Cold War II Taking Off with Rus Bombers, Carriers, arms to Venezuela?
This sure makes the decision to keep the B-1 base at Ellsworth AFB open look better and better.
Russia is betting on Blackjack and upping the odds: It may be a bluff, or Kremlin policymakers may believe they already are holding an inside straight.
Russian policymakers Thursday boosted their threat to deploy supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 “White Swan” — NATO designation Blackjack — nuclear bombers in Cuba to say they might put them in Venezuela and Algeria, too.
Like the original threat, floated three days earlier on July 21, to deploy the Blackjacks in Cuba, this one was reported Thursday in the newspaper Izvestia and was also attributed to unidentified sources in the Russian Defense Ministry.
Q. How close would the proposed single B-1 base be to the enemy – in EITHER Cuba or Venezuela at 2000 km/h?
A. A LOT closer than either is to South Dakota’s Ellsworth AFB!
How much is bluff, and how much is reality? Hard to say…but very much the sort of strategic “great game” played by the Soviets through Cold War I.
The Tu-160 Blackjacks and the more than a half-century old but still very much operational Tu-95MS Bears have gone through extensive refits in recent years. Both aircraft now carry new X-555 cruise missiles that can fly more than 2,200 miles, so that they do not have to fly out of bases close to the United States, or ever risk entering U.S. air space, to fire their nuclear-capable supersonic cruise missiles at almost any city or military target in the entire domestic United States, the report said.
RIA Novosti also noted the bombers could loiter in the air outside Russian territory, equipped with extensive electronic signals intelligence — SIGINT — and replace the capabilities of Russian military intelligence’s SIGINT station at Lourdes outside Havana, which was shut down six years ago.
The proposed policy of opening forward bases for the strategic bombers is not without its skeptics in Russia. RIA Novosti noted that the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta argued Thursday that Russia could not afford the infrastructure costs of building the new bases.
The answer to that is: Even if the idea of an entire network of bases around the world remains an unachievable dream in the immediate future, the Russian treasury, bursting with the windfall profits of being the world’s largest combined oil and gas exporter when oil prices remain at unprecedented high levels of well over $120 a barrel, can easily afford to build two or three of them, at least in countries like Cuba and Venezuela.
Schwartz’s tough comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 22 confirmed how seriously the U.S. Air Force takes the threat of a forward deployment of Tu-160s in Cuba. Schwartz knows that U.S. military planners cannot afford to bet against Blackjack.
Meanwhile, our southern flank isn’t being neglected in other ways also:
Oil-rich Venezuela may have signed off already on another huge arms deal with Russia during President Hugo Chavez’s visit to Moscow last week.
RIA Novosti said Thursday it had received what it called “unofficial reports” that the fiercely anti-American Chavez had closed the deal with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last Wednesday. The news agency said the agreement could include modern T-90 Main Battle Tanks, Ilyushin Il-76 military transport aircraft and man-held surface-to-air missiles — MANPADS in current U.S. parlance.
No doubt Chavez is seeking to protect himself from a feared blitzkrieg attack from Guyana. Yeah, sure.
And finally, our Russian “friends” aren’t neglecting the Naval side, either.
Russia has plans to start constructing at least five to six new aircraft carriers equipped with space-linked communications systems to operate in the Arctic and Pacific oceans, but work on the ambitious new carriers will not even start for at least another four years, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.
The news agency cited Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky as saying the navy command had decided to build complete systems for the new carriers and not just the ships themselves.
“Everything must work in a system, including aircraft carriers. We have called them sea-borne aircraft carrier systems, which will be based in the Northern and Pacific Fleets. The construction of such systems will begin after 2012,” Vysotsky said in a speech on the Russian holiday known as Navy Day.
All of this recent activity is yet more evidence that Donk Candidate B.O.’s situational awareness concerning national security is virtually non-existent, with his stated intention to gut US defense development and procurement.