If there’s big news in the arcane world of naval operations, it might be that the Russian aircraft carrier,
Admiral Kuznetsov, has supposedly
departed the Mediterranean to head for home.
Regional postures
Then again, it might not. The Aviationist reports that there are still
Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) effective in the Western Med that indicate an area where
Kuznetsov
plans to conduct flight operations. The NOTAMs are in effect through
26 April – although Russian media reported on 18 April that
Kuznetsov
had completed her mission in the Med and was heading home. It’s not
clear why the Russians would have reported the carrier’s movements
deceptively. (NATO navies know where
Kuznetsov has been throughout this period.) It could be that they just changed their minds.
There are several things to say about
Kuznetsov’s presence,
and you can decide for yourselves what the import of the move is. For
one thing, Russia’s ability to keep the carrier deployed forward is
bounded by the limitations of Russia’s basing and support arrangements
in the Med.
Kuznetsov has been deployed since December, and her
deployments since she began going to the Med again, in 2008, have
typically been of about the same duration. They are much shorter, in
other words, than the deployments of U.S. aircraft carriers. (USS
Harry S Truman
(CVN-75), for example, was deployed from July 2013 until this past
Friday, 18 April.) America has a far more extensive network of
shore-based support capabilities than Russia has in the Med.
Admiral Kuznetsov anchored off Limassol, Cyprus in April 2014 (Image via defencenet.gr)
For another thing, however, the U.S. hasn’t been keeping a carrier in
the Med. What the U.S. hasn’t been doing, in fact, is the main factor
affecting the decisions of Russia and other countries in the “Great
Crossroads” area, at the juncture of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
At the operational level,
Kuznetsov’s combat power and utility
are minimal for any true military purpose, in Russia’s major
foreign-policy concerns in the region right now, Ukraine and Syria. (
Kuznetsov
could, in any case, be gotten into the Black Sea only by breaching the
Montreux Convention – and Turkey wouldn’t sit still for that.) The
carrier’s presence in the Eastern Med, where she was for nearly three
months, is certainly not meaningless. But it’s politically
demonstrative rather than militarily decisive. And if there’s no U.S.
carrier prowling the Med, the need for demonstration can be accorded a
lower priority.
At the geopolitical level, U.S. passivity is equally important, if not more. There are no
new
patterns developing in any of the hot spots around the Great
Crossroads. There’s nothing new about the method by which Russia is
engulfing eastern Ukraine; the Russian tactics there are just Bolshevism
with cell phones. Bolshevism “works” not because it’s uniquely
effective in terms of methods or tactics, but because it attacks where
it’s most likely to go unopposed by a stronger power.
That’s exactly what’s happening in Ukraine. The decisive factor
isn’t anything the Russians are doing. It’s the lack of opposition from
the U.S. and NATO. Even the shaky interim government in Kiev could,
and probably would, be doing more to defend its territory if it knew it
had backing from NATO against the conventional power Russia can bring to
bear. But it doesn’t.
The same dynamic is in play in Syria, and it’s in this overall
context that all Russian moves have to be seen. If Russia is sending the
carrier home now, it’s because it’s convenient – it keeps her navy and
its budget on schedule – and nothing constrains her to do otherwise.
The Black Sea
USS
Donald Cook (DDG-75), which had the
encounter with the Russian Su-24 Fencer on 12 April,
has just departed the Black Sea.
Her departure is unrelated to the incident with the Su-24; the U.S. and
France are rotating combatants through the Black Sea to maintain a
demonstrative NATO naval presence there. The frigate USS
Taylor (FFG-50), which had the unfortunate event with the
propeller shaft grounding in the Black Sea in February, has just
reentered the Black Sea, and the French frigate FS
Dupleix (D641) is declared for an
inbound transit of the Bosporus
on 26-27 April. (The NATO navies will be restricting their ships’
visits to the Black Sea to 21 days or less, in compliance with the
Montreux Convention.)
The NATO warships represent the highest level of excellence for their kind, of course. Nevertheless, claims that they
signify a big military build-up by NATO
are vastly overblown. There is virtually no maritime character to the
Ukraine conflict, and the three ships are not militarily useful for
projecting power ashore, in any way that would be meaningful. They are
there to demonstrate NATO’s political interest, not to counter military
moves by Russia (a purpose for which they are unsuitable).
Is it wise to signal political interest using military assets that
have little to no military utility in the context they’ve been deployed
in? We report, you decide.
Turkish Maritime Task Group
The ships of the Turkish Maritime Task Group continue their progress in
circumnavigating Africa,
something the Turkish navy hasn’t done since 1866, when it was the
Ottoman navy. So far they have visited Tunisia, the Canary Islands, and
Senegal (see
here),
Mauritania,
The Gambia,
Ghana, and
Benin.
They’ve also visited Nigeria, and will
pull into Namibia for a port visit at the beginning of May. During the Nigerian visit, the Turks
reportedly “donated” a warship to the Nigerian navy.
I can find no record of which warship (i.e., what type it was), but I
assume it was a smaller patrol craft. Interestingly, in mid-March,
unconfirmed reporting suggested that
arms had been shipped to unknown recipients in Nigeria via Turkish Airlines, a claim vigorously rejected by the Erdogan government. An airline spokesman
later said
that the arms had been part of a legitimate shipment to the Nigerian
navy. Which doesn’t fit with the protestations from the Turkish
government, so you see the conundrum here.
Turkish
frigate TCG Gediz, an ex-US Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, hosts
Mauritanian guests in Nouakchott on 2 April 2014 (Turkish navy image)
In conjunction with the visit to Nigeria, the Turkish warships participated in a multinational naval exercise as well,
Obangame Express 2014.
This exercise series, sponsored by U.S. Africa Command and the host
nation, focuses on joint maritime security and antipiracy training. The
2014 iteration saw the Turkish navy’s first at-sea participation with
its own warships.
The Iranian enigma
Many readers are no doubt aware of the Iranian navy’s announcement
last week that its previously proclaimed plans to send warships to the
Atlantic
were on hold.
The “29th Fleet,” of which – depending on the report – the two formerly
Atlantic-bound ships formed either all or part, would not be going to
the Atlantic after all.
It remains the case that
Iran is not being forthcoming about this,
and that her ships have probably been somewhere other than where the
Iranian navy has suggested they were. Once again, a few days ago, the
Iranian navy announced that the two ships in question, the frigate
Sabalan and the replenishment ship
Kharg, were conducting a port visit in the region. This time, the port was
supposedly Muscat, Oman. And once again, there has been no independent evidence that the ships were there.
Iran has intimated vaguely that the antipiracy mission ended up
taking precedence for the 29th Fleet over the planned voyage to the
Atlantic. But in three months of deployment, there has been not a
single scrap of evidence that the Iranian warships were in the
antipiracy patrol area in the Gulf of Aden or Red Sea. With ships and
reconnaissance planes from multiple NATO countries, along with the
forces of China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New
Zealand, and Singapore, plying the same waters, it is simply not
credible to propose that the Iranian warships, which were supposed to be
in the Atlantic, were in the Horn of Africa instead for three months,
but went unnoticed and unreported.
The latest Iranian announcement is timed to account for an
on-schedule return to the ships’ home port of Bandar Abbas. What have
the ships been doing? There is little to go on. The ships have
apparently been in an area or areas where they were very unlikely to be
photographed or reported on. Highly trafficked and better-wired
locations around the Indian Ocean are
unlikely stowaway spots:
Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, the Maldives, the Mozambique Channel (where
South Africa and Mozambique run a joint antipiracy operation of their
own,
Operation Copper). Moving from one place to another, meanwhile, is more likely than remaining in a single place.
Presumably, the ships’ mission was related to Iran’s highest policy
priorities. Among those, her nuclear program and her arms shipments to
terrorists might obviously benefit from the transshipment services of
naval vessels (which cannot be stopped on the high seas except as a
belligerent act). As discussed
here,
Iran has been caught out, over the past decade, in increasingly
elaborate transshipment schemes to get arms to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Perhaps some shipments are worth exceptional furtiveness and
misdirection. Securing uranium from African sources might also warrant
such operations, or importing highly sensitive items from North Korea,
via multiple interim stops.
We aren’t likely to know any time soon. But we do have the prospect
of repeating this whole drama in the near future, with Iran’s promise
that the 30th Fleet (see link above) really will go to the Atlantic.
Russian – and Japanese – ships do Pakistan
File this one with the growing pile of “firsts.” Ships of the
Russian navy arrived in Karachi, Pakistan over the weekend for the
first such port visit in modern history.
It reportedly included an at-sea drill between the navies, along with
the usual diplomatic events. The three-ship task group, which includes
Udaloy-class destroyer
Marshal Shaposhnikov, a naval tanker, and a salvage tug, is from the Pacific Ocean Fleet and left Vladivostok in March.
On the way to Pakistan, the Russian group participated in
Exercise Komodo 2014, hosted by Indonesia, along with ships from 15 other nations, including the U.S., China, India, and Japan.
The
Japanese warships visiting at the same time were two destroyers,
Samidare (DD-106) and
Sazanami
(DD-113). They’re on the way home from antipiracy ops off Somalia –
and we are right to read something into the mutual comfort of the three
nations with each other’s company.
Pakistani
navy musters a reception contingent in Karachi for JDS Sazanami, a
Japanese destroyer, in April 2014 (Pakistani navy image)
Pakistan’s sudden wild popularity has a lot to do with Asian alarm
about China – Pakistan’s longstanding patron – but is also connected
with the long view of where Asian relations are going in a post-Pax
Americana world. In less than a year, U.S. forces will be all but gone
from Afghanistan, and the meaning of the American presence in the
Persian Gulf, as well as U.S. relations with Pakistan, will inevitably
change. By January 2017, we will not be living in the same world.
Russian tug saga off U.S. coast
Speaking of the Russian navy, remember the
Nikolay Chiker? She’s the large-capacity, ocean-going Russian navy tug that was
lurking off the Florida coast in March, before heading down to Curacao. She’s been lurking again. She was detected
sitting off St. Eustatius in the Caribbean 5-6 April, and in port Havana 20-22 April. Between times,
Nikolay Chiker meandered around off Canaveral. Her latest position on the 24th puts her
south of western Cuba.
It bears repeating that the big tug is
not outfitted for
intelligence collection against rocket and space launches. There may
have been interesting events in these categories while she was there, in
either March or April, but there’s nothing
Nikolay Chiker can do
about them. If she has been fitted with equipment for special
collection of some kind, it’s more likely to be underwater collection.
New agreement among Asian-Pacific nations on sea encounters
Members of the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) came to
a landmark agreement
this week on a Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), which – at a
very basic level – will regularize the behavior expected on both sides
in routine, unplanned maritime encounters between the member navies.
The U.S. and 20 other nations (including Russia and China) are
members of WPNS, a non-treaty consultative body which held its first
symposium in 1988. The CUES agreement is non-binding, and, again, is
very basic. It is
not an “incidents at sea” (INCSEA) type agreement, like
the one signed by the U.S. and former USSR in 1972. An INCSEA agreement of some kind is what many observers
have been advocating for relations in the South China Sea, especially
in the flurry after the Chinese navy’s incident with the cruiser USS
Cowpens (CG-63) in December 2013.
But it’s something. The final text of the CUES agreement has not
been made public yet, but you can view some of its provisions as
reported in Chinese (English-language) media
here. (China hosted the symposium this past week.)
It remains to be seen how much of an achievement CUES is as a measure
to promote stability, security, and peace. I have a strict policy of
not sneezing at these earnest, hard-negotiated conventions. But they
tend to proliferate when storm clouds are gathering, without damping
down the underlying reasons for confrontation. Procedure isn’t a
substitute for policy or will.
A video broadcast on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV yesterday shows actors playing Israeli soldiers entering the Gaza Strip, as atext on screen warns, "You will end up in Hell." One by one the actor-soldiers are shot in the head, after which a Hamas sniper collects all the dog tags of the killed soldiers. A text appears on the screen: "Our harvest is your heads."