I was reading that India will be purchasing an old soviet carrier. What needs to be done to make it operational? What are the factors that determine a carriers service life?
The cost of maintaining the ships hull and equipment sets the useful life of any ship… Equipment eventually breaks down to the point where it’s no longer cost effective to maintain or repair it, and so it must be replaced. Also as equipment ages, it becomes increasingly harder and more expensive to keep running even if youy’re not going to replace it. When the replacement + maintenance costs of equipment reaches near the cost of buying a new carrier, you’ve effectively reached end-of-life. Now, if there are no new ships to be had, you may find yourself with a ship beyond EOL, and indeed, most warships are built so robustly that they can be kept operating well beyond technical EOL. Half the navies in the world do this, as they can’t afford the outright cost of buying a new modern ship. They buy someone else’s cast-offs, fix them up as best they’re able, and use them till they can’t be fixed anymore, either due to cost, or to lack of spare parts. Then the cycle begins again.
One of the side-effects of the down-sizing of the major navies is that for a while, the quality of the lesser navies will increase, as more ships become available on the second-hand market, then, as the major fleets stabilize at smaller numbers, the lesser fleets will fall further and further behind in quantity and quality of thier fleets, as fewer transfers from major fleets are available, and competition for the few ships available will become more fierce.
Last I heard, the deal was not made final yet. The Admiral Gorshkov (the carrier in question) was not commisioned into the Russian/Soviet navy until 1987… 5 years after it was launched due mostly to incorperating new systems. I don’t know when it was mothballed, but it definetly is not active now.
It is planned for an extensive refit when/if the sale goes through for India. Planned changes include a ski-jump deck much like the Kuznetsov. As it sits right now, it is a VTOL carrier.
Along these lines what I am curious about is can these navies reasonably expect to be bale to functionally use these beasts?
Operating an aircraft carrier seems like majorly tricky business and dangerous to boot. I suppose popping a plane into the air here and there on a calm day is doable but what about in rough seas, at night under combat conditions? The US Navy has been working through carrier operations for 50+ years and even though we’ve got it down pretty good they are still dangerous places to be at the best of times. I can’t see how an inexperienced navy expects to get ahold of one of these things and make it a very useful fighting platform. Seems more like a feather in that military’s cap (and an expensive one at that) than a very useful weapon.
If they bought four of the things and busted their balls learning hard lessons over the next ten years then maybe I could see a workable carrier force emerging but just getting one to play with seems almost silly.
Of course I could be wrong since for all I know once you’ve procurred an aircraft carrier the rest is gravy.
India is a very populous and rather advanced nation. They posses nukes and IRBMS of their own making. If they wish to learn carrier operations, they will. They may make some mistakes along the way, but if they want it, the skill is theirs for the taking.
India has a history of naval aviation with far more experience operating aircraft carriers than Russia. The Vikrant, a conventional CV-type carrier (British-built, flying some of those “Sea Ugly Thing” or whatever 1950s and early 60s Brit carrier planes) operated from c. 1960 to the mid-late 80s converted to a Harrier-carrier late in life. They since operate the Viraat (former HMS Hermes), a carrier the Royal Navy itself converted to VSTOL in the late 70s and sold off after the Falklands.
Still, for VTOL operations, a lot of countries launch and recover helicopters from surface vessels in challenging conditions. Not that hard to go to a small helo-carrier. The one really unexpected carrier operator is Thailand. For some reason in the early 90s they bought a modern VSTOL-carrier from Spain (apparently the Spanish yard tooled up to make 2 carriers but the Armada decided they really needed only the one, and the yard really needed the sale). Thailand had jack-squat-zero experience in carrier ops, and it seems to have spent its entire short life so far being fitted and conducting tests and as ceremonial flagship.
Let’s see… in 1980 the carrier operators were IIRC: USA, UK, France, India, Brazil, Argentina, Spain; of which the USA, France and Argentina were operating fighters off of CV-type flattops while UK, India and Spain had turned or were turning to Harrier-carriers and Brazil was flying ASW prop planes. In the early 80s Argentina dropped out, Italy and the USSR came in with VSTOL carriers and the the dying USSR started the Gorshkov/Kuznetsov class. Then in the 90s Thailand joined the club.
The USA also has a bunch of the “gator navy” helicopter-carrierss that UncleBill referred to, “amphibious assault ships” (LPH/LHA) that are essentially a non-catapult carrier that contains a whole Marine Expeditionary Unit, and can launch all the helicopters and landing craft to put them ashore plus put a half dozen Harriers in the air to give them some extra punch (no ski-jumps, though – that would be admitting we are building mini-carriers and that is politically unwise). The French have some of those planned, and the Japanese have launched two ships that resemble a small LPH too much even though they swear all that deck space is for “truck parking”.
Oh, and yes, with many of these countries it is to a large degree a question of a ‘feather in their cap’. Specially, from a political viewpoint the ability of some countries to claim the status of a Regional Power to be at least given some proper respect by the Big Boys has historically hinged on maintaining a proper blue-water navy, once including at least the one dreadnought, now the one carrier – even though strategically, if you actually go to shooting war against someone who except for the carrier matches or exceeds you in sea or air power, a one-carrier navy is no better than a no-carrier navy (and may be worse: too many assets tied up protecting the carrier, instead of hunting the other fellow’s ships).
However, this is not to say they have to be white elephants. Many of the one- carrier fleets modify or custom-order their carriers to be more similar to an American LHA, with provisions for transporting landing craft and Marine batallions, able to use the helos as civilian-evacuation platforms in regional hotspots or as disaster-relief units in areas of the same country’s coast that may have been cut off by natural disasters. Militarily the helos can be fitted for fast mine laying/sweeping duty, which can be an important component of littoral warfare. The carrier may be used in domestic conflict, say to hit some pocket of insurgents from the sea side with air strikes and Marines, w/o tipping them off by a buildup in the nearest land bases (or heck, w/o requiring permanently garrisonned land bases).
The smaller NATO countries (Spain, Italy) probably have their single VSTOL carrier fit a NATO battle plan together with the British and American forces. France, being France, just has to have one because, well, they’re France.