Ukraine update: Russian warship, welcome to the age of missiles

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Despite the instant birth of 1,000 hilarious memes, it turns out that Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva (“Moscow”), isn’t currently being harvested by Ukrainian tractors scouring the seafloor. It is, however, reportedly being towed back to port after suffering serious damage and a fire as a result of a strike from two Neptune missiles launched by a shore battery.

Earlier this week, the site Small Wars Journal, warned that: “… Ukraine can easily achieve a resounding victory that would combine massive substantive defeats for the Russians with tremendous symbolism and loss of prestige for Russia in addition to greatly affecting the way ground combat plays out in the south and east. I am talking about the near-annihilation of the Russian Navy presence in the Black Sea, including the entirety or almost the entirety of the substantive portion of the Black Sea Fleet.”

That sentiment echoed statements from Daily Kos community member Kokopelli2018 who wrote back on April 5 about the possibility of sinking the Moskva and the rest of the Black Sea fleet. 

On Thursday morning, it’s clear that removing “Russian warship” from the battlefield was accomplished with a plan that took practice and timing. Still, the ultimate cost of a couple of Neptunes vs. what was surely the hundreds of millions invested in the missile cruiser has elevated the question of “is the age of warships over?” just as Russia’s loss of 500+ tanks has raised the question of “is the age of tanks over?”

The answer to both is almost certainly “No.” But it’s a modified no.

Tanks—a device originally developed with idea of countering trenches and machinegun nests—have proven themselves to be effective means of projecting force on the battlefield in a way that, for the last century, was hard to counter with anything short of another tank. That value is still there, but now that a tank can be taken down with handheld weaponry that can be produced at a fraction of the cost, its worth as a piece that can take, defend, and decisively occupy territory is greatly diminished. In a battlefield of drones and missiles, a tank is a relatively slow-moving target, and despite the cleverness of alloys and ceramics and active explosive defensive systems, its armor no longer means it’s all but immune to anything but another member of its own species.

Ships have held that role at sea for far, far longer. From Actium to Trafalgar to Leyte Gulf, ships have been the ultimate form of power projection. In the modern age, they’ve been both mobile gun platforms capable of targeting sites far inland with massive shells, landing strips for planes that can range out thousands of miles, and the launching points of both short range and long range missiles. What does Russia … or China … or the United States want do when they want to show someone they mean business? They park a carrier group on their doorstep, putting an incredible nexus of power just seconds away.

But is that power now as questionable as that of land-based armor? In The Age of Missiles, where every nation with a coastline is capable of fielding low-cost weapons that punch out a hundred miles from shore, is a big ship sitting on the horizon anything but a target? The answer is … we don’t know.

There have been questions about the continued value of large ships for a long time. And there’s absolutely no doubt that the billions spent on ships ranging from cruisers to aircraft carriers are heavily swayed by feelings of tradition, national pride, and more than a little “hey, that’s a lot of jobs in my district.” Whether they are worth what they cost is an extremely good question.

But we really don’t know what the near-sinking of the Moskva says about naval power overall. Right now, we know that it says don’t build your missile cruisers with such a useless defensive system that if you’re directing your radar somewhere else, it can’t see an incoming missile. We don’t know a lot more than that. Both on land and at sea, Russia’s defensive systems have proved astoundingly flawed. However that could be just another example of Russia’s vast and public grift-driven incompetence.

Naval actions are so incredibly rare, that the only active service ship in the U.S. Navy which has ever sunk another ship in battle is the U.S.S. Constitution, which did its damage during the War of 1812. The Moskva is only the second cruiser-class ship taken down since World War II (Argentina lost one during the Falklands War). 

There’s a real danger in drawing a general example from a single incident. Even so, you can bet every admiral on the planet is sweating this morning. And when it comes to the Black Sea fleet, that sweat may be enough to raise the waterline.

It’s likely Moskva will be towed to Sevastopol, which is the home of Russia’s southern fleet. They even rented the spot from Ukraine before Putin decided to just take Crimea and save himself the monthly payments. Right now, the port at Sevastopol is about 140 miles from territory definitively controlled by Ukraine, making the ships in harbor safe from additional missile attacks. Probably. But every step that Ukraine takes in recapturing the territory north of Crimea, is also a step toward making Sevastopol a scrapyard for the Russian navy. 

And oh yeah, and idea that Russia ever had about a naval invasion of Odesa? That is long gone.