The Black Sea fleet confrontation

Belmont Club:

Wired describes the allied flottila closing on Georgian coast, including a DDG, an SSN, the command ship USS Mount Whitney (”onsidered by some to be the most sophisticated Command, Control, Communications, Computer, and Intelligence (C4I) ship ever commissioned”) and the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Dallas. Wired describes the naval force:

“The vanguard includes the Burke-class destroyer McFaul (pictured)and the armed Coast Guard cutter Dallas. (Another Dallas, a nuclear submarine, is also in the area.) Trailing behind is the command ship Mount Whitney with, reportedly, Polish and Canadian frigates as escorts.”

The Coast Guard cutter USCGC Dallas? The Dallas was headed for the Black Sea in May, before the Georgian crisis broke out. And although the facts have been little reported, the Coast Guard deployed 8 vessels to the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The reason for the deployment is that the Coast Guard does certain things better than the Navy, like work inshore.

On 29 January 2003, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was asked, “The Coast Guard announced today [it is] sending eight cutters, 600 people, to the Persian Gulf, which I understand is the first time they have been dispatched to a combat zone since the Vietnam War. What’s the thinking behind that, and what’s their mission going to be?” General Myers answered, “For the Coast Guard, primarily for port and harbor and waterway security. That’s what they do best.”

The allied naval flotilla now in the area is a blue-water force and may in certain respects be superior to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, whose flagship the cruiser Moskva was reported damaged in combat by the Georgian navy. A Burke-class destroyer is considerably more powerful than anything the Georgian Navy could have deployed. While it is extremely unlikely that any actual naval confrontation will occur (Cold War Rule Number 1) there could be a return to Cold War era harassments between the two forces. At any rate, the Russians have sought to impede the ships not by naval means, but by denying the ships access to the land....

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They are using another Georgia port, but I thought the strength of the fleet was remarkable. It was a don't mess with us statement. The Russian Navy has has been a steep decline. After the fall of the Soviet Union much of it was confined to port where it was rusting away because they could not afford to maintain it.

Strategy Page says this about the Russian Navy:

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the second largest fleet in the world rapidly decaying in the 1990s. Russia lost about 80 percent of its naval power. It's still the second largest fleet in the world, but the U.S. Navy now has over half the naval combat power in the world, and even more of the kinds of ships that can be sent anywhere on the planet. We are now in the third century of either Britain or the United States as the dominant naval power in the world.

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It was no match before it shrunk.