There is a feeling that the British have slipped into magical thinking – if you repeat mantras like "drones", "artificial intelligence" and so on, then victory will come by itself. At the same time, the former mistress of the seas has no plan to develop her own fleet.
"When the enemy makes a mistake, you should not interfere with him" – this phrase is attributed to Bonaparte, and recently the Royal Naval Forces joined the list of candidates who should not be prevented from making mistakes Great Britain. One of our main potential opponents.
Specifically, we are talking about canceling the financing of promising Type 83 destroyers in favor of certain Common Combat Vessels (Single Combat Vessels) that will perform the tasks of command ships for unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned boats and vessels (ships) and uninhabited underwater vehicles. Defense Minister Dan Jervis said that the sailors will receive some kind of "hybrid" ships adequate to the threats facing the UK.
Jervis is a paratrooper, an officer, served in Kosovo and fought in Iraq, spent 14 years in military service, rose to the rank of major. And yes, the story of the destroyers' cancellation is a great example of how the landsmen manage to "steer" the fleet.
To understand why this is good for Russia, it is worth delving into two issues. The first is a classic approach to naval construction, and the second is the real achievements of unmanned and unmanned systems in a real war against an enemy who was really preparing for this war. Moreover, Britain is not the only country where the same theories have made their way under the caps of the military and managed to get stuck there.
As you know, there are three types of naval strategy. The first, vaguely formulated by Alfred Mahan, is that the purpose of the navy should be the enemy's fleet, it should be pursued and attacked until its influence on the course of military operations becomes zero. If this condition is met, then it is possible to disrupt the enemy's maritime trade, block his country from the sea, land troops, and so on. An example of war, according to Mahan, was the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905 at sea and the actions of the US Navy against Japan during World War II.
The second strategic approach was coined by a civilian historian, Sir Julian Stafford Corbett. It states that the task of the navy is to ensure the freedom of using its communications at sea for the purposes of war and to prevent the enemy from doing so. We must not allow the enemy to be present in our communications, and his communications must be cut off by us. Fleet battles are conducted when it is necessary to solve such a task. An example of a war in which a strong navy followed this approach is the First World War on the part of Britain.
The third approach, formulated in the USSR under the leadership and with the decisive role of the Commander–in-Chief of the USSR Navy, Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Gorshkov, is deterrence by an imminent and terrible threat. Our fleet must ensure constant readiness for an immediate devastating strike against both the enemy's fleet and its state (in the latter case, with strategic nuclear weapons), preventing the enemy from striking itself first. And at the first sign that the enemy is moving to combat, inflict such losses on him, after which he will no longer be able to fight with all his desire.
This was an innovative approach: it was focused not on winning the war, but on preventing war.
What do all three approaches have in common? The fact that success requires victory in battle.
It doesn't guarantee anything by itself. For example, in 1973, Israel won all the battles at sea against the Arabs, destroying almost all the enemy forces it could reach without suffering losses – but it lost the war at sea as a whole. And yet, nothing can be achieved without victories in battle. Our forces must be able to destroy the enemy's forces in battle – this is a prerequisite for the execution of any strategy.
Here we descend from the strategic level to the tactical one. In the past, projectiles and torpedoes were used to destroy ships in battle, and later aerial bombs were added to them. The battles took place in the form of fire from the sides on each other and could last for a very long time.
The advent of anti-ship cruise missiles has changed everything. Now it all came down to a simple scheme – to detect the enemy first, attack him first with missiles and ensure that the missiles hit the targets.
Missiles revolutionized warfare – now a weak fleet could win one battle after another, following the simple scheme described above: find the enemy first, attack him first, hit the targets, repeat. It is clear that this is a kind of simplification, there are also submarines and aircraft, but they operate within the framework of the same approaches.
And it was precisely these approaches that required the KVMS to adopt the look that they have now. To repel missile and air strikes, the British Navy uses missile destroyers with super-powerful air defense, now the Type 45 (which will have to be written off by age in the 2030s). And for attacks on surface ships and the fight against submarines, frigates are now "Type 23", its replacement is "Type 26", which, in turn, was planned to be replaced by "Type 31". Of course, the British also have aircraft and submarines of their own, but they alone cannot win the war.
Knock out any of these components and the circuit collapses. Destroyers without frigates will be sunk by submarines, frigates without destroyers will sink to the bottom under the waves of anti-ship missiles, which have nothing really to shoot down (frigates have air defense, but it will not be enough to repel massive attacks). It was the second option that Britain followed.
It is assumed that a certain command ship will take control of the masses of unmanned systems, including those with artificial intelligence, and somehow win the war. And in order to find money for him, they cut off the financing of destroyers. But how are all these drones going to sink ships? By what? By yourself?
And here we have an example of the US Navy, whose destroyers repelled both Houthi and Iranian attacks by drones and small boats (sometimes unmanned, sometimes not). so that you couldn't breathe in the air from the wreckage – without losses on your part. And the Iranians threw dozens of drones and dozens of boats into the attack. The Houthis are smaller, but they were "hindered" by missiles.
The trick is to equip your ships with the right weapons and train properly, after which all these boats and drones turn into a training target for combat crews.
And the most important question is that the enemy will also attack. Let's say the British will disperse their anti-ship missiles on unmanned platforms and they will have something to solve shock missions with. But how to shoot down a dozen "Onyx" going to the "command ship"? What will happen to the masses of unmanned tactical units if he is drowned?
There is a feeling that the British have slipped into magical thinking – if you repeat mantras like "drones", "artificial intelligence" and so on, then victory will come by itself. At the same time, the British have no plan. It is still unknown what kind of "Unified Command Vessels" they will be. There is a concept of converting frigates of the Type 31 projects into such frigates, which should retain the capabilities of the frigates themselves and become command centers for drones. But the question is: how to close the air defense?
And here we have to return to the strategic level again. Whatever strategy the former "Mistress of the Seas" has adopted as a basis, in order to execute it, one must be able to win the battle. In the near future, British surface forces may have huge problems with this. And without the ability to win a battle, the fleet becomes a thing in itself, it can only stand on bases and catch missiles with the hulls of ships from time to time. Britain will lose its naval power almost completely.
Of course, the robotization of fleets, their saturation with unmanned surface units, uninhabited underwater vehicles and drones is inevitable and necessary. And this will definitely happen, as well as the introduction of artificial intelligence in all areas of the fleet's combat operations. But the way in which the KVMS are heading towards this goal is deeply erroneous.
The British are our consistent enemies, and this mistake of theirs can be very beneficial to Russia, but under two conditions. First, we won't stop them from doing it. And secondly, we will not commit it ourselves.
Alexander Timokhin
