Breznev:

My Russian friends variously tell that if Nakhimov hasnt already reentered the fleet it will soon. I dunno.

They tell me that the document you cited really only says that the Nakhimov has been funded for operations through 2015 and that date isnt when its modernization will be completed.

Of course like you I thought otherwise.

But Im abit out of practice with my Russian language skills so I asked for clarification and this is what they responded with.

IMHO though she wont be operational until 2011. The Bellona website last year estimated ” 3 to 4 years”:

http://www.bellona.org/news/Nuclear_cruiser_Admiral_Nakhimov

Two Updates on USMC harriers aboard Illustrious:

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2925751&C=navwar

Learning To Fly Off Big Decks Again
In Atlantic Exercise, British Re-Learn Large Carrier Operations

By VAGO MURADIAN, ABOARD HMS ILLUSTRIOUS

As officials in London prepared to approve construction of two 65,000-metric-ton aircraft carriers, one of Britain’s two existing flattops was off the U.S. coast for a refresher course in big-deck carrier operations.
“Although we invented carrier operations, we have lost a lot of the knowledge needed to run big decks, and we are relearning it from countries like America and France,” said Lt. Jon Llewellyn, flight deck officer on the HMS Illustrious.
The Royal Navy last operated a big deck in 1978, when it retired the 54,000-ton HMS Ark Royal and its 50-jet air wing. Since then, the British fleet has flown 20-aircraft groups of Harriers and helicopters from three 22,500-ton Invincible-class ships.
Now, the Royal Navy is preparing for its return to complex carrier operations with the 2014 commissioning of the HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales two years later, each capable of operating with air wings of 36 Joint Strike Fighters and other surveillance aircraft.
Several years ago, the fleet launched an effort to rebuild its expertise by:
Embedding officers aboard U.S. and French carriers to relearn operational, flight-deck and other long-lead skills.
Drawing on 75 years’ worth of experience with Invincible-class ships.
Readying Navy personnel by training and operating at higher tempos.
Embarking a one-star officer and staff aboard Illustrious to practice running the kind of battle group that will accompany the new ships.
“There is an old saw which is: Do you equip the man or do you man the equipment?” said Commodore Alan Richards, who commands the U.K. Carrier Strike Group. “British forces, by and large, have looked to equip the person rather than get a bunch of equipment and then just man it.”
Richards, his staff and the carrier’s crew brought their ship to the coast of North Carolina July 15-31 to operate alongside the USS Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower battle groups as part of Joint Task Force Exercise Operation Bold Step 07-02. Truman was preparing for its six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf; Illustrious was wrapping up its certification as NATO’s High Readiness Maritime Strike Carrier.
Because the ship no longer operates with a dedicated air wing — Britain’s joint Royal-Navy-Royal Air Force Harrier force has shrunk, and four squadrons are fully committed to operations in Afghanistan — the head of the Royal Navy asked the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps for help.
After months of elaborate planning and a few days of high-tempo carrier-qualification ops, 16 U.S. Marine AV-8B Harriers and 200 support Marines settled aboard Illustrious, the largest Marine-aviation detachment ever to fly from a foreign warship.
The Harriers joined two Navy search-and-rescue and two airborne surveillance and control Sea King helicopters, and together the two-nation air wing set off on high-tempo air operations to test men and procedures at a record-setting pace.
Illustrious also became the first foreign warship to welcome aboard the Marines’ newest aircraft, the V-22 Osprey. The landings demonstrated the feasibility of operating the 23-ton tiltrotor, but also pointed up the difficulty of flying an aircraft with an 84-foot rotorspan from a small deck.
That shouldn’t be a problem on the new carriers, whose 4-acre flight decks are more than twice the size of Illustrious’ and only half an acre smaller than those on America’s Nimitz-class supercarriers.
The first lesson in big-deck ops “is that you need real estate,” said Cmdr. Henry Mitchell, the commander of Illustrious’ air operations. “You need a large deck to provide the flexibility. What we can do on this platform is pretty spectacular, given that it was designed for seven anti-submarine warfare Sea King helicopters.
“Nevertheless, what we can’t do [simultaneously] is the LPH role and the carrier strike role and provide the flexibility for other assets to come and go, especially aircraft as large as the V-22 or the CH-53,” he said. “But with something as large as CVF, you could operate a much more flexible air group with attack and support helicopters, V-22s and jets.”
Coalition Ops
The Marine embark — the first in which foreign aircraft have flown in rigorous operational scenarios from Royal Navy carriers — might one day pave the way for real-world operations.
For one thing, the Royal Navy has two carriers — Illustrious and Ark Royal — but not enough planes to equip them full time.
Mitchell, who spent a tour flying U.S. Marine Harriers in Yuma, Ariz., said commanders would have to become more imaginative in using coalition assets. The next step, he said, is “being a coalition within a ship, as opposed to a coalition of ships or a coalition of capabilities.”
He noted that Italian, Spanish and most recently Indian Harriers have already done photo-op-type landings on British carriers, and that the Italian and Spanish warplanes would return later this year for exercises.
“One of the strengths of this deployment is that if we end up in a coalition operation where we need the capability, which is currently a capability gap in the U.K., and if we need that gap filling for a particular operation and the only way of filling it on here is to invite the Spanish, Italians or the U.S. Marine Corps,” he said.
Mitchell declined to speculate on whether U.S. and British leaders might actually send U.S. aircraft on missions from U.K. ships. But he said, “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we could operate as we are in a conflict.”
Illustrious’ weapons engineer, Cmdr. Ian Annett, spent 10 days aboard Truman earlier this year studying knowledge management, the art of harnessing thousands of bits of data and information to manage a complex organization. On a carrier, information is critical.
“What you want is decision-making superiority, so how do you get the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision?” Annett said. “It’s hugely complicated … but if we’re going to get our graduate levels in strike ops, then we’ve got to go back to school, and that’s where we are now.”
Illustrious’ commanding officer, Capt. Tim Fraser, found the exercise a perfect way to get ready for bigger ships.
“The way this ship operates now, since its refit a couple of years ago, and its role as a strike carrier is part of the glide path toward the new carriers,” Fraser said.
The key, he said, is training as hard as possible.
“The Marines challenge us to operate at a different level,” he said. “Having a team of this sort of size and capability on board operating side-by-side, you learn a lot of lessons that this game is about people.”
Tough training creates the capacity for the greater capabilities that will arrive with the new ships, he said. “My experience with the Royal Navy and its people is that the people will do their bit; we just need the kit.”
Cutting Corners?
Some worry that the new carriers will turn out like the HMS Ocean. Built on a tight budget to commercial standards, the 12-year-old helicopter carrier is a floating maintenance headache.
But Cmdr. Peter Gilbert isn’t among the concerned. Illustrious’ head of marine engineering worked on CVF in his earlier post as chief of Navy propulsion systems.
“It shouldn’t be another Ocean,” Gilbert said. “That whole program was done on a much, much tighter budget, so the decision was taken to make it genuinely affordable as a truly commercial-design ship. It’s easy to say now, ‘It would have been nice if,’ but would we have the ship at all if we hadn’t made the tradeoffs? If we didn’t have the ship, how would we have reacted to the tsunami or done the kind of operations Ocean did off Sierra Leone?”
Still, Ocean’s combination of lean manning and less reliable systems taxes hardworking engineers, said Chief Petty Officer Steve Barr, who manages Illustrious’ fuel systems and has served aboard the ship several times since helping commission it in 1982.
Barr praised the carrier’s main engines, generators, gearboxes and subsystems.
“It was a good design that’s withstood the test of time,” Barr said. “On Ocean, the problem was always solved by going to the commercial market and things that were not known and well tested in the Navy.”
Ocean came with a low price tag but plenty of aftermarket expense, he said. “We got the platform we needed, but there wasn’t a real cost savings at the end. It’s coming out of a different purse and different year. so you are spreading the cost around, and the cost was ultimately the same but spread around in a different budget.”
Also, Ocean is a lean-manned ship, which worsens problems “when the machinery starts failing for whatever reason and they haven’t got the crew to actually keep on top of things,” Barr said.
Count the chief among those who worry about the new carriers. “On CVF, we’re already hearing of cutbacks here and there and watering it down a little bit, which we really shouldn’t need to,” he said.
Commodore Richards, who managed the MoD equipment budget before taking the seaborne strike job, noted that every program contains tradeoffs.
“Overall, Ocean is a triumph, and I think our new carriers will be a triumph,” Richards said. “The reality is that there are a range of things that the government wants to do for defense … It is totally wrong if one area of defense overspends because that money will have to come from another area of defense. So the military have to have an understanding of living within our budget and making our capabilities fit the budget.”
As for the new carriers, Richards is confident the Royal Navy will get it right.
The difference between the current and future U.K. carriers is like that between a 5-ton truck and an 18-wheeler, said the commodore, who was replaced July 28 by Commodore Tom Cunningham, who has served as a liaison officer aboard U.S. carriers.
“Although one is significantly bigger than the other and it requires a certain amount of care and some special considerations, it is still basically truck driving.” •
E-mail: [email]vmuradian@defensenews.com[/email].

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2007/07/marine_lusty_070729/

Marines make history aboard British carrier

By Trista Talton – Staff writer
Posted : Monday Jul 30, 2007 12:27:36 EDT

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — “Lusty” isn’t going to leave for England disappointed.

After a 10-day exercise off America’s Eastern Seaboard, the British aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious — or “Lusty” as it’s affectionately referred to by its crew — has made history and a new record with the help of a squadron of Marine AV-8B Harriers.

“Clearly, we’re breaking new territory,” Cmdr. Ian Annett, Illustrious’ head of weapons engineering, said in a telephone interview from the ship July 25. “We really haven’t operated on this scale in an exercise before. It’s the largest embarkation of U.S. aircraft on a U.K. carrier ever.”

Lusty’s crew welcomed to its deck Marine Attack Squadron 223, a Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N.C.-based squadron of 14 Harriers and about 200 leathernecks.

Operation Bold Step, a U.S.-led joint task force exercise, involved more than 16,000 military personnel from five countries. One goal of the exercise is to certify the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group for deployment later this year.

The exercise tested a broad spectrum of conflict from embargo operations to airstrike missions dropping precision ordnance onto simulated targets.

Marines have integrated with the ship’s 750-man crew, sharing berthing and swapping stories about how it’s done in the Royal Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps.

Annett said there are no plans for a U.S. Harrier squadron to deploy with a British ship.

“Our joint force Harriers are very much committed to operations in Afghanistan at the moment,” he said. “This has allowed us to keep that capability warm.”

Marines broke a record on the ship’s deck, completing 72 take-offs and landings, Annett said.

Lt. Col. David Lancaster, 223’s commanding officer, said the exercise was a success.

“This deployment has certainly exceeded our expectations,” he said in a July 26 interview from the ship. “These guys have been such great hosts and bent over backwards to support us out here.”

One of the first challenges the Marines and British sailors had to overcome was basic procedural and language differences, he said. British Navy flight deck operators use different arm and hand signals than those of U.S. sailors.

Acronyms are different. Most of the time, the sailors and Marines could figure them out, Lancaster said. But there has been a fair share of blank stares, he said.

The squadron’s missions have essentially been the same — defensive counter air missions and close-air support.

“We are performing all of our usual missions. It’s the big, obvious ones, like there’s not a battalion of embarked Marines onboard. There’s not [an air combat element] onboard. We’re working it as part of the JTF, but we don’t have the embarked helicopters other than the four Sea Kings,” Lancaster said.

But they’re flying more often than they would on a traditional training exercise with an expeditionary strike group.

“We’re excited to have an opportunity to do something that we know is historic,” Lancaster said. “And, while we’re doing that, we’re figuring out how to operate with one of our most important allies.”

Annett said there are no formal plans to get U.S. Harriers aboard the ship again in the future, but “we’d love to see this happen again.”

“you know quite well what’s the difference between single and double hull boats.”

Many dont and even I struggle to explain all the issues.

You got any good documentation or can direct us to a source?

A concise and informative essay I cant find nor have I been able to create myself.

Thanks
Rick

Comparing a Scud missle to a an SM-2?

LOL You and anyone else can go right on ahead and keep thinking that. LOL

Personally I think you need to do a little better research. LOL ROTFLMAO

As for SA-N-6 Grumble(S-300 family) it does indeed have an anti-missile capability:

“Range against incoming missiles at 25-m altitude is 25 km; targets at 2000m and higher can be engaged at 90km.”

The S-300 family of naval SAMs have a range of 45 to 150km depending on the version.

These missiles are only aboard four Russian ships. Five if Admiral Nakhimov ever recommissions and Petr Velikiy is maintained properly.

The three Slava class ships outfitted with the above mentioned missiles(One each in the Northern, Black Sea and Pacific fleets) have some serious combat limitations according to some sources but are excellent Command & Control ships and Flagships.