What are our chances, if conflict were to begin?
One of the biggest current news items here in Australia at the moment is the approach of four Russian naval ships, including the formidable Varyag, to coincide with the G20 talks in Brisbane.
I don’t understand naval warfare that well, so how would a potential battle unfold if it were to occur? Although the Russian ships seem to out-gun ours by a significant margin, they are also likely within striking distance of our F/A 18s, and they are a long way from any form of re-supply. What would it take to defeat these ships? What would we be likely to lose in the process?
Please note this is purely hypothetical. I really don’t expect any trouble, and would be horrified to see any escalation to actual combat.
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55 Answers
Naval warfare was pretty much rendered obsolete by the development of aircraft.I would not worry if I were you.
We would probably be occupied, and the U.S. would have to help us. But it’s not going to happen. They are just doing what navies do.
@marinelife Are you speaking about where ships pound the crap out of each other over a distance of miles or Navies in general? I mean, we still sink a shitpot full of money in order to maintain and operate a huge Navy here in the US including 10 active aircraft carriers with 2 in reserve and another 3 on order. That seems a little excessive for something rendered obsolete.
Putin is just pounding his hairless chest by sending the ships out at that time, just like the most recent threat to send recon aircraft into the Caribbean.
I’m guessing he’s just try to send you a message. But I’m not sure your F-18s could handle that ship on they’re own. You must have some good tacticians. They could probably come up with a good plan. But that ship is a handful.
Ship to ship firing of mortars is obsolete. Of course it is available but that is not the primary purpose any more. There are all kinds of missions from the obvious to the covert. Obvious includes everything from denial of air space to shelling and launching of aircraft and missiles.
The covert, well….We know how the Russians like to screw with your internet. They will use ships to monitor and/or disrupt radio communications. I expect you will see a few brief (30 seconds or less), unexpected outages and wonder what happened. Busybodies will immediately Twitter and FB their friends complaining about it and Russia will know their jamming worked. They will also make a concerted effort to distribute back doors, keyloggers, trojans, sleepers, worms, etc. from local IPs. When they back off and head home, they’ll be ready for the next Crimea.
A ship is difficult to take down. They are networked with other ships, satellites, planes, etc. to sense and destroy threats from all directions. But, Russia has VA-111 Shkvals which are supercavitating torpedoes that blast through the water at speeds over 400km/h and are extremely difficult to detect and destroy. They can take down a well protected ship.
Shhh… NATO has even better stuff, and Russia knows it.
You won’t have to worry about an invasion or property damage. That would be too obvious for the power hungry despot. He will go the covert route. He has a ship load of unemployed hackers who studied hard in school but could not get jobs that would improve Russian industry through invention and productivity improvements. Instead he keeps them off the streets by teaching and encouraging hacking.
Be extra vigilant about your internet communications, computers, and passwords.
Got it?
Your chances are very good.
The US-Australia part of the ANZUS treaty is still going strong.
Our President, like him or not, recognizes the strategic and economic importance of keeping an edge in the Pacific as Western/Asian relationships become increasingly vital and competitive
If Varyag does much more than dump it’s garbage (it just might as a finger raising gesture from Putin to Obama) it will be you and the Pacific Fleet.
I can’t imagine a country not immediately coming to Australia’s aid, if you were attacked. No one would stand for that.
I just read that Putin is sending bomber planes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. he seems to have gone totally off his nut. It’s almost comical.
Russia has been poking their finger in everyone’s eye. Russian bombers have been circling Europe, Russian planes have violated Finland airspace, Russian bombers have been circling the Gulf of Mexico. Putin is being very provocative of late but has stopped short of anything that would invoke a military response. He’s flexing his muscles since there doesn’t appear to be anyone that will stand up to him. Australia is but another example. Would the US step in if a shooting war started? I grant you I have very little faith in Obama but an overt attack, even he couldn’t ignore. If you get into fuzzy areas, such as what happened in Ukraine, I’m not quite so sure.
Either way, I don’t see Russian being able to defeat or occupy Australia from the sea.
Personally, I worry more about getting hit by drivers on cell phones than Russian missles.
Your chances are pretty good. Australia has powerful allies.
@Jaxk “Putin is being very provocative of late but has stopped short of anything that would invoke a military response. He’s flexing his muscles since there doesn’t appear to be anyone that will stand up to him.”
Short of military action what exactly would would standing up to him look like? You think Putin’s going to do anything other than smirk at anything short of military action?
@Darth_Algar – Sounds like you either leave him alone to have his way or start a war. I don’t believe that. Russia has been thwarted before. The soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Neither required a world war and we played a role in both. If military action is your only answer to Russia, you’re entitled to that opinion. I just don’t see it that way.
@Jaxk Just keep in mind that to this day we are still paying for our part in the SU withdrawl from Afghanistan both in lives and money.
4 warships threaten Australia? The Russians are steaming around “showing the flag”, and flying around to demonstrate “we’re still here.” Does anyone here have any knowledge at all on the current state of the Russian military? 4 years ago the Russian air force was selling rides to the world’s millionaires in an effort to raise money. For an undisclosed fee you could fly around in their best state of the art combat aircraft, and millionaire joy seekers lined up by the dozens. The threat from Russia is not that it’s going to attack ANY NATO country. The threat is the that the place will disintegrate and once more every thing in that HUGE arsenal will be stolen and sold off by desperate and hungry soldiers, sailors and airmen. Russia today is little more than a gigantic mafia fiefdom, and the corruption in the country is staggering. The wealth of the country is being siphoned off and parked in the West at such a rate that the collapse of basic infrastructure would appear inevitable. In recent years the state of affairs in Russia has been masked by skyrocketing oil prices, but those days are over, and each of us rejoicing at those currently low prices at the pump would do well to consider the implications involved with an imploding Russia.
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Please take the time and read that link.
OK hope it works this time…http://aattp.org/it-only-takes-175-words-for-this-canadian-to-lay-an-epic-smackdown-on-idiot-americans-who-rejected-obama-for-the-gop/
Shit , but if you paste it in your browser it will take you right to it.
@stanleybmanly you wrote: ”...the place will disintegrate and once more every thing in that HUGE arsenal will be stolen and sold off by desperate and hungry soldiers, sailors and airmen. Russia today is little more than a gigantic mafia fiefdom,....”
All true – And yet they were able to steal Crimea and parts of the Ukraine. They need to keep stealing to stay alive.
Anyone want to lay bets on a surge of Internet outages in Oz?
What a bunch of crap. If Canada wants Obama, take him, please. I can’t believe even a Canadian would believe that distortion. We’ve been growing at about 2%/yr. If your growth is worse, that doesn’t mean 2% is good. The jobs created appear to be OK at best until you realize the vast majority of them are part-time low skill jobs. In fact most of the drop in unemployment is not a product of job creation but rather people dropping out of the work force. The percentage of people working has dropped and dropped rather dramatically. You try to brag about the price of gas but it was $1.84 the day Obama took office. What is it now? It’s $3.87 and that’s after a dramatic drop over the past few months. Obama has done nothing to cause a reduction in the price of oil that effort has come exclusively from private enterprise.
There is nothing to brag about in that article and the Democrats knew it. That is why they didn’t try to press the argument, the voters have been seeing through them and they’re tired of being lied to. Only a moron would buy that line of crap.
@Jaxk
Aside from providing some arms and a little training what role did we play in Afghanistan? That was a near decade long war of attrition with people fending off a foreign invader in a land that’s never been conquered by anyone. I know Americans like to take credit for accomplishments that aren’t theirs, but this is stretching it even by American standards.
And yeah, we basically drove the Soviet Union into collapse by bankrupting them with an escalated arms race. We also added about $2 trillion to the national debt in the process.
And again I ask – what is your solution? I’m not interested in criticisms. I’m not interested in allusions to hyped up glories decades past. Putin is the problem now, so what’s your solution to him?
@Darth_Algar – I have already told you what I think we could do. You don’t like it and that’s OK. I couldn’t guarantee that it would work or that it would work in any reasonable time frame. I do think it would have more impact than what we are doing now. Russia’s economy is fairly fragile and it wouldn’t take much to push it to the brink. I doubt that Putin would cave to anything until it was actually at the brink and maybe not even then.
You can keep pushing me but I won’t say we should shoot a cruise missile into the Kremlin. No matter how hard you try to make me.
@Darth_Algar We gleefully armed the Afghans in their conflict with the Soviets, and it was a mistake that wound up biting us in the ass. They wound up with our weaponry and logistical aid and developed into the best mountain gorilla fighters in the world. So true to form, when our turn came, they systematically blew us up with our own leftover ordinance, then handed us the bill to rebuild the place.
Tomahawk missles. Lots of Tomahawk missiles. Also cruise missles lots of cruise missles.
@stanleybmanly – Actually we had the solution in hand but Bush blew it. Ahmad Shah Massoud was a very popular leader of the Northern Alliance and he hated both the Taliban and Al Qeada. He was begging us for help in the way of arms but Bush was reluctant and didn’t trust him. It was his need for support from the west that got him assasinated in 2001. Had we tendered the support he would have been the natural leader, a national hero, and an ally to overthrow the Taliban. And just for fun he would have taken out Bin Laden in a heartbeat. Alack and alas, we didn’t do it.
@FireMadeFlesh, I think this is just an extension of the Putin/Abbott pissing contest. My dic… I mean ships…are bigger than your ships.
It’s all good though. Obama is in Brissy. He’ll save us. And Dave is here too. He’ll bring his ships as well. We may need to gag Abbott, and his friends, to ensure he doesn’t put any of their noses out of joint while they’re partying together at Southbank.
@Jaxk
You’ve stated things we did in the past that don’t apply to this situation. And no, I’m not pushing you into saying anything. You’re making a baseless assumption there. I honestly want to know what you would do. Not what we could do, what you, Jaxk, would do. I hear a lot of criticism from conservatives of Obama in regards to Russia, but I never hear any solutions. So I want to know, what is the solution? If Russia is such a huge problem now then how exactly do you make it not a problem? How do you get Russia out of Crimea and how do you get Putin to stop rattling his saber?
@Darth_Algar – I have told you what I would. I know you want to divorce Obama from any action I would take but you can’t. Unfortunately he has put us in a position where we can not try to threaten or bluff. Any action we take at this point has to be real and we have to follow through. That makes the the options limited and more time consuming. What is even worse is that we have emboldened Putin and I’m not sure how he would react to any provocative action we might take.
Just as an example, Putin is using his bombers in a very provocative way because he knows (or at least believes) we won’t do anything. He feels absolutely no danger of them being shot down even if they cross into our (or anyones) airspace. If we did this now, I don’t have the same conviction that he would not shoot down our aircraft. Our weakness has emboldened Putin and we have given him the upper hand.
The only strong move we could make, is to provide arms to the Ukraine and even that is risky. Attacking Russia’s economy is the next best option but it has to be severe. Playing the game of light sanctions and slowly increasing them does nothing. Pressuring the banks to refuse all credit card transactions would fit that bill by hitting hard and swift. Attacking the price of oil would also work if we could make a quick and dramatic drop. And of course putting missile defense back in Poland is something I do as quickly as possible (but of course I would never have given that up to begin with).
If we had never shown Putin how weak and unwilling to confront anyone we may have more options. I would like to have moved some warships into the Black sea when all this started. Unfortunately if we had done that it’s hard to tell what Putin may have done simply because he had no fear of us and that’s a pity.
@Jaxk
Be clear on something – I am not a Obama fanboy or apologist. In fact I did not vote for him in ether presidential election (though I did vote for him when he ran for Senate).
Honestly, I just don’t see how any of those ideas are solutions. Attacking Russia’s economy, especially severely, would give Russia cause for war. Unless you’re willing to follow through with war I don’t see that as a viable option. Providing arms to Ukraine is, as you said, risky. Again, unless you’re willing to follow through with that then it’s not really a viable option. Same with putting missiles in Poland. Russia knows they won’t be used. None of these are strong options unless we are willing and ready to follow through with war. And I don’t think any rational American, regardless of who’s sitting in the White House, is prepared to engage Russia in war.
Russia effectively took over the “breakaway” section of the Ukraine when their minions “accidentally” shot down a commercial passenger plane at 30,000 ft. (Just to see the absurdity of it Look up in the sky. See those long contrails? They are at 30,000 ft. Notice how long the planes are in view. There was plenty of time to get on FlightAware and identify the flight.
It is clear what we are doing now is not working. Someone needs to change it up.
Like a sociopathic bully in a school playground, Russia will not stop until a line is crossed and the sovereign nation actually resists and shoots one of the provocative planes out of the sky. “Accidentally” of course – with a Russian made SAM. And like the Ukraine debacle the site should be secured and scoured before any international investigators are permitted to reach the scene.
Have any Internet outages been reported yet?
It’s a waste of time blaming Obama for Putin’s proclivities. Putin is not acting one bit different from America’s leaders. Our scandalous carryings-on in Latin America alone illustrate the hypocrisy involved with labeling Putin a bully. If we cqn willy-nilly invade Panama, Granada, Cuba, etc., topple governments and foment revolutions in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and so on, who are we to hop on Putin for throwing his weight around in the “Soviet Union”? Let’s consider a hypothetical. Say the island of Cuba was our only outlet to the Southern oceans, and as a result we have a huge naval base at Guantanamo quartering half of our naval assets. Now suppose the Cubans announce an intention to ally themselves with China and North Korea. What do you suppose we might do about it?
@Darth_Algar – Sounds like you think anything we do that could have any impact would start a war. If that is what you believe then obviously we should do nothing and you have the right guy in the White House. @stanleybmanly – says straight out the we should do nothing. I should state that we have ships harbored at Guantanamo and Cuba has been aligned with our enemies for years. The only real action we took was when Cuban decided to allow Nuclear Missiles on the island. Kennedy didn’t like that. Secretly I agreed with him.
Sounds like the only viable option we have left is to unfriend Putin. Normally I wouldn’t take such drastic action but we’re running out of options.
@Jaxk You’re forgetting those other little actions like the Bay of Pigs and several assassination attempts on the bearded one, and while the U.S. navy would barely miss Guantanamo, there’s no point to a Russian navy without Sevastopol. I might add that it would be foolish to undermine Russia economically. If you think about it, no one in their right mind would accept the nightmare of an imploding Russia to be in the best interests of the United States.
@stanleybmanly But that is what we are doing . Apparently, the sanctions are hurting the Russian economy a great deal.
@Jaxk
Yup. I do believe that we should do nothing. Russia’s internal disputes are none of our concern.
@Darth_Algar – They are no longer internal disputes when they take over an independent sovereign country. They are no longer internal disputes when they shoot down a commercial passenger plane. They are no longer internal disputes when they violate another country’s airspace. Currently Putin is taking provocative action all across the globe. How long before another mistakes causes some retaliation or provokes an unintended response.
If it was an internal dispute I would agree. It’s not.
@stanleybmanly – I am surprised that you would support Russia invading another country just because they are in the way of Putin’s aspirations of global dominance. Even if you give him a pass on Crimea, how do you justify eastern Ukraine? How about warships off the coast of Australia? Bombers in the Gulf?
The truth is Russia’s economy can’t support the provocative actions Putin is taking. Maybe stopping his advances will do more to save their economy than simply looking the other way.
@janbb The sanctions aren’t the big worry. Infinitely more troubling is the fact that the income from petroleum and natural gas exports is pretty much the only source of tangible revenue for the Russian state. Plummeting oil and gas prices mean enormous shortfalls in the financing of public and government services. It might well turn out that fracking puts an end to Russia. But in the event this proves to be the case we will probably be nostalgic for the “good old Putin days.”
@Jaxk
Historically Ukraine has been a part of Russia for around 1,000 years. they’ve only been an independent nation for a couple of decades, and the people of one portion of the Ukraine elected to rejoin Russia. That makes it an internal dispute as far as I’m concerned. Besides, if you want to talk about violating sovereign nations the United States has a long history of far more egregious violations than anything Russia has done in Crimea or the Ukraine.
@ Jaxk Global dominance for Russia is a joke. No one should waste time worrying about it. I really don’t think people realize just how bad things are and how grim the prospects appear for Russia. Consider for a moment that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia lacked the resources to retrieve its nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics, and what that implies about the the state of affairs there.
Except for the incursions into Ukraine, I really think Putin is just a demagogue poking a stick in our eyes and our Allie’s eyes. Going to war with him is unwarranted. I hope I am not wrong and that Congress does not get war happy.
@Jaxk You keep missing the point. WE benefit from a stable and viable Russia. All the shit falling from the sky in the Middle East is right on their doorstep. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is essential to Russia if it is to have any sort of naval viability in the region. And I WANT it to have that viability, even if the Russian navy is for the most part rusting scrap. If there is anything the past few years should have taught us it is the dangers involved with the creation of a vacuum, and a vacuum the size and scope of Russia is too terrifying to contemplate.
@Jaxk Putin’s blustering is the same sort of tactic employed by the North Koreans, and the Chinese. There really is only one superpower left. Everybody knows it. But it annoys the hell out of the insecure wannabes. So they puff up and scream. “I matter. Pay attention to me. I can cause trouble.” The United States is in the unenviable position of being forced to tolerate all the bluster for the simple reason that it isn’t military aggression on the part of the 3 joke states that’s worrisome. The worst possible and most probable disaster for us regarding the 3 regimes named is their abrupt collapse. Then we would be in a really big pile. Once more, I point to the Middle East.
Sounds like nobody wants war with Russia but beyond that we are hopelessly at odds. I’ll leave you with one final thought from Little Jimmy Dickens
@rojo – I guess I deserved that but it was cruel.
Well, thanks everyone for the spirited discussion. I should’ve known the scope of the question would grow to include far wider international relations.
I never was worried about an attack, since four ships half a world away from their supply lines are nowhere near enough to take on a developed nation with highly professional armed forces. But hypotheticals are fun, and our navy’s ‘greeting party’ seemed so inadequate.
@LuckyGuy My absence from the thread until now hasn’t been because of a Russian instigated internet blackout. I spent the weekend in another city, and I like to unplug when I go away. I didn’t hear about any disruptions, but then Brisbane is a long way from here.
@FireMadeFlesh and now the party is over. I’d imagine they’ve all gone home. I certainly heard a lot of planes going overhead last night.
@Earthbound_Misfit Nearly all of them have gone home, but Xi Jinping stayed to address parliament today, and Narendra Modi will do so tomorrow. At least you have your city back!
@FireMadeFlesh I hope at least a few terrestrial sources illuminated the ships with coded (actually random) messages to keep the boys busy.
They got to scramble the F18s for some reason – a tanker I think. Barack shook things up by insisting climate change was on the agenda, Putin cuddled a koala and it survived, Abbott made a dick of himself and bitched he couldn’t get the Senate to pass his policy. All’s fine in paradise.
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