Page 47 - North Atlantic and Nordic Defense

North European and North Atlantic Defense: The Challenges Return

China plans to build four more carriers, giving the PLAN the second-largest carrier fleet after the United
States.

Some forecasts indicate that the PLA will have a 500-ship fleet by 2030, compared with an estimated 350
vessels for the U.S. Navy unless U.S. shipbuilding rates increase significantly in coming years.

In short, the mass and reach of the Russian and Chinese Navies is on the upsurge.

What the impact of this will be in the future is a work in progress.

Editor's Note: And the Russians are innovating with regard to their concepts of operations.
For example, they have operated their own version of a kill web with missiles launched from frigates in the
Caspian sea against Syrian targets obviously guided by target acquisition and C2 nodes in Syria.

Chris Cavas wrote about the Caspian fleet in this piece while he was at Defense News:

Few naval strategists would count Russia's Caspian Sea flotilla among significant units in an order of battle. The
inland sea features naval forces from the four bordering countries — Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan in
addition to Russia — but most vessels are small missile-armed or patrol craft, nearly all well under 1,000 tons.
The forces have been viewed purely as local craft.

But that changed on Oct. 7, when four Russian warships in the Caspian Sea launched a reported 26 Kalibr SS-N-
30A cruise missiles at targets in Syria, nearly 1,000 nautical miles away. While most analysts dismissed the
military effects of the missile strikes, the fact that such small, inexpensive and relatively simple craft can affect
ground operations that far away is significant.

"It is not lost on us that this launch from the Caspian Sea was more than just hitting targets in Syria," said a US
official. "They have assets in Syria that could have handled this. It was really about messaging to the world and us
that this is a capability that they have and they can use it."

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2015/10/11/is-caspian-sea-fleet-a-game-changer/

The Russians Rethink Their Approach to Warfare: Tactical Nuclear

Weapons Outside the Nuclear Ladder of Escalation?
2016-05-11 By Robbin Laird

We have been building on Paul Bracken’s work on the second nuclear age to focus on the impact of the
rethink regarding nuclear weapons going on globally.

SLD: And to the point of different perspectives, that really goes to the heart of the matter. We are not going to
bargain with ourselves. And in the world we are in and it will get worse from this point of view, there is no clear
ladder of escalation. The rules are not clear, and learning will be by crisis not strategic design.

Bracken: The absence of any clear escalation ladder is at the heart of the challenge.

If you knew how many weeks I wasted on trying to construct the follow-on escalation ladders for the 21st Century
but could not convince myself that they were worthwhile.

In the first nuclear age it was learning by crisis, and we got fortunate because the crises that started were not
particularly severe. If the Cuban Missile Crisis had come in the late ’40s, God only knows what would’ve happen.

Page 46