Russian Navy is a real-life ‘Bad News Bears’

While we cannot say with total certainty whether the Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk due to a Ukrainian anti-ship missile or just a fire that crews were unable to control, we know that it is lost. Soon we will find out what happened, but regardless of if it was an unfortunate series of events or enemy action, what we do know is the Russian navy is about as big of a joke as the Bad News Bears baseball team from the 1970s movie.

The Russians have admitted that the flagship of their Black Sea Fleet — the ship that was famously told to “go f–k yourselves” by a small Ukrainian force on Snake Island — has sunk, but attribute the loss to a fire that caused munitions to explode. While you can trust virtually nothing the Russians say, the Ukrainians are not above using propaganda themselves, and fog of war is always a factor, so we will just have to wait for the facts to come out. But the Russians have egg on their face regardless of whether the ship was lost due to enemy action or not.

If it was in fact a Ukrainian missile then it evaded multiple layers of defensive systems that should have protected the ship. Open-source intelligence indicates that a Turkish-produced drone may have distracted the crew, but are Russian radars and their operators so bad that they can somehow only process one potential threat?

On the other hand, if the loss was solely due to fire then that calls into question the competency of the ship’s crew. Fire is a serious threat to all ships at sea, and a cruiser would certainly have plenty of munitions on board that could take out the vessel, but let’s not start the story in the middle. Why did a fire start, and then grow to a point beyond the crew’s capacity to extinguish if it wasn’t a missile? Are Russian sailors as incapable and poorly led as their ground forces seem to be?

The biggest threat to the Russian navy is the Russian navy.

Let’s face it: whether it’s the Russians over-hyping their capabilities or our own Pentagon and defense contractors overestimating the threat, Russian air, land, and sea forces have historically proven themselves underwhelming and unimpressive. For example: Russia’s aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is so jankety that when it did venture out to sea, it had to be accompanied by tugs for when — not if — the carrier broke down. It has suffered from oil spills and fires. Kuznetsov‘s turbines only worked intermittently (hence the tugs), and aircraft have been lost to malfunctioning arrestor cables. When it was in dry dock, the dry dock container sunk, causing serious damage.

Russia’s sad excuse for a carrier has already spent the last five years undergoing repairs and modernization, it will be at least another year before Kuznetsov is back in action.

Considering the ship’s history, the Russian Navy could revive the “fire ship” tactic from the wooden navy days: set Kuznetsov on fire and sail it into an enemy port. Not much on it works anyways and given its history there is a decent chance it will already be on fire should they actually reach their destination.

The nuclear submarine Kursk was destroyed by an explosion in 2000. While Russia publicly blamed a collision with a foreign vessel, they found the cause was a torpedo that exploded inside the sub. We can’t be completely certain exactly what caused the explosion since everyone died, but a Russian investigator found evidence that poor training, poor maintenance, and other examples of negligence may have led to the disaster. Russian authorities said that everyone aboard was killed immediately and refused assistance from other countries. Meanwhile, 24 sailors in the back of the boat had managed to survive the explosions, fires, and flooding, but their oxygen-generating equipment started a fire, killing even more. It wasn’t long before everyone aboard was dead.

In 2008 the attack sub Nerpa was undergoing sea trials when a sailor apparently decided to play with a Halon fire extinguisher system that he thought was out of service. 20 died from asphyxiation and 41 were wounded. No alarm sounded, which would have warned the submarine’s crew that the suppression system was displacing their oxygen. Several crew members who were able to don breathing apparatus in time discovered that their safety equipment didn’t work.

The Russian spy sub Losharik also suffered a deadly fire in 2019, killing 14 officers. Due to the secretive nature of spy submarines we won’t likely learn what happened, but given the pattern, it’s quite possible that incompetence and faulty equipment played a role.

Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine has exposed to the world that Russia’s military and naval forces are an absolute dumpster fire. This clearly has given their fighting men an inferiority complex, which is why Russian pilots and naval crews perform dangerous hotdog stunts around our patrol aircraft and ships. Russian pilots buzzing our unarmed aircraft comes off about as professional and brave as me sucker punching Chuck Norris when he is under anesthesia for surgery and then running away.

To be fair, disastrous leadership, political correctness, social engineering, and vaccine mandates have weakened us as well. And United States fighting forces has been honed from near-constant fighting over the past 80 years. It’s possible that with Russia increasing its engagement in military campaigns they will work some of the bugs out.

But given how poorly they have performed against massively outgunned foes, we can only expect slight improvements here and there as many of their issues are very deeply ingrained. Regardless what ends up being the cause of Moskva‘s sinking, the Russian Navy has a history of negligence and incompetence that will be very difficult to overcome.