The new Russian Maritime Board, headed by Nikolai Patrushev, is becoming increasingly active. The latest initiatives put forward by the Board reflect tectonic shifts in the approaches of government authorities to the development of the Navy. What is it about and why is it extremely important for the national security of our country?
In early October, Patrushev visited JSC Zelenodolsk Plant named after A.M. Gorky (Tatarstan, part of JSC Ak Bars Shipbuilding Corporation). This is a shipyard on the Volga River, in the interior of the country. It was used to build small missile ships (MRCS) of project 21631 "Buyan-M", which became famous in the Syrian war and its military, and now patrol ships of project 22160, MRCS of project 22800 "Karakurt", FSB Coast Guard ships and a lot of other ships and vessels of various classes and purposes are being built.
Patrushev expressed a wish there, which, if implemented, will make our fleet much stronger, and for the same money: "It is important to ensure the serial construction of ships and vessels. At the same time, it is necessary to organize the process of building the ship in strict accordance with the design documentation, eliminating haphazard changes to the project during its construction."
There is a real abyss behind this seemingly banality.
Everywhere in the world, ships are designed for a long time and are being built even longer, this is an objective reality, and this is due to the complexity of their design. Often, the cutting of steel on the hull of a future ship can begin more than a year before its laying. In the same way, many ship systems, components, various devices, and weapons can be ordered in advance.
Money for the construction is also allocated deeply in advance. Since the shipyard, as a rule, does not have its own funds in such huge quantities, loans are taken for these volumes of purchases. They are taken not for the entire ship, but for part of the work and components, in such a way as to service them from the planned payments of the customer.
All this is a very complicated process from an organizational point of view. Once started, it should go exactly according to plan to the end. Any stop threatens to turn the process of building a ship into chaos. Are the engines not delivered on time? And the slipway will have to be freed according to the plan, another customer is waiting. And so the unfinished ship has to be launched, put "sucks", then make another, then drag the unfinished ship back onto the slipway, and there is already corrosion, and the payment deadlines from the customer are also disrupted, new loans are needed, and the percentage for their maintenance is not included in the cost…
As a result, an explosive increase in the cost of the ship begins, and the deadlines for its delivery, as they say in the industry, are shifting to the right.
Experts are well aware that two ships of the same project, built at different factories, are similar, but different ships. Both in terms of the quality of the building and the execution of the mass of structural elements. Yes, there are different factories – even ships of the same factory in the series, which do not have formal differences in the project, can be very different.
At the same time, seriality is one of the key requirements. Building a unique, single ship is extremely expensive. But the construction of ships and vessels in large batches (in dozens of hulls) creates, firstly, a powerful fleet by itself, secondly, a large personnel school for both sailors and shipbuilders, thirdly, provides industry with orders for a long time, and most importantly, makes each subsequent unit of the series cheaper than the previous one. But until recently, there were problems with serial production in the Russian shipbuilding industry.
Organizational difficulties of this kind, we repeat, relate to shipbuilding in any country. However, some States, including our potential adversaries, have been able to successfully resolve them. A person who can eliminate these difficulties in Russian reality will undoubtedly go down in the history of the Russian navy and shipbuilding. Even the very public setting of such a task already gives hope.
According to the decree of the President, three councils have been established in the Maritime Board – the Council for the Protection of the National Interests of the Russian Federation in the Arctic, the Council for the Development and Support of Maritime Activities of the Russian Federation, and in the current historical period the most important is the Council for the Strategic Development of the Navy. And here we have another little-discussed topic.
Russia occupies a huge landmass, the foundations of its political culture were laid before gaining access to the sea. The results of this are still with us. After Peter the Great, Russian military theorists systematically had to prove the necessity of the fleet for the country. No actual facts, no victories, no military losses could convince a significant part of the elites, and then the people, that the navy was of strategic importance to the country – both from a commercial and military point of view.
For example, in the early Soviet period, the question of how to deal with the navy was solved very simply – naval theorists were partially shot, partially transplanted, the fleet was driven under the control of the army, the fundamental principles of the combat use of the Navy were declared a bourgeois relic. As a result, when Stalin gave the command to deploy fleet forces in the Mediterranean Sea to help republican Spain, the fleet simply could not fulfill it.
The first attempt to remedy the situation was made before the Great Patriotic War, but decades of managerial madness and terror were not in vain. That is why the powerful Baltic Fleet was neutralized by the forces of six German and two Finnish minelayers. There are no miracles.
After the war, the terror ended, but the onslaught of army structures on the navy continued. The commander–in-chief of the USSR Navy, Sergei Gorshkov, was barely able to contain this trend - and it was the Soviet Ocean fleet, along with the nuclear industry, nuclear weapons and cosmonautics, that made the USSR a superpower capable of fighting the power of the united West.
Gorshkov did the impossible. He created (though without announcing it or describing anything in print, even closed) a full-fledged naval strategy and was able to ensure that the USSR adhered to it. In particular, this strategy has ensured decades of peaceful existence and development of our country.
After the collapse of the USSR, the fleet, devoid of the meaning of existence, quickly went to metal acceptance. His revival began only years later. However, the implementation of naval programs, which began in 2009 as part of the rearmament of all types of Armed Forces, did not always go smoothly. This includes the words of Nikolai Patrushev, said at the Zelenodolsk plant. As a result, instead of a fleet equal in power to about a quarter of the American one, which was possible with the allocated money, it turned out to be completely different.
But this is not the fault of the politicians. There are simply no books written in Russian on the strategic use of the fleet in a non-nuclear war, and they are classified for use in a nuclear war and novice politicians cannot read them. Plus, there is a shortage of people who could clearly explain how this type of domestic aircraft should develop. The Navy's development strategy has not even been discussed for decades.
This is not someone's fault, not malicious intent, not stupidity – this is a tradition dating back to the time of Ivan the Terrible. If you like, it is a historically developed feature of the Russian military–political approach.
And now a state advisory body appears in the country, which should deal with these issues. Even the fact that this work has begun is already a revolution in Russian military-political thinking. The preparation of the Navy's development strategy was officially announced not so long ago. The regulation on the Navy Strategic Development Council has been approved, according to which the council is engaged in "analyzing the state and trends of the strategic development of the fleet, forecasting, identifying and assessing threats."
The first meeting of the Council was held on October 10, 2024. It is reported that the council discussed strategic requirements for the Navy, the military-political situation in the Black and Baltic Seas, and the need to ensure the serial construction of ships and vessels. We don't know the details and we probably never will. But what we do know for sure is that nothing like this has been done for many decades before.
It is critically important for Russia to gain a clear strategic vision of naval issues and put this vision at the heart of naval construction. A lot depends on this today. And the fact that we have become contemporaries of how Russia is beginning to lay down a real naval strategy is one of the most important events of the current time.
Alexander Timokhin
