Nuclear Policy and Naval Decline

(I)

By Gilbert Doctorow on November 24, 2024 (Doctorow)

The first and most important thing that one can say about Russia’s new doctrine on nuclear deterrence and the circumstances under which Russia foresees use of its nuclear arsenal against adversaries is the following:  it has been tailor-made to fit the situation in which Russia finds itself today with respect to the United States and its NATO allies.

The doctrine is couched in abstract language without naming names, but behind every clause you can identify a specific threat to Russia that the United States and its allies have been implementing these past few years. The logic flowing from this is that if and when the strategy and/or tactics of the adversary changes, then there will be appropriate modifications to the doctrine.

The doctrine itself has two parts to it.

‘The field of nuclear deterrence’ is what we read as the title of the Decree and ‘the essence of nuclear deterrence’ is the most lengthy and detailed part of the document, laid out in paragraphs 9 to 17,

The second part, entitled ‘conditions for the Russian Federation to shift to use of nuclear weapons’ is set out in paragraphs 18 to 21. This is much more concise.  

Let us look at each of these parts in turn.

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Deterrence

The single biggest change in Russia’s nuclear doctrine is found in the very first article (9) which describes the ‘potential adversary’ to be deterred as

‘states and military coalitions (blocs, alliances) that are viewed by the Russian Federation as a potential adversary and which possess nuclear and/or other forms of weapons of mass destruction or significant fighting potential in conventional forces.’

Nuclear deterrence will also be applied with respect to

‘states which make available their territory, air and/or marine space and resources to prepare for and execute aggression against the Russian Federation.’

This is directly complemented by article 10 which explains that

‘Aggression of any state within a military coalition (bloc, alliance) against the Russian Federation and/or its allies is viewed as aggression of this coalition as a whole.’

The foregoing is absolutely new and binds the United States and NATO countries more closely together in a common fate than the famous Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Article 5 of that treaty provides for the common defense of the signatory countries.  Articles 9 and 10 of the Russian doctrine provide, as we see in part two of the doctrine, for Russian attack on any of them it chooses should one or more of them attack the Russian Federation and/or its allies directly or indirectly.

The Oreshnik missile system whose existence Putin disclosed on Thursday has Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs).

Article 11 sets out what Vladimir Putin had said to a reporter first on 12 September and then repeated when he addressed Russia’s Security Council on 25 September:

‘Aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies coming from any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is viewed as their combined attack.’

This is explicitly directed against the policy of the United States to wage proxy wars so as to inflict damage and possibly defeat a perceived adversary while expecting to avoid being identified as a co- belligerent. It is, of course, drawn from Russia’s experience in the current war in and about Ukraine.

Note the mention of Russia’s allies as also being covered with its nuclear umbrella. Until recently this sounded like an empty piece of rhetoric. ‘What allies?’ one might ask. But the conclusion of a mutual defense treaty with North Korea leaves no doubt that Russia’s nuclear umbrella is part of their deal. Separate statements coming from both Minsk and Moscow tell us that the nuclear umbrella now covers Belarus. De facto we may suppose that the same goes for Iran, though properly speaking no mutual defense treaty has yet been signed with Teheran.

Article 12 says the purpose of nuclear deterrence is to ensure that potential adversaries ‘understand the unavoidability of retaliation in case they commit aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies.’

The next article worthy of our attention is 15, which sets out in subclauses a list of military dangers which, depending on changing military-political and strategic circumstances, can grow into military threats to / aggression against the Russian Federation. These are all explicitly cases where ‘neutralization’ requires nuclear deterrence to be applied.

Note as you review the list below that there is something akin here to the formulation of the Wolfowitz doctrine in the USA wherein the potential of an adversary is equated with malicious intent that must be stymied.

1. The potential adversary’s having nuclear and/or other forms of weapons of mass destruction which could be applied against the Russian Federation and/or its allies, as well as the means to deliver these kinds of arms

2. The potential adversary’s having and deploying air defenses including ABMs, medium and lesser range cruise and ballistic missiles, high precision conventional and hypersonic weapons, offensive drones variously based, directed energy weapons that could be used against the Russian Federation.

3. The buildup by a potential adversary along territory bordering the Russian Federation and its allies or in nearby waters of groups of general-purpose military forces which possess the means to deliver a nuclear strike and/or the military infrastructure enabling such an attack.

• The creation by a potential adversary of anti-missile defense equipment, attack weapons and satellite-killer equipment and his positioning this in outer space

• Positioning of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery on the territory of non-nuclear states

• The creation of new or expansion of existing military coalitions (blocs, alliances) resulting in their military infrastructure drawing closer to the borders of the Russian Federation

• Actions by a potential adversary directed at isolating part of the territory of the Russian Federation, including blocking access to vitally important transport communications

• Actions by a potential adversary directed at defeating (destroying) environmentally dangerous infrastructure of the Russian Federation which might lead to manmade, ecological or social catastrophes.

• The potential adversary’s planning and carrying out large-scale military training exercises near the borders of the Russian Federation.

• The uncontrolled spread of weapons of mass destruction, means of their delivery, technologies and equipment for their preparation.

• The potential adversary’s having and deploying air defense including ABMs, medium and lesser range cruise and ballistic missiles, high precision conventional and hypersonic weapons, offensive drones variously based, directed energy weapons that could be used against the Russian Federation.

It is worth remarking that many of the items in the list reflect directly what the United States and its NATO allies have done already or are talking about.  Among them are a blockade of Kaliningrad, the positioning of NATO infrastructures close to the Russian border, holding war games close to Russia’s borders. The remarks in point h above surely refers to attacks on nuclear power stations, which Ukraine has done using drones and Soviet era missiles.    Other items, particularly those that one might call a restoration of Reagan’s Star Wars plans are among the stated intentions of Donald Trump once he takes office and their inclusion in the list may be interpreted as a clear message to Trump to rethink this strategy if he wants to make peace with Russia.

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Conditions under which the Russian Federation moves from deterrence to nuclear strikes

Here some of the conditions were taken over from previous iterations of the nuclear doctrine, in particular what we read in article 18: a retaliatory attack for use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against Russia and its allies, Here we also read that conventional weapons attack on Russia and/or Belarus can trigger a nuclear response if there is a ‘critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity.’  The mention of ‘territorial integrity’ is a new condition.

Article 19 lists other conditions that could allow for Russia to use its nuclear arsenal:

1. Reliable information about the launch of ballistic rockets attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies

2. The use by an adversary of nuclear or other forms of weapons of mass destruction on the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies against troop formations and/or infrastructure located outside its territory.

[note: this is new]

• Action by an adversary against critically important state or military infrastructure of the Russian Federation which, if knocked out, will disrupt retaliatory moves of the nuclear forces

• Aggression against the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus using conventional weapons that create a critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity

[here, too, ‘territorial integrity’ is a concept introduced in this iteration of the doctrine]

• Receipt of reliable information about a massive launch (take-off) in an air and space attack (strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, hypersonic and other aircraft and their crossing the borders of the Russian Federation

(II)

By Kit Klarenberg. From Global Delinquents, Substack. Dated Nov. 24 (Klarenberg) 

On November 15th, The Times published a remarkable report, revealing serious “questions” are being asked about the viability of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers, at the highest levels of London’s defence establishment. Such perspectives would have been unmentionable mere months ago. Yet, subsequent reportingseemingly confirms the vessels are for the chop. Should that come to pass, it will represent an absolutely crushing, historic defeat for the Royal Navy - and the US Empire in turn - without a single shot fired.

A THING OF BEAUTY, PERHAPS, BUT D.O.A. The Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is essentially a "vanity job" doomed to be sunk in any modern conflict within hours or even minutes. The new age of hypersonic missiles has rendered all surface fleets highly vulnerable to attack by even "lesser powers" (i.e., the Houthis, Iran, etc.) and eventually obsolete as reliable tools of war.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales first set sail in 2017 and 2019 respectively, after 20 years in development. The former arrived at the Royal Navy’s historic Portsmouth base with considerable fanfare, a Ministry of Defence press release boasting that the carrier would be deployed “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades.” The pair were and remain the biggest and most expensive ships built in British history, costing close to $8 billion combined. Ongoing operational costs are likewise vast.

Fast forward to today however, and British ministers and military chiefs are, per The Times, “under immense pressure to make billions of pounds’ worth of savings,” with major “casualties” certain. Resultantly, senior Ministry of Defence and Treasury officials are considering scrapping at least one of the carriers, if not both. The reason is simple - “in most war games, the carriers get sunk,” and are “particularly vulnerable to missiles.” As such, the pair are now widely perceived as the “Royal Navy’s weak link.”

Matthew Savill of British state-tied Royal United Services Institute told The Times that missile technology is developing “at such a pace”, carriers are rapidly becoming easy for Britain’s adversaries to “locate and track”, then neutralise. “In particular,” he cautioned, China is increasing the range of its ballistic and supersonic anti-ship missiles. Meanwhile, Beijing’s “hypersonic glide vehicle”, the DF-17, “can evade existing missile defence systems,” its “range, speed and manoeuvrability” making it a “formidable weapon” neither Britain nor the US can adequately counter.

China’s DF-17

Chinese DF-17 glider launcher on exhibit in Beijing in 2022. (Yiyuanju, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Savill advocated “cutting one or both of the carriers,” as this “would free up people and running costs and those could be reinvested in the running costs of the rest of the fleet and easing the stresses on personnel”. Nonetheless, he warned that scrapping the carriers would be a “big deal for a navy that has designed itself around those carriers…and that the £6.2 billion paid for them would be a sunk cost.”

That the Royal Navy has “designed itself” around the two carriers is an understatement. For just one to set sail, it must be supported by a strike group consisting of two Type 45 destroyers for air defence, two Type 23 frigates for anti-submarine warfare, a submarine, a fleet tanker and a support ship. This “full-fat protective approach”, Savill lamented, means “most of the deployable Royal Navy” must accompany a single carrier at any given time:

“You can protect the carriers, but then the Navy has put all of its eggs in a particularly large and expensive basket.”

‘National Embarrassment’

March 2021 saw the publication of a long-awaited report, Global Britain in a Competitive Age - “a comprehensive articulation” of London’s “national security and international policy,” intended to “[shape] the open international order of the future.” The two aircraft carriers loomed large in its contents. One passage referred to how HMS Queen Elizabeth would soon lead Britain’s “most ambitious global deployment for two decades, visiting the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific”:

“She will demonstrate our interoperability with allies and partners - in particular the US - and our ability to project cutting-edge military power in support of NATO and international maritime security. Her deployment will also help the government to deepen our diplomatic and prosperity links with allies and partners worldwide.”

Such bombast directly echoed the bold wording of a July 1998 strategic defence review, initiated a year earlier by then-prime minister Tony Blair. Its findings kickstarted London’s quest to acquire world-leading aircraft carriers, which culminated with the birth of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. Britain’s explicit objective, directly inspired by the US Empire’s dependence on carriers to belligerently project its diplomatic, economic, military and political interests abroad, was to recover London’s role as world police officer, and audaciously assert herself overseas:

“In the post-Cold War world, we must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us. So we plan to buy two new larger aircraft carriers to project power more flexibly around the world…This will give us a fully independent ability to deploy a powerful combat force to potential trouble spots without waiting for basing agreements on other countries’ territory. We will…be poised in international waters and most effectively back up diplomacy with the threat of force.”

Blair’s reverie appeared to finally come to pass in May 2021, when HMS Queen Elizabeth set off on a grand tour of the world’s oceans, escorted by a vast carrier strike group. Over the next six months, the vessel engaged in a large number of widely-publicised exercises with foreign navies, including NATO allies, and docked in dozens of countries. Press coverage was universally fawning. Yet, in November, as the excursion was nearing its end, an F-35 fighter launched from the carrier unceremoniously crashed.

Royal Navy engineers attempt to rescue a downed F-35, November 2021

The F-35’s myriad issues were by that point well-established. The jet, which has cost US taxpayers close to $2 trillion, entered into active service in 2006 while still under development. It quickly gained a reputation for hazardous unreliability. In 2015, a Pentagon report acknowledged its severe structural issues, limited service life and low flight-time capacity. Two years later, the Department of Defense quietly admitted the US Joint Program Office had been secretly recategorising F-35 failure incidents to make the plane appear safe to fly. 

Despite this, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales were specifically designed to transport the F-35, to the exclusion of all other fighter jets. However, Britain has all along struggled to source usable F-35s, which produces the ludicrous situation of the two carriers almost invariably patrolling seas with few if any fighters aboard at all, therefore invalidating their entire raison d’etre. In November 2023, the Daily Telegraph dubbed these regular “jet-less” forays a “national embarrassment”.

‘Carrier Gap’

An even graver embarrassment, rarely discussed with any seriousness by the British media, is that the two aircraft carriers have been plagued with endless technical and mechanical issues as long as they’ve been in service. Flooding, mid-operation breakdowns, onboard fires, and engine leaks are routine. Both vessels have spent  considerably more time docked and under repair than at sea over their brief lifetimes. In 2020, an entire HMS Prince of Wales crew accommodation block collapsed, for reasons unclear.

As elite US foreign policy journal National Interest acknowledged in March 2024, “the Royal Navy remains unable to adequately defend or operate” its two carriers “independently” - code for the Empire being consistently compelled to deploy its own naval and air assets to support the pair. This is quite some failure, given British officials originally intended for the vessels to not only lead NATO exercises and deployments, but “slot into” US navy operations wherever and whenever necessary.

The Empire’s inability to outsource its hegemonic duties to Britain has precipitated a critical “carrier gap”. Despite maintaining an 11-strong [carrier] fleet, Washington cannot deploy the vessels to every global flashpoint at once, grievously undermining her power and influence at a time of tremendous upheaval worldwide. In a bitter irony, by encouraging and facilitating London’s emulation of its own flawed and outdated reliance on aircraft carriers, the US has inadvertently birthed yet another needy imperial dependant, further draining its already fatally overstretched military resources.

Several Royal Navy destroyers were originally part of abortive US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, launched in late 2023 to smash AnsarAllah’s righteous anti-genocide Red Sea blockade. Almost immediately, it became apparent the British lacked any ability to fire on land targets, therefore rendering their participation completely useless. Subsequently, photos emerged of areas on Britain’s ships where land attack cruise missiles should’ve been situated. Instead, the spaces were occupied by humble treadmills, for use as on-board gyms.

It transpired that the appropriate weapons hadn’t been purchased, due to a lack of funds - the money having of course been spent instead on constructing barely operable aircraft carriers, which now face summary defenestration. By investing incalculable time, energy, and money in pursuing the mythological greatness associated with carrier capability, Britain - just like the US Empire - now finds itself unable to meet modern warfare’s most basic challenges. Meanwhile, its adversaries near and far have remorselessly innovated, equipping themselves for 21st century battle.

Days after The Times portended the impending death of London’s aircraft carriers, mainstream media became awash with reports of savage cutbacks in Britain’s military capabilities, in advance of a new strategic defence review. Five Royal Navy warships, all of which have lain disused due to staffing issues and structural decay for some time, were among the first announced “casualties”. What if anything will replace these losses isn’t certain, although it likely won’t be aircraft carriers.