20 August 2007

The Bear is Back



People who live in the high latitudes are a little nuts in the summer. The daylight hours peak in June, and the stimulation of all that sun and warmth upon the Northern brain is almost overwhelming.

I knew people who lived in Nome, Alaska, and they said they thought nothing of cutting the grass before midnight. When I worked in Norway one June during college, it was unnerving to have the light come up and the birds sing hours before official rising time.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Republic, is no exception to the manic activity of his countrymen in high summer. He knows that soon enough it will be the flip-side of endless day and slide into endless night, so it is important to get things done before the sun sets. The Russian economy is resurgent on increased energy income. There is the tantalizing prospect of much more, if the national frontier can be pushed further north.

August is the last summer month up north, and Mr. Putin's people have been busy. They have ridden in the mini-submarines Mir-1 and Mir-2 to plant the rust-proof Russian flag under the Pole. State scientists claim the flag marks the end of the undersea Lomonsov Ridge which they assert is connected to the Russian mainland. If the claim is adjudicated favorably, it would give the Russian state the lion's share of 25% of the world's unexploited gas and oil reserves.

There are some significant reservations about that on the part of the Canadians and the Danes, but the only other power that could plant flags on other worlds is busy elsewhere.

Mr. Putin is in a hurry. Darkness is coming soon. His second term expires next March, even sooner than Mr. Bush's does. In order to serve a third term, he would have to alter the constitution. While he certainly could, some say that Mr. Putin aspires to be known as a democrat who has respect for the law, the last few years activity notwithstanding.

He does not want to be lumped into the same category as Hugo Chavez, or Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, after all. The whole "president-for-life" thing smacks of autocracy, and one would not want that in a modern Great Power. Instead, there are several stratagems by which he could return to power legally, and the smart money is saying that he may lease his chair for a while before coming back.

In any event, he intends to go out with Russia once more a major player on the world stage. There is talk of reestablishing a standing naval presence in the Med. The Interfax news agency quoted him yesterday as he vacationed at the resort in Chebarkul, Russia, saying he has "decided to have Russia's strategic aviation resume flights on a permanent basis."

It is the summer training season, with plenty of daylight for extended training. At least, this had been the season back in the day of the Soviet Empire. In those days, the strategic bombers of long-range aviation, or LRA, would fly exciter missions against Iceland and the United Kingdom from bases in the Kola Peninsula, and in the Pacific against air defenses in Alaska.

Strategic and Long Range Aviation were part of the strategic triad, along with ballistic missile submarines and land-based ICBMs. It feels a little funny to talk about it now, but although moribund, the triad still exists. According to the tables contained in the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Soviet Strategic aviation was once capable of delivering 1,506 nuclear warheads, including bombs, cruise missiles, and air-to-surface missiles.

It is hard to make my mind follow the mathematics of those days, equations that included terms like “throw weight,” and “launch on warning.” I guess you get soft when you don't exercise.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, a significant portion of modern heavy bombers turned out to be the property of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, neither of which new nation had much use for the things. When the dust settled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia wound up with only a quarter of the hundred or so heavy bombers that were capable of carrying cruise missiles, and another sixty-odd nuclear capable bombers.

The Soviets had a variety of medium and long-range platforms with which to fly their out-of-area missions, as we used to call them. In the conditions of the time, the formal design designations were not shared, and the NATO analysts came up with a system for naming them; propeller aircraft were of one syllable, jets of two. Fighters began with “F,” and bombers with “B's.”

Things had gone too far, even for the cash-strapped Russians. The Air Force decided in November 1995 to buy all 19 Tu-160 "Blackjack" and 25 Tu-95 "Bear" bombers with three hundred strategic cruise missiles from Ukraine. In 2000, eleven more strategic bombers and six-hundred air-launched missiles came home to Russia in exchange for cancellation of an oil and gas debt. The fact that they flew at all is remarkable. I have seen the pictures of them the mid-1990s, and they looked forlorn and abandoned, birds nesting in the engine intakes.

Back in the day, when we ventured up into the Sea of Japan we often saw the medium-range Badgers, flying simulated wave missile attacks against our ship. They were sleek 1960s-style aircraft. Later upgrades to the inventory brought the impressive wing-wing Backfires and Blackjacks, each model mirroring some capability of the Americans or filling some niche market in between. Their mission was to kill us on our carriers, while ours was to control the seas around them.

The most famous of the Soviet bombers is the Tupelov TU-96 Bear, and it is still flying today. It is an ancient aircraft, first observed in 1953, the year after the first flight of the venerable Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. It is an incredible plane, a throwback with propellers, and it was made in more than a dozen models. The ones we encountered in the late 1970s were the “Delta” model, which was equipped with a bulging belly radar that passed our location to waiting cruise missile-equipped submarines that would try to kill us on command.

It also comes in the "H" model, designed to launch long-range nuclear and conventional cruise missiles

It was a matter of honor to intercept the Bears as far away as possible. I have been privileged to see the Leviathan in flight only once, standing on the bridge wing of a ship operating somewhere in the South China Sea, I think.

Flying by, they spewed smoke in lazy gray contrails. The pilot who intercepted them said they were actually a million parts flying in losse formation.

The narrow elongated fuselage make them look prehistoric. From the spear-like thrust of the refueling probe, back past the bulges of the radar and electronic countermeasure antennas the airplane sprouts wide, deeply-swept wings with four gigantic counter-rotating engines with gigantic propellers. There is a stinger on the stern, automatic cannons that convey a sense of ominous insect-like menace.

It has been a long time since the Russian Air Force has flown deep in to the Pacific. They did it two weeks ago, passing in the general vicinity of Guam, home to this year's edition of the Valiant Shield exercise. The Pacific forces of the United States were conducing integrated joint designed to “detect, locate, track and engage units at sea, in the air, on land, and in cyberspace.”

There were three aircraft carrier strike groups involved, the Kitty Hawk on her last cruise, joined by Nimtiz and Stennis. Land-based US tankers and fighters hauled more than two million pounds of gas into the air to feed the thirsty fighters of the Fleet and Air Force. An E-3 Sentry airborne radar controlled the skies, watching the Bears come.

The flight to Guam was part of a three-day Russian Long Range Aviation exercise during which they flew forty bomber sorties and launched eight cruise missiles.

As impressive as the two simultaneous exercises were, it is enough to make a Cold Warrior sniff. Sources close to the planning staff said that the main event of this year's exercise, jaws the photo op provided by fifteen ships and seventeen Navy and Air Force aircraft.

It is complex, and planning for evolution started seven months ago. The goal was a tighter formation than the one they pulled off last year. If they had included the Russians, it would have been spectacular; a real Cold War reunion.

I do not think Mr. Putin intends to play it that way though. I think he intends to do it his way. From the Pole to England, from Siberia to Guam, Mr. Putin has announced that the Bear is back.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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