in some kind of opportunity to "go out into the ocean" (which has been repeatedly voiced at least in the discussion about the Poseidon torpedo), something else would be surprising.
We can only rejoice in the fact that we live in a time of peace, when all these factors take place only potentially. Let's hope that it will remain so, because with the existing approaches to the development of Russia's naval power, we have only hope. Unlike the same Chinese.
