Watching Russian Air & Sea Activity

[AdamG]

September 14 2017

Vladimir Putin’s warships destroyed “control centers, communication hubs, militant weapons and ammunition warehouses in ISIS-controlled areas in southeast Deir ez-Zor”.
Russia has been waging war against ISIS in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
ISIS are facing military defeat in the Middle East as they are pushed out of their final strongholds in Syria.

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/worl...di-Deir-ez-Zor

A Russian Navy ship with a fishy past is currently sailing around the eastern Mediterranean. Described as an oceanographic research ship, outside observers believe the Yantar is actually a spy ship using mini-submersibles to conduct cloak and dagger work on the bottom of the sea.
The Yantar is a Russian Navy ship that joined the fleet in 2015. Officially described as a "special purpose ship" or "oceanographic vessel," the ship is operated by the Russian Navy's Main Directorate of Underwater Research, which is thought to control Russia's undersea espionage efforts.

Yantar is designed to act as a mothership to mini-submarines, with hangars for storing manned and unmanned submersibles and cranes for lowering them into the water. While that's useful for legitimate scientific research, the reality is that the ship is often spotted lingering above the undersea cables that carry data across the ocean floor, linking entire countries and even continents in the global telecommunications network

http://www.popularmechanics.com/mili...mediterranean/

[AdamG]

Russia is in the process of setting up a new naval base in the Pacific Ocean, on an island chain disputed with Japan for decades, a senior Russian senator has said.

“The decision has been made,” Senator Franz Klintsevich, deputy chairman of the Defense and Security Committee, told the Interfax news agency on Thursday, speaking about a new naval port on the Kuril islands. “It is in the realization stages,” he added, noting that what lay ahead now were “organizational matters” about the constitution of the base.

The Kuril islands are a chain of islets, stretching between eastern Russia and northern Japan, across the Sea of Okhotsk. Klintsevich did not say on which island the base will stand—a significant matter, considering Japan and Russia have been locked in a dispute over four of the islands since World War II.

The four southernmost islands in the chain, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, are under Russia’s control, seized by the Red Army in the closing stages of World War II combat. Its native Ainu population faced a swift deportation campaign and despite Japanese objections, Russia has kept control of the territories off the coast of Hokkaido.

http://www.newsweek.com/russian-navy...senator-693642

[AdamG]

Indicator

Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that his country’s biggest enterprises must show that they can step up arms production and important services on short notice to be war-ready.
“The economic ability to increase the production of defense products and services quickly is a vital element of military security,” Putin told military leaders and senior officials in the defense industrial complex on Wednesday. “All strategic and simply large companies, regardless of the type of ownership, must be able to do this.”

http://www.newsweek.com/putin-says-r...economy-720802

[AdamG]

The Russian navy’s maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean far exceeded what Moscow had planned for 2017, almost quadrupling the time originally allocated to drills, patrols and other activities, amid peaking tension over neighbor North Korea’s nuclear program.
Russian military vessels spent over 9,000 days on water in the past 11 months, Pacific Fleet spokesman Nikolay Voskresenskiy told state news agency Itar-Tass on Monday. This exceeded last year’s sailing time and was roughly “four times” the planned length of deployment Moscow had for its Pacific ships, Voskresenskiy said

http://www.newsweek.com/russian-forc...ensions-734961

[AdamG]

Britain’s military has prioritised the protection of undersea cables from Russia because if they are cut or disrupted there would be an immediate and “potentially catastrophic” hit to the economy, the chief of defence staff has said.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach said the vulnerability of communication lines under the sea poses a “new risk to our way of life” as Russia modernises its navy and perfects unconventional and information warfare.
Conservative MP Rishi Sunak warned earlier this month that a successful attack on the UK’s network of undersea communications cables could deal a “crippling blow” to the country’s security and economy

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a8111536.html

Track the Yantar's shenanigans from your easy chair.
http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/.../vessel:YANTAR

Details on the Yantar
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/r...bles-2kzrxpq9q

Historical perspective
http://www.bryensblog.com/sea-cables-real-threat/

Does your Admiral need a desktop model?
Have to do a briefing slide for Monday?
Have some plans.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ino-producti...jpg?1462345384

[davidbfpo]

This reporting was probably stimulated by the publication two weeks ago by a Policy Exchange (PX) 48 pgs. report 'Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure' by a Conservative MP, Rishi Sunak (PX is a right wing think tank).
Link:https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-con...sea-Cables.pdf

When you read the paper the biggest current threat is not Russian sabotage (or Chinese in the South China Sea), but fishing trawlers damaging the cables 100-150 times per year.

For the US military there is an issue, the reliance on cables to pass the very high data load for drone operations; cables severed in the Mediterranean in 2008 drastically reduced deployments.

There are only a very small number of "choke points" at sea and on land, which make the system vulnerable. Notably this one:

The location is the single cross‑connect for all cable traffic between Africa, Europe, and Asia. 80% of all European to Middle Eastern connectivity passes through this one building.

Which is in Alexandria, Egypt.

Two BBC reports, one "beating the drum" for this old problem, which has a small map of the cables routes:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-42365191 and a historical piece on WW1 cutting of cables:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42367551

[AdamG]

Russian submarines are prowling around vital undersea cables. It’s making NATO nervous.

BRUSSELS — Russian submarines have dramatically stepped up activity around undersea data cables in the North Atlantic, part of a more aggressive naval posture that has driven NATO to revive a Cold War-era command, according to senior military officials.
The apparent Russian focus on the cables, which provide Internet and other communications connections to North America and Europe, could give the Kremlin the power to sever or tap into vital data lines, the officials said. Russian submarine activity has increased to levels unseen since the Cold War, they said, sparking hunts in recent months for the elusive watercraft.

NATO has responded with plans to reestablish a command post, shuttered after the Cold War, to help secure the North Atlantic. NATO allies are also rushing to boost anti-submarine warfare capabilities and to develop advanced submarine-detecting planes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.0ffdc699d07a