A map showing the location of the Black Sea and some of the large or prominent ports around it. The Sea of Azov and Sea of Marmara are also labelled. Created by User:NormanEinstein, Wikipedia
Russia has dispersed its naval forces in the Black Sea between the southeastern coast of Crimea and Novorossiysk in fear of Ukrainian surface drone strikes, Southern Command spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk said on Aug. 18.
Well, the US Navy is all a twitter about “Distributed Maritime Operations” (DMO) so is this a good idea for the Russian Black Sea Fleet? Like most such questions, it depends.
It depends on how good Ukrainian intelligence is. The supposed advantage for the Russian Fleet would be that their ships are harder to find, but is this case? Not only does Ukraine have access to some Western intelligence sources, but they seem to have good independent intelligence. All their successful USV attacks seem to have been against valid targets though there are many more potential targets that were not directly supporting the Russian military. When Russian ships are in port, the Ukrainians are going to know it.
Convoying has been a feature of Naval Warfare for over a thousand years because it is a defensive tactic that takes the choice of where and when to concentrate out of the hands of the offense. Spreading out the potential targets requires diluting the defense. That leaves the choice of where and when to concentrate effort in the hands of the Ukrainians.
To be successful, the defense has to detect all of the incoming USVs at a distance from their target and have sufficient numbers of countermeasures systems, in the right place, to engage all incoming USVs as they are detected.
The Ukrainian USVs don’t seem to be too hard to defeat once they are detected. Most of the successful countermeasures seem to have used machineguns, but you need one or more within effective range to engage every attacking USV.
The Ukrainians have told the world that no Russian Black Sea port is safe.
On August 4, Ukraine’s maritime authorities issued a “war risk area warning” to all international mariners headed for six Russian Black Sea ports, including Novorossiysk and the smaller oil-exporting terminals of Tuapse and Taman. The warning is scheduled to go into effect on August 23 and continue “until further notice” (Interfax-Ukraine, August 5). And on August 8, Zelenskyy’s economic adviser Oleh Ustenko told US media that “everything the Russians are moving back and forth on the Black Sea are our valid military targets,” including oil tankers or terminals.
When you multiply the number of points you have to defend, you divide your defensive force. USVs are cheap and readily produced. Ukraine will not have trouble finding targets. Ukraine will attempt to overwhelm the defenses by creating situations where even if the defense is taking out say four out of five or six out of seven attacking drones, the Russians still loose, even if it is only one ship at a time.
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