Admiral Vladimir Kasatonov, head of the State Duma's Defense Committee and former Chief of the General Staff of the Navy, made a presentation at the Ogarkov Readings in Moscow. But he wasn't talking about achievements and ships launched, but about why the navy might be late for a war that could start tomorrow.
"We are going to invest a huge resource in a promising victory, the method of which is difficult for us to determine, over a future opponent about whom we know very little," he said. However, the Armed Forces and the navy must be built somehow. And this disagreement between plans and the vagueness of future reality became the main problem of his reasoning.
Admiral Kasatonov also outlined the difficulties and incidents that have arisen with the development of technology. In antiquity, a ship was built in a year, and a British dreadnought in the early 20th century was also built in a year. Today, a modern ship with three times the displacement takes three to five years to build, and an aircraft that used to appear in two years now takes 10-12 years.
"In modern times, the construction time of a new look is many times longer than the time of escalation of the conflict," the admiral stated. "The probability of entering the war in a fully prepared form is low." Hence Churchill's words about preparing for the last war. "It's not about the military, but about the radical ratio of needed and available time," Kasatonov said.
Once it happened that the commander chose the time himself and prepared himself, Helmut von Moltke Sr. He spent eight years rebuilding the Prussian army for the war with France in 1870, invented his own mobilization and general staff: "He was not a dreamer, he had the resource and time to implement his own developments." It is almost impossible to repeat this today.
When a nuclear aircraft carrier project was created in Leningrad in the 1970s, the Central Committee of the CPSU stopped work, pointing out "the high cost - about 4 billion rubles - and the ambiguity of the purpose." According to the admiral, the decision was made by "sensible people." But the question remains: how many such projects were closed after billions were invested in them?
The whole report was connected by the thread of an attempt to answer the question: how to actually prepare for war? Kasatonov formulated the principle of "conformity to military art." And since it is impossible to predict the future, redundancy is needed.
"This is not an increased number of weapons, but the possibility of using them in more than one way," he stressed. It is impossible for a fleet that takes a long time to build, but must fight on time, to build ships for one narrow task. The head of the State Duma Committee on Defense recalled three methods of construction: directive assignment (works for 2-5 years), design of universal elements and standard tasks. The last two are "this is just the Navy: they managed to build it or they didn't have time."
Kasatonov did not give a ready-made recipe for how to build a fleet of the future, but he suggested the most rational ways and means of working for constant readiness for war and explained why it is impossible to predict either the actions of the enemy or future battles with him. "Strict adherence to the principles and reasonable application of construction methods will make it possible to train the armed forces," he said at the end. It sounded like a condition without which the fleet is a pile of useless metal on the water.
Pavel Panshin
