Future russian aircraft carriers. #1

He wanted to commission one Mistral each for the Black sea fleet and the Baltic fleet,

The Mistrals are too big for the Black and Baltic seas... they would serve no purpose in either area except antagonise the locals.

Any further problems with Georgia can easily be dealt with using the forces moved into the region after the conflict... instead of facing lightly armed paratroopers, they now face much much better armed paratroopers who likely want revenge for what Georgia did to their comrades... and there will be plenty of volunteers in North Ossetia and Chechnia and Dagestan to go back in and deal with Saakashvili if the need or opportunity ever came up again.

while the second two (which are to be built in Russia) would be commissioned to the Pacific Fleet.

The French made vessels could be fitted with all sorts of sneaky stuff like hidden kill switches or beacons that are remotely activated... it makes sense to base them as far away from France as possible.

There are only two places a Mistral class carrier would be of use to the Russian navy and that is in the Pacific fleet to protect the Kurile islands and also operate in the Pacific in the smaller islands to help locals by providing access to its state of the art medical facilities during peace time, and aide during a disaster with helicopters and trucks to deliver aide and perform rescues.
The other place is the Northern Fleet to protect the potential oil resources on the Russian north shelf.

The Kuznetsov would be with the Northern Fleet. In time, he also wanted for two or three new heavy carriers (revamped modern versions of the Ulyanovsk class), to be built to supplement and eventually replace the Kuznetsov. He reckoned that this would create a new carrier force, instead of recreating an old force.

By rebuilding the Ulyanovsk class carriers are you not recreating an old force?

The new carriers don't need to look anything like US or western carriers and could be fairly exotic in design.

A double hull vessel would allow massive internal space without being too long and with two flattops could allow continuous take off and landing operations from each deck for example.

So, I guess that the current plan is good in your opinion. Have any designs for future carriers been finalised yet?

Well the current plan is for no actual new aircraft carriers in service till the end of the 2020s... 2027-2030, and I think that is perfectly sensible.

To make them right now would be silly as there are no support vessels in service or planned that could properly support their operations, and the base facilities and infrastructure needs a lot of work too.

Not to mention that international basing would be required too so a base in Cuba and a base in Vietnam and Venezuela would make them more capable because it would greatly shorten support and supply lines.

The Mistrals should be relatively cheap to operate, and from what I have read they are talking about up to 120 missiles, which I assume will be Redut/Vityaz which are the smaller S-400 missiles with 40km and 120km ranges respectively... being vertical launch systems they wont take up too much space.

They also mention 2 to 4 naval Pantsir-S1 systems, so these wont be defenceless helicopter barges.

I doubt anything will be shown that is serious before 2017 when they want to look at competing plans.

There will likely be fantastic designs from all sorts of arts students but I think the Russian Navy will be relatively conservative and the ships wont look too different from the sorts of vessels the British and French are building.

I doubt they will be identical as they will likely not have a strike role... for that mission the Russians will likely prefer Klub cruise missiles.

The opportunity to give their naval forces full air support of course will just make them more effective.

Lots of money is being spent on the Navy... not choosing to have carriers is like choosing not to have insurance... sure you save a bit of money... but when you need it...

Air power doesn't make your navy invincible but not having air power would make you easy meat for even modestly equipped countries.

Lets just say the British attempt to recover the Falklands came close to failure.
If the Argentines had struck 10 years earlier and the Brits had fixed wing carriers with Phantoms and Buccaneers the British would likely not have lost so many ships.
If the Argentines had struck 5 years later than they did in the late 1980s then the British might not have had any carriers at all and without carriers those Argentine pilots would have decimated the British fleet if it had even been sent.

With a carrier the British had a choice... without one... well it is like Russia and Kosovo or Russia and Libya... no carrier and they got to speak but few listened.

You could argue that in Georgia the US were impotent too despite having more carriers than the Russians will ever likely have, but I would suggest if US ties to Georgia were more than oil pipelines like Russias relationship with Serbia was they might have done rather more than they did.

The fact that GPS was turned off in the Georgian region clearly shows that the US knew exactly what was going on and also supported Georgian aggression... but they didn't go much further than that.

I wouldn't give them those Humvees back either...

http://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201201272258-iux0.htm#

George1 wrote:What type of aircraft do u suggest for future carriers?

Interceptor role:
Fighter attack role:

The US are F/A-18E/F and F-35C (replacing F/A-18)

The answer is obvious:

Interceptor role: PAK-FA
Fighter attack role: MiG-29k

However, as the new carriers are a long way off, the MiG-29k is certainly outdated by then, but this armament of aircraft´s will equip Kuznetsov after the refit.

Well, Superhornet, Rafale, J-15, Tejas will all be active naval aircraft by then, and MiG-29K can certainly hang with them, so I don't think it will be badly dated.

PAK FA is too big for smaller carriers like the new carrier for India, but for the Kuznetsov that currently operates the Su-33 the PAK FA is slightly smaller than the Su-33 so should be fine.

Of course the Mig-29K of today will be obsolete in 2025, but by 2025 it will be upgraded with all sorts of new stuff that will make it competitive.

Wort case scenario there is no reason why the PAK FA can't be both fighter and attack aircraft on a carrier.

Good.

To those that ask why Russia needs a carrier, I would ask why Russia needs an Air Force.

An Army can fight without air support, just like a Navy can operate without carriers, but the Army becomes much more effective when it has air cover because the Intel alone, not to mention the strike capability multiplies the effectiveness of the land or sea based force by many times, while at the same time denying the enemy air component the opportunity to do the same to their sea and land forces.

I would think 3-4 would be enough, though if they can be made cheaply and efficiently perhaps 6 might be ideal.

Normally if you want to guaranteed have one carrier available all the time then you need three... one fully operational, one in training, but ready if needed, and one in overhaul/upgrade.

That means in an emergency you might be able to have two carriers available for an incident.

4 would mean two in the Pacific Fleet and two in the Northern Fleet.

With a Mistral carrier assigned to each carrier group that would result in pretty effective airpower and pretty good power projection capability.

Of course the upgrade of the K should unify propulsion, weapons and sensors, so it can count as one as well.

The perfect aircraft carrier are the Elizabeth class carriers of the Royal Navy.

NickM wrote:The perfect aircraft carrier are the Elizabeth class carriers of the Royal Navy.

What makes it better than the larger and more capable new American carriers?

The problems that the Navy find today with the selection of the cardinal technical requirements to include in the design of the new generation.... "aircraft carrier"..... are dictated almost entirely by the the enormous incertitude about the level of operations to assign to a similar asset two decades far from today.


Aircraft Carriers are assets that cannot be renounced if you aim to expand military influence (mean of political and economic influence),but : areimmensely costly -requiring obviously also a big amount of corollary surface and submenrged units to operate - require more groups to obtain an effective expeditionary capability, need several years to achieve ,a among the crew, the professional "know-hows" to allow complex military operations to be conducted very far from friendly bases.


Russia ,like URSS before, has obviously never aimed at achieve those offensive assets which find a place only in a strongly expansionist military doctrine ; moreover no other Nation at world is contemporaneously more aware than Russia that similar assets would represent nothing more than an immense, fearful waste of financiary resources in any conflict against a major enemies (for the near absolute impossibility to defend them ,in plain ocean, against the very sophisticated asymmetrical weapons that it had developed ,already since Cold War, to destroy them).


Returning to the initial problem domestic strategists have argued that the enormous financiary resources for the realization of a 2030 and over "Carrier battle group" could be justified only commiting to them (through technical requirements very far from today aircraft carriers) a STRATEGIC ROLE, encompassing unique features capable to render the new "carriers" true mobile nodes and a C4 epicenters of the Russia Federation's future Air and Space Defense structure ; the final formulation of its requirements will, therefore, also wait the maturations and validation of some of the most important scientifical acquisitions (including also some true brekthroughs ) of some of the Institutes operating in the correlated fields.

Capability to launch "aircraft", in the classic meaning of the term, will therefore NOT be its central and even less its defining feature.

Of course a program with so a high degree of technical risks has also a commensurated probability to don't be even only initialized and ,in this optic, the extremely prudent behaviour adopted on the project is a wise position : it could allow to avoid to throw in a black hole hundreds of billions of rubles in the next decade SAP.

I'm trying to figure all this out. I understand the Ru Navy wants designs for super-ambitious carriers that can provide a base for fighter planes, UCAVS, reconnaissance planes, underwater vessels (unmanned and manned), and perhaps even satellite launches. Who knows, perhaps laser/ energy weapons too.

What I can't figure out is that an 80 or 100 000 tonne carrier is usually jammed with a big flight deck and the support for planes. So how does it cater for all these other possible uses. Now I can understand that the Typhoon subs could be converted to become underwater vessel "motherships", but how will this super-advanced aircraft carrier work? Will it be a huge vessel? OR will it have a flight deck but a sparse number of planes? Or will there be VTOL planes instead of skijumps?

OR, perhaps it will literally be a floating base? American once planned for a giant carrier which could have airliner sized planes landing on it. Ofcourse plans never realised. It was called a JMOB or joint mobile offshore base.

Then the question is, will there be a major chain in military doctrine as a result? Will there be a closer alliance with India, or CIS members? A little puzzling, but also very fascinating.

Lets be clear. Russia doesn't want or need a Nimitz carrier.

The purpose of Russian carriers is not to allow them to do what the US Navy did in Serbia or Iraq or Afghanistan.

The purpose of the new Russian carriers is to provide air cover for the other Russian Naval units it will be operating with.

In other words it is like the Russian Army having Frontal Aviation as a component of it... it can use it as a recon asset to monitor and control the airspace above the Army. It wont be used for deep strikes etc... a deep strike would be much more easily performed via long range cruise missile.

Regarding:

"The main requirement for this ship is its ability to act in all environments: space, air, water, land and underwater", the source emphasized.

I would suggest they don't mean their new carriers will be part of the new SEA LAUNCH system with proton rocket launch facilities at one end of the vessel... I rather suspect they mean like an extension to Sigma that allows the carrier to monitor enemy activity underwater, on water, on land, in the air and in the space above, and share that information with other platforms and get information from other platforms including subs, ships, aircraft, and of course satellites.

They might mount a launcher for the naval S-500 for instance, but that would largely be to defend the carrier from ballistic missile threats.

I would say 4, and the 5th the kuznetsov for training.

Right now they don't really need any... they still have a lot of rebuilding of their navy and its infrastructure to do. In 10 years time it will be useful to have something in production, which means they have to start designing it now.

If they were designing a new rifle they wouldn't start by learning how to make a matchlock musket, so I equally think any work on steam cats should be put aside and EM catapults should be the main focus. Both would be difficult and expensive to develop, but if you spend the money on steam cats you end up with a perfected obsolete technology, whereas EM technology can be applied to other areas like EM guns and indeed the work on super magnets can also be applied to more powerful electric motors too... which would also be very valuable for the Navy and the Russian military in general.

4 carriers would be a useful number without being excessive, the focus will be on maximising the number of aircraft per vessel.

I suppose one potential "game changer" in all this, is if Russia decides its time to rigorously defend territory in the Arctic. Which ofcourse could be a VAST wealth of resoruces.

America has just started on a new class of aircraft carrier, which is likely planned for the next few decades. So its interesting that Russia is planning something "dozens of years" ahead of rivals.
What I wonder about is, why does the new ship need so many different purposes?
Why not just have a carrier, destroyers, cruisers and underwater cruiser subs etc?

I'm not knocking it. Its interesting why there is talk of leaping ahead of America.

The carriers will have little to do with American carriers... yet at the same time there are parallels.

A carrier is the centre of a battle group... its aircraft extend the vision and reach of the vessels within the group and add a ring of protection that helicopters simply can't provide.

The carrier also performs the role of battle management for the group.

Very simply the US carrier is a strike carrier... a platform that allows the US navy to strike land based targets globally that can be repositioned within days without requirements for basing rights or setting up logistics lines.

The main power of a US carrier is her strike aircraft... the fighters are there to protect the strike aircraft and the carrier and the naval group. The strike aircraft also have an anti ship role to also defend the carrier and surface group, but primarily it is a land strike function they are optimised for... and the rest of the aircraft on the carrier are there to support that mission.

For the Russians any land strike can be carried out by cruise missile either of the subsonic or supersonic variety... Their previous carriers and carrier cruisers had a more limited role of carrying fighters and the role of attacking enemy ships was performed by their SS-N-12 in the case of the Kiev class and the SS-N-19 in the case of the Kuznetsov class carriers... both of which are anti ship only and have no land attack capability at all.

The new carriers will likely have a few UKSK bin launchers for both land attack and anti ship but also importantly anti sub missiles.

As mentioned the new Russian carriers will be optimised to see and fight threats from space, air, land, and sea surface and subsurface... their aircraft can deal with underwater, surface (sea and land), air, and space based targets using depth charges, torpedoes, antiship missiles, land attack cruise missiles, AAMs, and air launched missiles to take out low flying satellites and incoming ballistic threats. For the carrier itself simply fitted a UKSK launcher would allow it to engage subsurface, sea surface and land surface targets, and a SAM system would enable air and near space threats to be dealt with too.

With the standardisation of systems and weapons and propulsion the design should be pretty modular, so it would be a case of designing a stealthy outer shell and then filling the insides with bits you want/need.

This is not about leaping ahead of the US or UK... Russia has no global empire to maintain and is running a different race.

Having said that of course when PAK FA is modified for carrier use I suspect Russia will have a rather better naval carrier jet than the west.

Carriers are not only big ships with strong advantages, they are also vulnerable and costly. And Russia has a lot of Kh-22/32 missiles "carrier killers"

That is like saying the Russian Air Force is not needed because its airfields are vulnerable.

Russia does have a lot of carrier killer missiles, but it is hardly going to use them on their own ships.

The west has relied on its carrier groups and large numbers of Harpoon missiles to defeat surface vessels, and the best defence against a mass attack is a layered defence with long sight and long reach... and therefore the best defence starts about 1200km around the ships which is where the Mig-29K2s should be able to patrol to to look for threats and targets. Without a carrier you are limited to the radar horizon.

Very simply the logic that a carrier is vulnerable is hogwash, because the presence of a carrier and her aircraft actually make naval surface and subsurface vessels much much safer than they would be on their own.

Carriers are big targets, but they are big very very well defended targets.

Look at the British in the Falklands... without their carrier they would not have even bothered going because without air power their ships would have been sitting ducks to land based fighters... which was the main threat.

and therefore the best defence starts about 1200km around the ships which is where the Mig-29K2s

GarryB no aircraft at world can offer an effective air screen for an aicraft carrier group ,against enemy ASM-delivering intruders ,even only equal to half of this range.



Like you well know one the most common attack profile and organization in attacking a CVBG foresee the splitting of the long range attacking aircraft units in ,at least, two-three squadrons (or part of them) organized to coming-in following very different vectors of attack ; each of them travel at very low altitude near the maximum possible boundary of the E-2 AWACS detection range footprint using ,in this phase, low intensity noise jamming near sea surface to furtherly reduce the detection range by part of the high altitude radar platforms ; just after the penetration of this potential CVBG's surveillance area, all aircraft accelerate at maximum gaining ,contextually, also altitude at maximum rate allowed by the payload while jamming platforms separate from main group in a random direction ,"masking" the main group with maximum jamming signal radiated power up to theirs missile's delivery.
Just near the correct delievery altitude each aircraft of the squadron initialize the banking and deliver its payload, at this point it complete the U-turn and egress from area at maxium supersonic speed.

You can easily realize that capability to execute and useful interception of high supersonic intruder groups coming from two-three vectors of attack ,following the up-described flight profile and tactics (for remain silent of the chance of the presence of an OCA escorts for the strike groups ....) and armed with ASM with astounding stand-off ranges is practically NEAR TO ZERO.


Already in plain Cold War the same US. Navy was perfectly aware that CVBG, far from NORAD ,was not survivable when the same Admiral Hyman Rickover declared that in a conventional WWIII scenario against URSS them expected theirs carrier battle groups fleets to last no more than two days.

I repeat one more time: CVBG are not conceived and even less optimized to fight a conflict against a sophisticated enemy ; the stellar costs of the carriers itself ,of all the aircraft them carry and of the ships that are forced at the mere role to defend them , could be employed dozen of times better for construct a much greater amount of incomparably more survivable and lethal ships moreover relieved from the slaving task to defend a frail whale.

Very simply the logic that a carrier is vulnerable is hogwash, because the presence of a carrier and her aircraft actually make naval surface and subsurface vessels much much safer than they would be on their own.

Sorry but i can't say to agree with you on that GarryB, and i am in good company:

Gates also referred, in veiled terms, to China’s increasingly sophisticated near-shore surveillance-and-missile defense complex. “At the higher end of the access-denial spectrum, the virtual monopoly the U.S. has enjoyed with precision guided weapons is eroding — especially with long-range, accurate anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles that can potentially strike from over the horizon.”
The sum of these innovative and low-cost threats is the looming obsolescence of the U.S. Navy carrier force. Against a clever enemy, “a Ford-class carrier plus its full complement of the latest aircraft would represent potentially a $15-to-$20 billion set of hardware at risk,” Gates said.

A group of US cruiser ,destroyer and submarines -any of which perfectly capable to disperse or to reunite themselves in an integrated group) with same value of an aircraft carrier with all its fighter aircraft,AWACS and its escort ships against a powerful opponent would represent a naval force dozen of times more survivable ,lethal and ductile than a CVBG ; naturally if your goal is to move war against a nation of the opposite part of the planet, devoid of any mean to defend its airspace or to put in any peril your ships....well then your aircraft carriers are very cost efficient.

Simply ,at now,in the world the second instance is much more likely than the first.