A group of Russian naval ships, including a nuclear-powered submarine, will visit Cuba next week as part of “historically friendly relations,” Cuba’s government said Thursday.
The Russian “frigate Gorshkov, the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, the fleet oil tanker Pashin, and the rescue tug Nikolai Chiker” will visit the port of Havana between June 12 and 17, according to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces in a statement published by the Foreign Ministry.
I've been in a fair number of naval task groups/battlegroups (I despise the newer term), both American and NATO, and at no time did we ever set out with a fucking "rescue tug". The only time one ship towed another was for training.
That the Russian Navy deploys its ships with a tug to accompany them speaks volumes about their level of readiness and maintenance.
Yeah, I saw that and wondered myself. There used to be a satirical list of supposed machine language commands; one of them was HCF: halt and catch fire. A command you do NOT want to issue in the Russian surface fleet, much less subsea. But you don't have to: it happens all of itself.
ReplyDeleteRussia technical design can be breath-takingly effective, doing amazing things with back-level materiale and utterly off-the-wall near magical techniques...because they are out-of-the-box of conventional Western thinking and design.
Production and fielding of the same is less successful because crazed/alcoholic/demoralized Russian workers/soldiers.
If Russia could ever shed itself of tyranny, paranoia, misery, etc. it would astound the world.
Thoughts...
ReplyDeleteTheir DC teams are ineffective or poorly equipped.
More boats bigger show.
Hey, we're towing something we forgot last time home.
Eck!
But then, if Russia could ever shed itself of tyranny, paranoia, misery, etc.--it would be some other country. 😈
ReplyDeleteIvory Bill, that's true.
ReplyDeleteThere is the point that, especially now, the Russian Navy has minimal ports and few allies to access for support/repairs, at least without some potential issues. Surely that adds to the desire to have that tug along, but the rest is all absolutely true too. I am mildly interested in if the U.S. has given the word to Ukraine that no fuckery should occur to Russian Navy ships outside the war zone though. With their drone developments, surely they could fly some out with a few operators and charter a vessel out of perhaps Galveston or Miami…meet the drone team and its assets clear of the 12 mile limit, if they could figure a way to get the stuff into a nearby country with lax control (Haiti, perhaps).
ReplyDeleteWon't the sheep just believe what trumples tells them about the boogie man?
ReplyDelete