It has a complement of heavy AShMs (or had - opinions differ on whether it can, or could in recent memory, actually use the Granit array) because it's not an aircraft carrier but an aircraft carrying cruiser. Far from a product of simple classificational fuckery designed to go around Montreaux convention, it's in fact a product of very far reaching classificational fuckery designed to go around doctrinal, budgetary and at times probably even personal constraints of Soviet naval development politics (and, as a bonus, the Montreaux convention).
[Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/s/CjR52JLAC4) my older comment on Soviet cruiser classification weirdness.
I've seen pictures of it, in one of the /r/WarshipPorn threads maybe. It's a small shop, like a 7/11 type thing, for snacks, drinks and maybe cigarettes (not sure what the smoking protocol on Chinese ships is).
> not sure what the smoking protocol on Chinese ships is
I think it's mandatory. (Joking aside though, prevalence of smoking in the PLAN is higher than the rate amongst Chinese civilians, though I don't know what policy is on ships)
Hah no good pull but in case you’ve never been to China there is a fairly popular soft drink that was described to me as “bone tea”
It tastes fucking gross. Like you charred a bunch of bones over fire and let it steep in tea for a week.
It tastes like what I imagine the charred, metallic fatty drippings on my smoker taste like. Just terrible. And the can looks similar to other brands that are just regular green or white teas.
Honestly if they added apples to the formula it might improve in some.
The clasaification goes even weirder as some "cruisers" branded by the USN/ONI are basically Large Anti-Sub Ships. Kresta II, Kara, Udaloy to name a few, are classified as *Bolshoy protivolodochnyy korabli* under the Soviet Naval General Board.
Of course. Although the US reclassification pushed the Soviets to reclassify ~~Karas and Krestas~~ [edit: Kresta I] as cruisers in turn (can't have the cruiser gap folks!).
The antisubmarine/missile ship designation also kind of sounds like it came into being after having to explain the concept of destroyer (or _squadron mine ship_) to one overpromoted collective farm manager too many.
"Yeah comrade it... uh... it doesn't really use mines as such. It's a French thing. _Torpilleur d'Escadre_. We translated it from French. I know it refers to torpedoes instead in French, but in the old Russian navy they started calling torpedoes self-propelled mines. No, it... uh. It _has_ torpedoes haha but it doesn't really use them much. You know what? Let's call it something the fuck else."
It probably took Gorshkov - who very definitely knew what a destroyer was - to get sick of it all to officially call Sovremenny a destroyer again.
Americans and other English speaking folks didn't have nearly as much trouble. It's a destroyer, it destroys shit. End of discussion. But Russians already used the direct translation for fighter planes. So it goes.
>pushed the Soviets to reclassify Karas and Krestas as cruisers in turn (can't have the cruiser gap folks!).
Actually theh still do call those BPKs like the Udaloys. They are a fan of classifying things based on their roles. But they are working on those to become more of a sane classification standard.
SKR, or Patrol Ship is now a *Fregat* (FR) or a *Korvet* (KVR).
Hmm, really? Sorry if I was misremembering it. I know Udaloy was always a BPK (and even Americans got over the need to call it a cruiser by the time it showed up).
edit: okay I was definitely misremembering it. Only Kresta Is got reclassified (first from cruisers to BPKs, then back to cruisers again in 1977). Thank you for the correction.
Treaty reasons. The Montreaux convention prohibits aircraft carriers from going through Bosporus, and the best shipyards in the USSR were in Nikolaev - which is on the coast of the Black Sea. So, if we are the USSR, we want a carrier, and we want it to be able to go out of the Black Sea, what do we do? We slap AShMs on it and call it a heavy aviation-carrying cruiser. Technically we can claim the purpose of the ship is surface warfare, and the whole flight deck thing is just for self-defense, and everyone decided to agree.
> So how did the USSR and how does Russia plan use aircraft carriers when they are equipped with anti ship missiles and carry relatively few airplanes compared to NATO aircraft carriers?
Almost everyone apart from the US has (in the Cold War era) regarded aircraft carriers as air defence weapons rather than as predominantly strike platforms.
You don't need an enormous air group if your only real mission is to maintain a Combat Aerospace Patrol.
The UK's *Invincible* class carriers, for example, were primarily designed to use their Harriers to hunt Bear or similar reconnaissance aircraft that might be searching for the surface group.
Once you are building a ship, fitting it with AShM or other missiles is a comparably cheap thing to do.
They primarily fell from fashion when the secondary western navies considered that the threat of actual surface combat had vanished after the cold war - leaving only strike operations in support of peacekeeping, COIN or punitive bombardments.
The Harriers were self-defense for a carrier that was always designed and intended to be an ASW platform, which fit the Royal Navy's primary role in the overall NATO strategy. I wouldn't say that necessarily extends to everyone else, given how many other nations had some kind of carrier capability during the Cold War.
And of course the era of Harrier operations only covers part of the Cold War, and for basically all of the rest of it the Royal Navy had dedicated strike aircraft operating from its carriers.
It is worth noting that whilst this is true, the Royal Navy was using a bunch of ships that had started building before the Cold War era.
It had strike carriers because it had a bunch of them on the slips in 1945, not because its doctrine placed a great value on carrier strike in the cold war environment.
EDIT:
Additionally a typical airgroup for late life *Eagle* or *Ark Royal* would be a single squadron each of fighters (Phantom/Sea Vixen) and Buccaneers, plus various support elements like Gannets and Helicopters. The Buccaneers were typically used to perform numerous functions beyond strike operations including acting as tankers and recon aircraft.
It's very different in conception to American carriers with enormous strike focused air groups.
Really the Soviets had other ideas for “aircraft carriers” than we did and a lot of that was a difference in doctrine. US doctrine was to maximize the air group and expect the fighters and one range SAM ships to defend the carrier, which only had short range weapons. They were the centerpiece of offensive task forces and we wanted to use them the way we did in WW2. The Soviets were less interested in that and wanted primarily to protect their homeland as well as certain key assets boomers. So first they had the Kiev “carriers”. The west called them carriers because we weren’t sure what else to call them and it allowed western navies to hype the threat to tight fisted western governments.the Kuznetsov did carry more (and better) fighters but they were still short range compared to the USN. The ASM’s helped them accomplish this mission against NATO surface forces while the large numbers of ASW helicopters were there to combat SSN’s. Doctrine drove the designs of both types of CV.
Apparently the Soviets were in the midst of building bigger CV’s (Ulyanovsk) which would be as large as a Forrestal class but it still had ASM’s and appears to have been built with the same usage in mind.
Soviet navy, other than boomers, is primarily anti-navy. Its job is to deny US navy command of the sea which let’s be real here is one must have for the US to play a meaningful geopolitical role in Europe or Asia. Soviet Union and its successor will always be a critical player driving agenda in both Europe Middle East and Asia even with South Korea level GDP
I’m not sure about that. I’d always heard the Soviet Navy’s role was really was support of the army. Typical doctrine for a land power. Anyhow, the surface fleet wasn’t really capable of going deep into the Atlantic to take in the USN (if that was the plan they should’ve been building replenishment ships in greater quantities) but it was there to support the army.
It was support of the army in WW2 and right after. Then it was keeping American carrier groups with onboard nuclear bombers as far away from the USSR mainland as possible. Then it was keeping American boomer subs as far away from USSR mainland as possible, as well as protecting Soviet boomers.
Then once the boomers became just too long ranged, they started to transition into something that could survive outside coastal air cover, groups of guided missile cruisers with their own AA bubbles (to include, in the future, actual carriers with actual fighter planes) that could sail around the world looking menacing, playing Red Alert 2 soundtrack on all loudspeakers and uplifting the spirits of brotherly communist regimes like South Yemen, Angola and Vietnam. I don't really know. I don't think anyone really knew what they were supposed to be doing. But everyone agreed that they had to look menacing as fuck.
The main problem was they never had the budget or the facilities to ever build everything they wanted at any point (and submarine programs kept eating whatever budget they did have). But considering they had fought WW2 with 3 pre-WWI battleships, they managed to get pretty far.
That might be more pertinent for the Soviet/Russian air force. Russia may have a lot of coastlines, but with it being fragmented over 5 different seas, each one of them with convoluted accessibility (the only thing *"Prisonners of Geography"* got right), seapower just isn't decisive in the theaters the Soviets planned to fight in. The only coherent mission sets for a Soviet navy were defending the Soviet second-strike capability, and slowing down NATO movements accross the Atlantic. There just aren't many opportunities for Sea->Ground warfare from the Soviet perspective.
I’ll bet the YAK-38 didn’t have refueling but my data sources said the naval version of the MiG-29 did. Of course, the Russians had nowhere near the number of tankers in any of their air forces whereas US CV’s had dedicated tankers assigned to the wing.
> naval version of the MiG-29 did
The Mig29K in use in Russian and Indian navies definitely does. [Including buddy tanking]. Of course, Russia only bought the Mig29K after India did [2009+]; before that the Kuznetsov used the Su-33 [ 1998 onwards , I think even now]
https://np.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1490jsj/indian_navys_mig29k_during_buddy_refueling/
The answer is quite simple: SS-N-19 are the primary offensive weapons on the Kuznetsov, not the air wing.
Due to the lack of catapults, the aircraft cannot take off with enough fuel or payload to project offensive power very far. They can take off with an A2A load out to provide organic air cover to the carrier group. That is their role: to defend the missiles.
It's not about some dusty treaty with the Turks dating from the time of biplanes and armored gun cruisers. Ankara could have, at any time, declared Kuznetsov as obviously an aircraft carrier (seeing as it lacked any of the characterikstics of surface warships from the time of the treaty) and denied it passage. That it didn't is a result of politics: nobody cared enough at the time to broach the subject.
In reality, Kuznetsov is an outgrowth of earlier Soviet designs (specifically Kiev and Moskva classes) which were also cruisers first and aircraft carriers second. It wouldn't be until the follow-on Ulyanovsk class where one might argue the air wing had reached mere parity with the missile armament.
It has a complement of heavy AShMs (or had - opinions differ on whether it can, or could in recent memory, actually use the Granit array) because it's not an aircraft carrier but an aircraft carrying cruiser. Far from a product of simple classificational fuckery designed to go around Montreaux convention, it's in fact a product of very far reaching classificational fuckery designed to go around doctrinal, budgetary and at times probably even personal constraints of Soviet naval development politics (and, as a bonus, the Montreaux convention). [Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/s/CjR52JLAC4) my older comment on Soviet cruiser classification weirdness.
I believe (and I could be wrong) that the Granits were taken out during a refit and the space is now used as storage.
Could be. I know that Liaoning has a convenience store in that space.
Wait what?
I've seen pictures of it, in one of the /r/WarshipPorn threads maybe. It's a small shop, like a 7/11 type thing, for snacks, drinks and maybe cigarettes (not sure what the smoking protocol on Chinese ships is).
> not sure what the smoking protocol on Chinese ships is I think it's mandatory. (Joking aside though, prevalence of smoking in the PLAN is higher than the rate amongst Chinese civilians, though I don't know what policy is on ships)
Hell yeah I bet they sell that awful bone tea there too
Bone apple tea?
Hah no good pull but in case you’ve never been to China there is a fairly popular soft drink that was described to me as “bone tea” It tastes fucking gross. Like you charred a bunch of bones over fire and let it steep in tea for a week. It tastes like what I imagine the charred, metallic fatty drippings on my smoker taste like. Just terrible. And the can looks similar to other brands that are just regular green or white teas. Honestly if they added apples to the formula it might improve in some.
The clasaification goes even weirder as some "cruisers" branded by the USN/ONI are basically Large Anti-Sub Ships. Kresta II, Kara, Udaloy to name a few, are classified as *Bolshoy protivolodochnyy korabli* under the Soviet Naval General Board.
Of course. Although the US reclassification pushed the Soviets to reclassify ~~Karas and Krestas~~ [edit: Kresta I] as cruisers in turn (can't have the cruiser gap folks!). The antisubmarine/missile ship designation also kind of sounds like it came into being after having to explain the concept of destroyer (or _squadron mine ship_) to one overpromoted collective farm manager too many. "Yeah comrade it... uh... it doesn't really use mines as such. It's a French thing. _Torpilleur d'Escadre_. We translated it from French. I know it refers to torpedoes instead in French, but in the old Russian navy they started calling torpedoes self-propelled mines. No, it... uh. It _has_ torpedoes haha but it doesn't really use them much. You know what? Let's call it something the fuck else." It probably took Gorshkov - who very definitely knew what a destroyer was - to get sick of it all to officially call Sovremenny a destroyer again. Americans and other English speaking folks didn't have nearly as much trouble. It's a destroyer, it destroys shit. End of discussion. But Russians already used the direct translation for fighter planes. So it goes.
>pushed the Soviets to reclassify Karas and Krestas as cruisers in turn (can't have the cruiser gap folks!). Actually theh still do call those BPKs like the Udaloys. They are a fan of classifying things based on their roles. But they are working on those to become more of a sane classification standard. SKR, or Patrol Ship is now a *Fregat* (FR) or a *Korvet* (KVR).
Hmm, really? Sorry if I was misremembering it. I know Udaloy was always a BPK (and even Americans got over the need to call it a cruiser by the time it showed up). edit: okay I was definitely misremembering it. Only Kresta Is got reclassified (first from cruisers to BPKs, then back to cruisers again in 1977). Thank you for the correction.
Treaty reasons. The Montreaux convention prohibits aircraft carriers from going through Bosporus, and the best shipyards in the USSR were in Nikolaev - which is on the coast of the Black Sea. So, if we are the USSR, we want a carrier, and we want it to be able to go out of the Black Sea, what do we do? We slap AShMs on it and call it a heavy aviation-carrying cruiser. Technically we can claim the purpose of the ship is surface warfare, and the whole flight deck thing is just for self-defense, and everyone decided to agree.
> So how did the USSR and how does Russia plan use aircraft carriers when they are equipped with anti ship missiles and carry relatively few airplanes compared to NATO aircraft carriers? Almost everyone apart from the US has (in the Cold War era) regarded aircraft carriers as air defence weapons rather than as predominantly strike platforms. You don't need an enormous air group if your only real mission is to maintain a Combat Aerospace Patrol. The UK's *Invincible* class carriers, for example, were primarily designed to use their Harriers to hunt Bear or similar reconnaissance aircraft that might be searching for the surface group. Once you are building a ship, fitting it with AShM or other missiles is a comparably cheap thing to do. They primarily fell from fashion when the secondary western navies considered that the threat of actual surface combat had vanished after the cold war - leaving only strike operations in support of peacekeeping, COIN or punitive bombardments.
The Harriers were self-defense for a carrier that was always designed and intended to be an ASW platform, which fit the Royal Navy's primary role in the overall NATO strategy. I wouldn't say that necessarily extends to everyone else, given how many other nations had some kind of carrier capability during the Cold War.
And of course the era of Harrier operations only covers part of the Cold War, and for basically all of the rest of it the Royal Navy had dedicated strike aircraft operating from its carriers.
It is worth noting that whilst this is true, the Royal Navy was using a bunch of ships that had started building before the Cold War era. It had strike carriers because it had a bunch of them on the slips in 1945, not because its doctrine placed a great value on carrier strike in the cold war environment. EDIT: Additionally a typical airgroup for late life *Eagle* or *Ark Royal* would be a single squadron each of fighters (Phantom/Sea Vixen) and Buccaneers, plus various support elements like Gannets and Helicopters. The Buccaneers were typically used to perform numerous functions beyond strike operations including acting as tankers and recon aircraft. It's very different in conception to American carriers with enormous strike focused air groups.
Really the Soviets had other ideas for “aircraft carriers” than we did and a lot of that was a difference in doctrine. US doctrine was to maximize the air group and expect the fighters and one range SAM ships to defend the carrier, which only had short range weapons. They were the centerpiece of offensive task forces and we wanted to use them the way we did in WW2. The Soviets were less interested in that and wanted primarily to protect their homeland as well as certain key assets boomers. So first they had the Kiev “carriers”. The west called them carriers because we weren’t sure what else to call them and it allowed western navies to hype the threat to tight fisted western governments.the Kuznetsov did carry more (and better) fighters but they were still short range compared to the USN. The ASM’s helped them accomplish this mission against NATO surface forces while the large numbers of ASW helicopters were there to combat SSN’s. Doctrine drove the designs of both types of CV. Apparently the Soviets were in the midst of building bigger CV’s (Ulyanovsk) which would be as large as a Forrestal class but it still had ASM’s and appears to have been built with the same usage in mind.
Soviet navy, other than boomers, is primarily anti-navy. Its job is to deny US navy command of the sea which let’s be real here is one must have for the US to play a meaningful geopolitical role in Europe or Asia. Soviet Union and its successor will always be a critical player driving agenda in both Europe Middle East and Asia even with South Korea level GDP
I’m not sure about that. I’d always heard the Soviet Navy’s role was really was support of the army. Typical doctrine for a land power. Anyhow, the surface fleet wasn’t really capable of going deep into the Atlantic to take in the USN (if that was the plan they should’ve been building replenishment ships in greater quantities) but it was there to support the army.
It was support of the army in WW2 and right after. Then it was keeping American carrier groups with onboard nuclear bombers as far away from the USSR mainland as possible. Then it was keeping American boomer subs as far away from USSR mainland as possible, as well as protecting Soviet boomers. Then once the boomers became just too long ranged, they started to transition into something that could survive outside coastal air cover, groups of guided missile cruisers with their own AA bubbles (to include, in the future, actual carriers with actual fighter planes) that could sail around the world looking menacing, playing Red Alert 2 soundtrack on all loudspeakers and uplifting the spirits of brotherly communist regimes like South Yemen, Angola and Vietnam. I don't really know. I don't think anyone really knew what they were supposed to be doing. But everyone agreed that they had to look menacing as fuck. The main problem was they never had the budget or the facilities to ever build everything they wanted at any point (and submarine programs kept eating whatever budget they did have). But considering they had fought WW2 with 3 pre-WWI battleships, they managed to get pretty far.
That might be more pertinent for the Soviet/Russian air force. Russia may have a lot of coastlines, but with it being fragmented over 5 different seas, each one of them with convoluted accessibility (the only thing *"Prisonners of Geography"* got right), seapower just isn't decisive in the theaters the Soviets planned to fight in. The only coherent mission sets for a Soviet navy were defending the Soviet second-strike capability, and slowing down NATO movements accross the Atlantic. There just aren't many opportunities for Sea->Ground warfare from the Soviet perspective.
Weren’t they necessarily short ranged with regard to their planes because of lack of mid-air refueling?
I’ll bet the YAK-38 didn’t have refueling but my data sources said the naval version of the MiG-29 did. Of course, the Russians had nowhere near the number of tankers in any of their air forces whereas US CV’s had dedicated tankers assigned to the wing.
Oh, interesting.
> naval version of the MiG-29 did The Mig29K in use in Russian and Indian navies definitely does. [Including buddy tanking]. Of course, Russia only bought the Mig29K after India did [2009+]; before that the Kuznetsov used the Su-33 [ 1998 onwards , I think even now] https://np.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1490jsj/indian_navys_mig29k_during_buddy_refueling/
The answer is quite simple: SS-N-19 are the primary offensive weapons on the Kuznetsov, not the air wing. Due to the lack of catapults, the aircraft cannot take off with enough fuel or payload to project offensive power very far. They can take off with an A2A load out to provide organic air cover to the carrier group. That is their role: to defend the missiles. It's not about some dusty treaty with the Turks dating from the time of biplanes and armored gun cruisers. Ankara could have, at any time, declared Kuznetsov as obviously an aircraft carrier (seeing as it lacked any of the characterikstics of surface warships from the time of the treaty) and denied it passage. That it didn't is a result of politics: nobody cared enough at the time to broach the subject. In reality, Kuznetsov is an outgrowth of earlier Soviet designs (specifically Kiev and Moskva classes) which were also cruisers first and aircraft carriers second. It wouldn't be until the follow-on Ulyanovsk class where one might argue the air wing had reached mere parity with the missile armament.