Carrier Relaunches Jets After 2 Years

[Jack Ray]

Carrier Relaunches Jets After 2 Years
Boston Globe
August 20, 2007

MOSCOW -- Russia has started flying jets again from its only operational aircraft carrier after a two-year break, state-run television reported yesterday in the latest show of the country's reviving military capability. "Aircraft are taking off and landing from the deck of the Kuznetsov after a gap of two years. To the pilots and crew [the gap] seemed enormous," Channel One television said in a report from on board the vessel. Last week, President Vladimir Putin announced Russia was returning to its Soviet-era practice of sending long-range bomber aircraft on regular patrols near to NATO airspace. Observers saw those sorties as a sign of Russia's growing assertiveness and ambitions to extend its global reach -- helped by a budget swelled by revenues from energy exports. Russia's other aircraft carriers have been decommissioned or sold. The television report did not say why flights from the Admiral Kuznetsov had been halted. (Reuters)

[Werner]

I have a nasty feeling that Comrade Putin is going to pay for his new military muscle by raising the heating bills of our friends in Europe.

Extortion is a very old political policy.

[Tshipley]

I saw an article a couple days ago that they are starting the old Cold war Bomber missions again putting um in the sky...

[Lesforan]

Yes, I see they have dusted off their Bears and are testing our airspace again. I had so hoped they had gotten beyond that.

Maybe, to show we are good sports and can get into the spirit of things, too, we should put some of our F-4's back into service to intercept them with.

Sort of like vintage sports car racing.

[Werner]

Maybe they should reactivate George W. Bush and have him drive his F-102 and chase them away.

I just realized. He's probably the first President to have gone supersonic, let alone be driving at that speed.

[Timmy C]

Hmm, hope our (Canada's) yet-to-be-built "arctic patrol vessels" will have some sort of AA protection...

[Lesforan]

Don't worry Timmy.

Just get some CF-100's out of the deadline to go with our F-4's and F-102's and go Bear hunting with us.

If we can roll back our technology fifty years, as Russians seem to have,
we can participate with them in 1950's aieral nostalgia.

[Lesforan]

Sorry for the spelling. Must have drank too much Tab.

[Timmy C]

Take off the smoke tanks on our Snowbirds and add bombs in their place and I think we're set...after all, we do have 12 or so of them =P

[Lesforan]

No bombs needed, Timmy. Air intercept is the game. Just fly up to them and wiggle your wings, and they'll go away.

Nobody stands to get hurt that way, and both sides get a story to tell.

[Timmy C]

The Snowbirds are our bombers >.>

[Werner]

The Canadian Air Force was supposed to be in the Chicago Air & Water Show this year, but they had to cancel because the pilot had a cold.

Britain can't maintain 7,000 troops in Iraq and 7,000 in Afghanistan. Those are hardly huge numbers for a country of 60 million with the fifth-largest national economy in the world. Yet even as Britain has continued to play a leading role in world affairs, it has allowed its defenses to molder.

The total size of its armed forces has shrunk from 305,800 in 1990 to 195,900 today, leaving it No. 28 in the world, behind Eritrea and Burma. This downsizing has reduced the entire British army (107,000 soldiers) to almost half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps (175,000). Storied regiments such as the Black Watch and the Royal Scots, with histories stretching back centuries, have been eliminated.

Even worse hit is the Royal Navy, which is at its smallest size since the 1500s. Now, British newspapers report, of the remaining 44 warships, at least 13 and possibly as many as 19 will be mothballed. If these cuts go through, Britain's fleet will be about the same size as those of Indonesia and Turkey and smaller than that of its age-old rival, France.

Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly poignant case in point. At the end of World War II, Canada had more than a million men under arms and operated the world's third-biggest navy (behind the U.S. and Britain), with more than 400 ships. Today, it has all of 62,000 personnel on active duty, and its navy has just 19 warships and 23 support vessels, making it one-fourth the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Of course, numbers aren't the entire story. Both Britain and Canada have top-notch soldiers, allowing them to punch above their weight class in military affairs. But there is only so much that a handful of super-soldiers can accomplish if their numbers are grossly inadequate. Quality can't entirely make up for lack of quantity...

Look at Afghanistan, where NATO is always having trouble dredging up an extra helicopter or another infantry battalion to throw into the fray. The British and Canadians are doing more than their share; their willingness to fight hard and take casualties sets them apart from most NATO countries, which prefer to send troops to safe parts of Afghanistan rather than to the front lines in the south and east. But 5,500 British and 2,500 Canadian soldiers can cover only so much ground, even with another 1,500 Brits thrown in. As usual, the United States, with more than 27,000 troops in Afghanistan, is left to carry the lion's share of the burden.

The primary culprit is declining defense spending among U.S. allies. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, defense budgets among NATO members, excluding the U.S., have fallen from 2.49% of gross domestic product in 1993 to 1.8% of GDP in 2005. Britain is actually above the norm, spending 2.3% of GDP, or $52 billion, on defense. Canada, with a defense budget of $13 billion, is below the norm, at 1.1%...

And Canada needs to spend much more than even the current government is planning. But a start has been made:

The pre-budget increase in estimated spending includes a 14.1-per-cent, or $2.1-billion hike in expenditures to $16.9 billion, by the Department of National Defence to cover a variety of additional military expenditures, such as the expansion of the Armed Forces and operations in Afghanistan...

With a smaller armed force and a longer coast than the USA, Canada may have trouble asserting sovereignty over the Polar Seas.

[Cadman]

This is not such a bad thing. It gives our boys something to do to keep them in shape. Dust off the old EP3's and paint them up with some bumper car graphics and send them up.

[Werner]

I was going to move the Canada stuff to R&R soon. Let's see how it holds up. Our friends up North have been good allies, and more importantly they don't take it personally when we give them a ribbing.

[Timmy C]

...because we know it's true.

[kennylibben]

...because we know it's true.