Something better than a carrier navy?

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

I never said that it was a bad strategy, as far as theoretical strategy goes. All I said was that it was not a particularly 'sailor friendly' strategy. Soviet doctrorine, whether naval, ground or air, held that in the event of war, the USSR could expect large numbers of casulties due to the superior detection, fire control, tracking and weapons technology of the west. They needed all of those units to 'clog the system', as it were. They certainly could have sunk the carrier at the center of the CVBG, but they would have lost many units in doing so. Therefore, if you are a Soviet sailor, you can expect to have a far greater chance of dying than the enemy.

Effective, but not efficeint. Of course, it was not intended to be efficient.

I think that this not only has to do with an acknowledgment that overall they have the inferior technology (what they tell their troops in propaganda might be another matter), but also their operational emphasis as opposed to the tactical emphasis in doctrine.

Putting it very crudely, an operational emphasis you are out to win "campaigns", and thinks though of course at some point you have to win a battle, you can actually lose or tie most of your battles and still win. A tactical emphasis means that you are more out to win "battles", and hope that by winning as many battles as you can, you can win the campaign.

So NATO tries to build the best subs. The Soviets try to build lots of what they think are good enough subs. But if you assume the tactic is effective, it may actually be more efficient even in terms of sailor lives. For example, every time a Soviet sub gets killed trying to attack a CVBG, 80-100 lives goes. But when one sub succeeds, not only does it create an operational victory, but potentially several hundreds of Americans may die in the sinking, which will go a long way toward counterbalancing this.

[LoBlo]

So this really wasn't the discussion that I was hoping for... but oh well.

Its hard to compare "which naval architeture was better" between the now dead USSR and the USN, becuase the two sides each had different objectives.

The USSR would have its war at its borders and would need naval power to prevent foreign supplies and naval sorties from interfering with its land and air campaigns. The US on the other hand faced war an ocean away and would need naval fleets that could travel across an ocean and take up shop of a coast providing strike sorties, air support, and reinforcements from sea.

So while the US navy built an expeditionary navy that could travel far and accomplish everything from ground strikes, sea control, and air superiority, the USSR built a carrier-killer navy that would be mostly concerned at keeping british and american ships from interfering with its border campaigns.

[LoBlo]

I've always thought that Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" was one the best books depicting the differences in the to strategies. The first thing the Soviets do is step up a clever attack on the US carrier and cripple it, preventing it from interfering in its ground efforts. Meanwhile the US naval support is crippled and can not help in the Europe war effort, having to make do with what ever European forces were already in place and can now only rely on its sub forces for naval efforts.