Will the recent string of incidents increase aggressiveness of russian navy?

[speed150mph]

This year has not been a great year for NATO navies.

We started the year in a mass panic as russian navy submarines were operating at an increased tempo. All across Northern Europe countries were reporting violations of territorial waters by russian submarines, with most of these submarines not being prosecuted by the combined searches of several navies. The general consensus of the media was that Russian submarines were free to transit where ever they pleased and NATO was struggling to counter. Not a great start.

I also want to point out the string of incidents in the past few months.

We had a whistle blower calling out the British Royal navy on the poor condition of the royal navies SSBN fleet.

We had reports of several US ship and sub commanders being released of duties for "loss of confidence in abilities to command"

Then we had the collision of HMS Ambush with a merchant ship near Gibraltar.

We had a US navy crew get captured by the Iranians after getting lost.

A month later, there was a collision between an American SSBN and her support ship.

And now we have the latest string of mechanical failures in the LCS ships. All of which are being blamed on crew error.


You combine this with what the Russians view as a fairly successful year with both their northern, caspian, and Black Sea fleets having successful exercises and some of them performing fairly well in combat operations in Syria; and their latest aggressiveness against NATO navies, it makes me wonder if the recent events might shape russian views on the competency of the NATO navies, and might lead to more bold actions by the russian federation and others?

Does the subsim community have any views on this point?