8 ms·

More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing") Anyway, as a former navy officer it looks very

by WJW 5y ago

More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing") Anyway, as a former navy officer it looks very bad that the flagship of a fleet was apparently sunk by a anti ship missile (ASM) strike. Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets and while the Neptune ASM is very modern, the flagship should definitely not have been the first to be sunk. This will be (should be) a wake up call for the rest of the fleet and keep them much further from the shore, which in turn has impact on the amount of air control the Russians can exert on the southern parts of Ukraine as apparently they have been leaning on navy vessels to provide SAM cover.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing") Fun fact: in early modern English, "towing" was the correct passive participial form, and "being towed" was ungrammatical.
- WJW 5y ago
  Wow, TIL! How would the early English have expressed "towing" in the active sense though?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    The same way. You'd have to make the distinction through context. read (a little) more: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903
tim333 5y ago
Some info off twitter >So how did Ukraine do it? Early reports suggest a brilliantly effective combination of tactics, strategy and the exploitation of its own capabilities, combined with awareness of Russian weaknesses >According to early reports, the attack took place during a storm. This would have made flying difficult but also helps to conceal shore-based activity from observation. The Russians wouldn't have seen the preparations >Reportedly, the Ukrainians used a Bayraktar TB-2 drone to distract the Moskva. The Ukrainian Navy introduced TB-2s into service in August 2021. >How did the Russians not see the incoming Neptunes? The Moskva has/had a single main air defence radar - a 3P41 Volna phased array to guide S300 missiles. Problem is, it only has a 180 degree field of vision >360 degree coverage is provided by MR-800 Voshkod/Top Pair 3-D long range air search radars for shorter-range SA-8 missiles. But it's likely that in the storm, they couldn't distinguish the sea-skimming Neptunes from the wavetops. So likely a Bayraktar distracting on one side while the missiles were camouflaged by the storm waves. Quite cunning really. More info: https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1514498197489659909 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1514498197489659909
jollybean 5y ago
As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying: 1) Do ships truly have good defences against Harpoons etc. these days? If 1 or 2 were sent a ship is there a decent chance they'd be neutralized? 2) There's indications Ukraine was flying a drone to distract them possible have their radars not on the right thing, firing missiles from behind. Does this remotely make sense i.e. radar coverage? Or possibly even just overwhelming/confusing the ships operators a bit?
- wins32767 5y ago
  Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.
  - emaginniss 5y ago
    Somebody needed a chalet instead
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.
- WJW 5y ago
  Sure! 1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact. 2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illumination-radar https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.
cm2187 5y ago
Would you be able to share some light on what a cruiser is (that's how this ship is classified on wikipedia) vs another kind of ship. I am comparing to the british navy which doesn't seem to have anything above destroyer (outside of aircraft carriers). In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Some are bigger than others, which means that they can launch more missiles (and maybe also longer range missiles). They may also have more powerful radars, and have a more central role in coordinating the fleet as a whole. Also, they have more people, so it's a bigger deal if they get sunk.
- brimble 5y ago
  Ship class designations are weird. Russia keeps a ship or two designated as "battlecruisers" (in the WWII era, that would have meant a lightly-armored, probably fast, very large ship with battleship-class guns) that would just be called cruisers in most other navies, now. I've seen British ships with tonnage that would put them nearly up to a WWII-era heavy cruiser (step under a battlecruiser, the smallest thing generally regarded as a "capital ship" in that era) called a destroyer (formerly that would have been a much smaller size of ship), these days. From their design, the ship class in question seem to be some kind of largish general-purpose missile cruisers with substantial armament and decent anti-air/anti-missile defenses, but not intended to survive sustained fighting (their weapon placement suggests that—all those missile tubes on the deck can't possibly be safe, but it might let them cram more weapons on there cheaply) [VERY LATE EDIT] The TL;DR here is that "cruiser" and "destroyer" and all that are nearly meaningless without context of who's doing the labeling, and when. [ANOTHER LATE EDIT] I overstated the degree to which the Kirov class' designation is misleading: its displacement is roughly in the range of WWII-era battlecruisers (~1/2 the displacement of an Iowa class battleship—armor is really, really heavy). It lacks battleship-class guns, but so does everything else these days and it'd be kinda silly if it had them.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
jeffbee 5y ago
It's always seemed very doubtful to me that a layered defense of the type mounted by U.S.N. carrier groups would be effective in a real war against a sophisticated opponent. It's obvious to me that every capital ship would be at the bottom of the ocean in the first hour of a war with China. The useless Russian ship we are discussing was, after all, equipped with a modern anti-missile system and yet it sank. Perhaps their CIWS readiness was not optimal, but that has also happened to the U.S. in the case of the Stark. Ships are expensive and missiles are almost free by comparison, so this seems like a fundamental problem for naval warfare. What I'm really wondering is why the Russians even staged this ship into the Black Sea. What possible capabilities could it have been providing that the Russians could not also get from land units?
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Defense-in-depth includes obfuscation of position, signals warfare, first-strike, and strategic deterrents. If you put a carrier group in a pond and lob missiles at them, I'm not confident in the outcome either.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  The joke on our submarine was that aircraft carriers should more properly be called "targets." Sweden has a super quiet submarine design using Sterling engines: A Stirling engine is particularly well suited for a submarine because the engine is nearly silent and can use the surrounding sea water as a heat sink to increase efficiency In 2005, HSwMS Gotland managed to snap several pictures of USS Ronald Reagan during a wargaming exercise in the Pacific Ocean, effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine My own opinion is that aircraft carriers are very effective in projecting power around the world during peacetime or low intensity conflicts, but military planners recognize (I hope) that they will be quickly sunk in an all out war and have contingency plans.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    There is this theory that at least US CVNs have enough power and the correct hull shape to hydroplane in an event of an emergency. It would likely do a lot of damage in the process so it's probably never tested, and it's classified so nobody really knows for sure. But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.
Someone 5y ago
> Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets It looks similar to what they did with their tanks: fight with insufficient infantry support (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/15/in-ukraine-russian-tanks-are-fighting-without-the-protection-of-infantry/?sh=5fa04f056ef3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/15/in-ukraine-...)

by WJW 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> More like being "sank while being towed" I think? (edit: original title was "Cruiser 'Moskva' sank while towing") Fun fact: in early modern English, "towing" was the correct passive participial form, and "being towed" was ungrammatical.

WJW 5y ago
Wow, TIL! How would the early English have expressed "towing" in the active sense though?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  The same way. You'd have to make the distinction through context. read (a little) more: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903

tim333 5y ago

Some info off twitter >So how did Ukraine do it? Early reports suggest a brilliantly effective combination of tactics, strategy and the exploitation of its own capabilities, combined with awareness of Russian weaknesses >According to early reports, the attack took place during a storm. This would have made flying difficult but also helps to conceal shore-based activity from observation. The Russians wouldn't have seen the preparations >Reportedly, the Ukrainians used a Bayraktar TB-2 drone to distract the Moskva. The Ukrainian Navy introduced TB-2s into service in August 2021. >How did the Russians not see the incoming Neptunes? The Moskva has/had a single main air defence radar - a 3P41 Volna phased array to guide S300 missiles. Problem is, it only has a 180 degree field of vision >360 degree coverage is provided by MR-800 Voshkod/Top Pair 3-D long range air search radars for shorter-range SA-8 missiles. But it's likely that in the storm, they couldn't distinguish the sea-skimming Neptunes from the wavetops. So likely a Bayraktar distracting on one side while the missiles were camouflaged by the storm waves. Quite cunning really. More info: https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1514498197489659909 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1514498197489659909

jollybean 5y ago

As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying: 1) Do ships truly have good defences against Harpoons etc. these days? If 1 or 2 were sent a ship is there a decent chance they'd be neutralized? 2) There's indications Ukraine was flying a drone to distract them possible have their radars not on the right thing, firing missiles from behind. Does this remotely make sense i.e. radar coverage? Or possibly even just overwhelming/confusing the ships operators a bit?

wins32767 5y ago
Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.
- emaginniss 5y ago
  Somebody needed a chalet instead
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.
WJW 5y ago
Sure! 1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact. 2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illumination-radar https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.

cm2187 5y ago

Would you be able to share some light on what a cruiser is (that's how this ship is classified on wikipedia) vs another kind of ship. I am comparing to the british navy which doesn't seem to have anything above destroyer (outside of aircraft carriers). In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Some are bigger than others, which means that they can launch more missiles (and maybe also longer range missiles). They may also have more powerful radars, and have a more central role in coordinating the fleet as a whole. Also, they have more people, so it's a bigger deal if they get sunk.
brimble 5y ago
Ship class designations are weird. Russia keeps a ship or two designated as "battlecruisers" (in the WWII era, that would have meant a lightly-armored, probably fast, very large ship with battleship-class guns) that would just be called cruisers in most other navies, now. I've seen British ships with tonnage that would put them nearly up to a WWII-era heavy cruiser (step under a battlecruiser, the smallest thing generally regarded as a "capital ship" in that era) called a destroyer (formerly that would have been a much smaller size of ship), these days. From their design, the ship class in question seem to be some kind of largish general-purpose missile cruisers with substantial armament and decent anti-air/anti-missile defenses, but not intended to survive sustained fighting (their weapon placement suggests that—all those missile tubes on the deck can't possibly be safe, but it might let them cram more weapons on there cheaply) [VERY LATE EDIT] The TL;DR here is that "cruiser" and "destroyer" and all that are nearly meaningless without context of who's doing the labeling, and when. [ANOTHER LATE EDIT] I overstated the degree to which the Kirov class' designation is misleading: its displacement is roughly in the range of WWII-era battlecruisers (~1/2 the displacement of an Iowa class battleship—armor is really, really heavy). It lacks battleship-class guns, but so does everything else these days and it'd be kinda silly if it had them.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago

It's always seemed very doubtful to me that a layered defense of the type mounted by U.S.N. carrier groups would be effective in a real war against a sophisticated opponent. It's obvious to me that every capital ship would be at the bottom of the ocean in the first hour of a war with China. The useless Russian ship we are discussing was, after all, equipped with a modern anti-missile system and yet it sank. Perhaps their CIWS readiness was not optimal, but that has also happened to the U.S. in the case of the Stark. Ships are expensive and missiles are almost free by comparison, so this seems like a fundamental problem for naval warfare. What I'm really wondering is why the Russians even staged this ship into the Black Sea. What possible capabilities could it have been providing that the Russians could not also get from land units?

jvanderbot 5y ago
Defense-in-depth includes obfuscation of position, signals warfare, first-strike, and strategic deterrents. If you put a carrier group in a pond and lob missiles at them, I'm not confident in the outcome either.
mwattsun 5y ago
The joke on our submarine was that aircraft carriers should more properly be called "targets." Sweden has a super quiet submarine design using Sterling engines: A Stirling engine is particularly well suited for a submarine because the engine is nearly silent and can use the surrounding sea water as a heat sink to increase efficiency In 2005, HSwMS Gotland managed to snap several pictures of USS Ronald Reagan during a wargaming exercise in the Pacific Ocean, effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine My own opinion is that aircraft carriers are very effective in projecting power around the world during peacetime or low intensity conflicts, but military planners recognize (I hope) that they will be quickly sunk in an all out war and have contingency plans.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  There is this theory that at least US CVNs have enough power and the correct hull shape to hydroplane in an event of an emergency. It would likely do a lot of damage in the process so it's probably never tested, and it's classified so nobody really knows for sure. But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.

Someone 5y ago

> Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets It looks similar to what they did with their tanks: fight with insufficient infantry support (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/15/in-ukraine-russian-tanks-are-fighting-without-the-protection-of-infantry/?sh=5fa04f056ef3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/15/in-ukraine-...)