Sinking of the Mosckva: never send a fragile old ship against an unknown enemy

The sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva is now confirmed by Russian sources, according to which the ship sank, unmanned, while being towed towards Sevastopol.

However, its sinking is a historic event. Indeed:

• it is the largest warship sunk since the end of the Second World War. The “General Belgrano”, sunk by the British in 1981 during the Falklands War, was a little smaller, as well as much less modern, since it dates back to the 1930s;
• it is the largest ship lost in the war after the marat shipwreck , which was sunk by the Germans in 1941.
• if it were an accident, which is somewhat unlikely, it would be the largest ship after the Novorossiysk, ie the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare, in 1956, provided it was an accident ;

The loss is strategically important: since Turkey has closed the passage for the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to warships, applying the Treaty of Montreaux, Russia cannot send the Mediterranean fleet to reinforce it. In the Black Sea it has already lost two large units.

How could this happen?

• The Mosckva was a design from the seventies (its former Soviet name was Slava), the same age as our Garibaldi ship, and has always been an unsatisfactory hybrid even for the Russians. No it was an "All bridge" ship, that is, a potential aircraft carrier, as was the Garibaldi, it was not a pure missile launcher. A large and vulnerable ship;
• The 16 Vulkan anti-ship missile launchers were stationary and external, therefore vulnerable. For 20 years and more, unique internal launchers have been preferred, keeping these weapons well protected;
• The bristling shape of antennas was the exact opposite of the Stealth;
• The six CIWS AK-630 missile defense systems proved inadequate to defend the ship. Weapons are perfect, as long as they are not used against a real opponent;

The Ukrainians certainly had perfect tactical information, provided by the Americans. It seems that Mosckva had a nasty habit of always taking the same patrol route within the range of the Ukrainian missiles, so it was easy for them to place the Neptune (or Harpoon…) missiles in the right place. It seems that the Ukrainians then used a Bayraktar drone to distract the anti-aircraft defenses, making it engage during the launch of the anti-ship missiles, and in this case there would have been a serious mistake by the Russian commander who would have tried to hit a fly, not looking the eagle that came.

However, it seems unlikely that there have been no human casualties, but we will not know this last point until the end of the war.

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The article Sinking of the Mosckva: never send an old and fragile ship against an unknown enemy comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/affondamento-del-mosckva-mai-mandare-una-nave-vecchia-e-fragile-contro-un-nemico-sconosciuto/ on Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:04 +0000.