The Ukraine war sinks a new Russian ship design

 

I was interested to read that Russia has just canceled what's been called its version of the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, the Project 20386 or Derzky class corvette design.  Strategy Page reports:

The Derzky turned out to be more expensive to develop and build than anticipated. The original service date for the Derzky was 2025, but as the problems piled up that date was pushed farther in the future while the costs for each of these Corvettes kept climbing. There were attempts to control and reduce the costs. This proved impractical and when the Derzky-class was canceled the lead ship was ordered to be completed as cheaply as possible, which meant removing many of the features that made the Derzky unique, expensive and difficult to build.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia has had problems dealing with ambitious new ship designs that were too expensive and complex to complete. Even with access to Western tech after 1991, Russian shipbuilders didn’t have the facilities or skilled workers to build the Western-style warships the navy wanted. The Derzky is one of several overly ambitious shipbuilding efforts that had to be modified or canceled. The Russians have to learn to build what they can, not what they aspire to.

There's more at the link.

I never saw much point to the LCS program right from the start.  It was dreamed up in the fevered minds of a US navy procurement system that had lost its way, and it's had monumental problems right from the start - so much so that the US Navy is about to retire many almost-new LCS hulls, because fixing them would be too expensive and many of their critical features have never been fully developed, making them (in so many words) the nautical equivalent of paperweights.  The whole program has been a catastrophic case study in mismanagement and wasting money and resources.

In Russia's case, the high-tech demands of the Derzky class ran headlong into the realities of its war with Ukraine.  The Russian Army and Air Force have been far more active in the fighting than the Navy, and have suffered major losses of important weapons systems.  Those have to be replaced and improved, and they take precedence over a new class of warship when it comes to getting hold of the latest technologies.  Not only are those very expensive, but in a sanctions environment they're hard to acquire.  Most of Russia's weapons development efforts must therefore be diverted to the military's most urgent needs.  New warship designs have to take a back seat to operational reality.

However, there's an important lesson in this for the USA as well.  Russian shipbuilding was almost crippled after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Many specialist designers, engineers and technicians were thrown out of work because there was no money available to keep them employed.  A lot of them switched careers to other fields, and many left the country.  As a result, the Russian Navy has had a terrible time trying to maintain its existing fleet, let alone develop new designs.  (For example, its Borei class nuclear missile submarines and their Bulava missiles have suffered prolonged delays:  the first in the class began construction in 1996, but finally made it into service with the Fleet only in 2013.)  There have been no new major surface combatants at all since the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Russian Navy has built limited numbers of its relatively small Steregushchiy and Gremyashchiy class corvettes - predecessors to the now-canceled Derzky class - but no larger warships.

The US Navy finds itself in a very similar, and very difficult, position as far as shipbuilding and maintenance are concerned.  It was recently pointed out that compared to China, the USA has fallen far behind.

A U.S. Navy briefing slide is calling new attention to the worrisome disparity between Chinese and U.S. capacity to build new naval vessels and total naval force sizes. The data compiled by the Office of Naval Intelligence says that a growing gap in fleet sizes is being helped by China's shipbuilders being more than 200 times more capable of producing surface warships and submarines. This underscores longstanding concerns about the U.S. Navy's ability to challenge Chinese fleets, as well as sustain its forces afloat, in any future high-end conflict.

. . .

The most eye-catching component of the slide is a depiction of the relative Chinese and U.S. shipbuilding capacity expressed in terms of gross tonnage. The graphic shows that China's shipyards have a capacity of around 23,250,000 million tons versus less than 100,000 tons in the United States. That is at least an astonishing 232 times greater than the United States.

U.S.-based shipbuilding capacity was in decline even before the end of the Cold War, but steadily shrunk even more afterward. It is at a particularly low point, across the board, now.

. . .

"They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity – one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined," Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told members of Congress at a hearing in February. "That presents a real threat."

. . .

Shipbuilding is also a complex and costly affair that requires large amounts of skilled labor and resources, which can take significant time to source. Delays or other hiccups in shipbuilding, as well as repair and overhaul work that requires shipyard capacity, can easily cascade. This reality has manifested itself to an especially extreme degree for the U.S. Navy when it comes to submarine maintenance.

Rear Adm. Jonathan Rucker, the Navy's Program Executive officer for Attack Submarines, told reporters in November 2022 on the sidelines of the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference that 18 of the service's 50 attack submarines of all classes were undergoing or awaiting maintenance at that time. This is significantly higher than the service's target of having no more than 20 percent of all attack submarines down for maintenance at a time.

The Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Boise, which was first commissioned in 1992, has become an unfortunate poster child for these issues. Boise has been sitting pierside since 2017 and when it hopefully returns to active duty next year it will have spent around 20 percent of its entire career idle awaiting maintenance.

Again, more at the link.

18 out of 50 attack submarines awaiting maintenance.  That's more than a third of the US Navy's (allegedly) operational attack submarine fleet.

Perhaps we shouldn't point fingers and laugh at the Russian Navy's problems.  Our own shipbuilding and repair situation is beginning to resemble theirs to a very, very uncomfortable degree.  Let's hope our Navy doesn't get into a shooting war anytime soon . . .

Peter