Rusia: ¿Vuelve la estrategia de las aguas cálidas?

En la década de los 70´ la Unión Soviética desarrolló una agresiva campaña de desarrollo naval. Recientemente, las noticias -desmentidas por el Kremlin- de que Rusia reabriría sus viajes bases navales en Cuba, Vietnam y en las Islas Seycheles dio a entender que la estrategia de "la búsqueda de las aguas cálidas" volvía nuevamente.

Global Insights: Russia's Navy Not Yet Ready for Global Return

Portaarenaves Tipo "Kiev"

By Richard Weitz, on 31 Jul 2012, Column

Last week, when the head of the Russian navy, Vice Adm. Viktor Chirkov, was quoted saying that Russia was seeking access to naval maintenance and supply facilities in Cuba, Vietnam and the Seychelles, the Russian government quickly denied the reports. The Russian navy abandoned almost all such overseas facilities more than a decade ago to save money and because it no longer had a global mission.

Significantly, however, the government has not challenged Chirkov’s statement that Russia would construct new aircraft carriers starting after 2020. “At the moment,” Chirkov told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, “the construction bureau has received its assignment. The documents are being processed, and the money for the construction program has been allocated.”

Russian leaders have made modernizing the Russian navy a priority of their military buildup and reform program. Current government plans are to further strengthen Russia’s sea power by building new ships and raising the navy’s international presence. But the Russian navy’s sustained return to the world’s oceans faces formidable impediments that will likely constrain Moscow’s global reach for at least the next decade or two.

Perhaps the most visible sign of the Russian navy’s revival has been its renewed deployments. During the August 2008 war with Georgia, vessels from Russia’s Black Sea fleet, based at the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, deployed along the coast of Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia to support Russian ground and air operations in Georgia.

In December 2008, Russian warships conducted joint exercises with the Venezuelan navy, marking the first time since the end of the Cold War that the Russian navy had conducted surface operations in the Western Hemisphere. The Russian navy has also maintained a presence off the Somali coast since 2008 to fight pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden. Most recently, last week Russian naval forces participated in the international RIMPAC naval exercise for the first time, completing an anti-piracy exercise in the Pacific alongside U.S. forces.

Meanwhile, the Russian government has expanded and modernized the Soviet-era naval maintenance site near Tartus in Syria, in part to support the increased Russian naval deployments in the eastern Mediterranean. The Soviet Navy regularly deployed a flotilla in the Mediterranean, but until recently, Russian Federation warships had rarely deployed there. That has changed over the past year, with Moscow sending several patrols to the region since the outbreak of the Syria crisis, which, among other potential outcomes, threatens further Russian access to the Tartus facility.

Moscow’s newfound emphasis on naval power follows a long period of neglect. Russian military shipbuilding effectively collapsed during the 1990s. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government lacked the resources to build new vessels and struggled to complete the construction of ships already begun during the Soviet period. As a result, much of the Russian navy consists of platforms designed and built before the Soviet collapse in 1991. Even though new naval construction has resumed during the past few years, the fleet is still declining in size due to the need to decommission many vessels that have reached the end of their operational lifespan.

Due to their visibility and versatility, aircraft carriers would help confirm Russia’s revival as a great sea power. The 2011-2020 Russian State Armament Program commits to funding the repair and upgrading of Russia’s single Project 11435 Admiral Kuznetsov ship. However, even the Russian navy terms this vessel a “heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser,” rather than a real aircraft carrier, because its air component has limited functionality. The ship has repeatedly gone out of service since joining the Northern Fleet in January 1991.

Last November, the Russian navy leadership recommended building two aircraft carrier battle groups by 2027. One would serve in the Northern Fleet, for deployment primarily in the Atlantic Ocean, and one with the Pacific Fleet, a region of increasing importance to the world economy and replete with maritime hotspots.

Russian navy leaders considered but later rejected the argument that Russia could perhaps get by with a mixture of advanced surface and submarine ships alone. Instead, they endorsed the so-called American model of carrier task forces. In addition to the carrier itself, a task force would include more than a dozen auxiliary escort ships, such as cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, landing craft, multipurpose submarines and perhaps icebreakers for deployment on Arctic cruises.

But Russia’s political leaders have supported such a recommendation many times in the past, only to have their proposals derailed by a lack of money and other barriers. In July 2008, the then-commander-in-chief of the Russian navy, Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky, stated that the navy intended to form five or six aircraft carrier task forces. Later that year, President Dmitri Medvedev also said that Russia intended to build aircraft carriers as part of its general naval rearmament program. But the Russian navy subsequently backtracked and announced they would not have a new carrier for at least another decade.

It remains unclear if Russia’s defense industry would even be capable of constructing such a large and complex weapons system as a modern aircraft carrier and its associated warplanes anytime soon. Russia does not presently have a dry dock large enough to build aircraft carriers. The Kuznetsov and earlier Soviet aircraft carriers were constructed in Ukraine during the 1980s, when that republic’s defense industries were embedded in the integrated Soviet military-industrial complex.

The Russian navy considers it too expensive to build a new shipyard designed specifically to assemble aircraft carriers. Instead, the most recent proposal is to construct a carrier in pieces at different shipyards and then combine the modules at a single assembly point, the Sevmash shipyard. Located in the northern Russian city of Severodvinsk, Sevmash is Russia’s biggest shipyard and has been used in the past to construct warships powered with nuclear engines. But such a modular assembly process is complicated and leaves the timetable vulnerable to disruptions at any of the prime subcontractor facilities.

Even during the period of the integrated Soviet military-industrial complex, the Soviet Union had difficulty building carrier ships whose equipment and accompanying aircraft matched the capabilities of NATO carriers. Now Russia’s military-industrial complex regularly struggles with massive production delays and cost overruns when trying to renovate complex ships such as the Admiral Gorshkov, which is only now being turned over to the Indian navy after years of delays and cost overruns.

Another indicator of Russia’s return to great-power status would be if the Russian Defense Ministry had sufficient confidence in its own shipbuilders to contract them to design and build its most complex warships besides carriers. At present, however, the Defense Ministry is increasingly open to foreign sellers providing Russia with advanced military technology. Most notably, Russia has contracted to purchase several of France’s Mistral-class amphibious ships. Not only does the Russian navy lack a large amphibious ship like the Mistral, but it is doubtful that Russian shipbuilders can construct such a complex vessel without foreign assistance.

That the Russian navy would want to pursue overseas bases, as Chirkov suggested last week, is understandable, given Moscow’s heightened ambitions for its fleet. But before securing bases, the Russian navy needs to build more and better warships