Early in July the Indian Navy announced that it was finally running acceptance trials for its Russian-built carrier, the Vikramaditya. The ship, which began life as the Soviet carrier Admiral Gorshkov, was rebuilt by the north Russian yard Sevmash for the Indians. The deal must have seemed good at the time. The Russians were desperate. In return for an order for carrier-capable aircraft, they offered the carrier gratis. The Indians were to pay only for the cost of modernization. As a Soviet vessel, the Gorshkov operated Yak-38 short-takeoff/vertical-landing (STOVL) fighter-bombers plus various other weapons, most notably a battery of long-range antiship missiles. Reconstruction, including removal of the missiles, will allow the ship to operate higher-performance MiG-29K aircraft, which will take off using a ski-jump forward and land, using arresting gear, on an angled deck. All of that had to be built in. The combination of ski-jump and arresting gear is used on board the somewhat larger (55,000 rather than 45,000 tons) Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetzov and her Chinese half-sister Liaoning (the former Russian Varyag).
None of these ships has U.S.-style steam catapults. Conventional (non-STOVL) aircraft can operate off their ski-jumps as the ship provides the necessary wind over her deck, but they suffer a penalty in payload compared to aircraft that rely on catapults. Moreover, it takes a high ratio of thrust-to-weight to launch off a ski-jump, as the airplane benefits heavily from the force its engines exert as it is forced up by the deck.
Ski-jump carriers are ill-equipped to operate lower-performance aircraft such as E-2 Hawkeyes, which is why the Chinese, and probably the Indians, are currently working on catapults for future carriers. Without those radar aircraft, a carrier is much more vulnerable to air attack from beyond her horizon. The Indians are relying on a Russian-supplied radar helicopter (the Ka-31), but it cannot fly as high as a fixed-wing aircraft, nor does its radar have anything like the performance of that on board an E-2.
Perhaps more significant, when the Russians sold her, the carrier had no usable power plant due to a fire in her boilers. Replacing or repairing them was a major job, given the amount of ship structure between the boilers and the flight deck. When the Vikramaditya ran her first sea trials last year, her engines suddenly cut out when she reached 30 knots. It turned out that seven of her eight boilers had failed because the fire (insulating) bricks in them had melted. The Russians later blamed that on low-quality Chinese brick (a claim the Chinese hotly denied).
The High Cost of Defense
The fire-brick problem suggests that other Russian steam-powered warships may not be as capable as imagined, and this might portend a deeper problem the Russians face. They are still contending with the effects of the old Soviet Union’s breakup two decades ago. Prior to that event, supply chains stretched throughout the country. The Soviets had a deliberate policy of placing different parts of supply chains in various republics, in an attempt both to bind the country together and industrialize all the republics. For example, when Nikita Khrushchev was in power, a sonar development center was set up in his native Ukraine, supplementing (and competing with) the main center in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The Ukrainian center produced the sonar in the Charlie-class cruise-missile submarine, and all Soviet dipping sonars and sonobuoys. When Ukraine broke with the other republics in 1991, the Russians lost their source of airborne sonars.
The Ukrainians would still sell to the Russians, but the operative word was sell, and for that the Russians needed cash. In the past, all that had been required was an order from the Kremlin. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians and the other republics found themselves operating Western-style cash economies. Some of the big defense organizations, which were in deep trouble, were willing to work the old way, trusting for later payment, but that could not last. That is why Russian forces have found themselves so badly deprived in recent years. Their situation is beginning to improve only because the country is benefitting heavily from its trade in oil and other natural resources.
That does not solve the supply-chain problem. Many of the organizations that once produced the components going into weapon systems have been starved of that business for two decades. They have either disappeared altogether, or they have gone into other enterprises, losing the necessary expertise. This capacity has to be recreated if large orders for new equipment, even of existing design, are to be fulfilled. The Russian government is painfully aware that the buying hiatus has left it with an aging force, and now that it has more money it is trying to make up for lost time.
The Russians are now publishing their planned defense programs for the period through 2020 (a shocking departure from past secrecy), and they show just how much production is needed. The announced plans are to provide 70 to 100 new aircraft by 2020, plus 120 helicopters, 600 armored vehicles, and 8 or 9 ships (including submarines). These numbers include what is already on order (47 percent of the submarines involved are to be delivered this year, which means they represent long-overdue orders).
The Russian Ministry of Defence cannot afford the mass of inspectors and other officials who guarantee quality. Problems with some ballistic missiles, such as the Bulava planned for strategic missile submarines, have been blamed on sub-component failures. It’s been suggested that the normal extended test programs of the past, which would have caught minor (but fatal) design flaws, were curtailed as unaffordable. As a consequence, much of what is currently produced is far less reliable than one might expect. Customers have sometimes complained publicly. Algeria went so far as to return some MiG-29s because of engine unreliability.
Moreover, the businesses that remain are desperate for cash to keep them afloat. They sometimes take an advance for one project and spend it on a more urgent one, leaving them without the ability to complete what they have promised. The Indian carrier is the most public example. Originally the modernization was to have cost the Indians $947 million (as stated in 2005), which would have been a bargain for a modern carrier. While the project was beginning, Sevmash (which was basically a submarine-building yard) was struggling to complete new missile and attack submarines for the Russian navy—a much higher-priority project. The Russian navy, moreover, was in a far stronger negotiating position than the Indians. It had its own limited budget, and it could make sure Sevmash delivered at a promised price.
Sevmash had no deep carrier expertise; the Soviet carriers were all built in Nikolaev, which is now in Ukraine. Its last experience building large surface ships was with Sverdlov-class cruisers in the 1950s. It had also laid down (but never completed) a Stalin-era battleship. None of that had much to do with rebuilding a carrier. The lack of expertise beyond Nikolaev was so poor that the Russian navy discarded three of its carriers because they could not be refitted in Ukraine. The Admiral Gorshkov would have followed them off the Russian navy list had the Indians not turned up as willing buyers.
India’s Growing Fleet
Sevmash engineers probably knew about the boiler problem (the lack of good boiler bricks may also affect other Russian steam warships). They do not appear to have taken into account the need to replace internal wiring and renew hull plating, presumably much of it inside a double bottom and side-protection spaces. Sevmash asked for more money. It had bought into the project, and it could not complete it. Several times the Indians talked of walking away, but the Russians knew they had no other way to buy a carrier to replace their aging ex-British Viraat. The Indians announced a project for an indigenous carrier, possibly to goad the Russians.
The latest estimate of the total cost of the Vikramaditya is $2.3 billion. That may not seem much compared to the estimated cost of the new U.S. carrier, the Gerald R. Ford (currently estimated as $9 billion, including a considerable amount of entirely new equipment), but then again the Indians are not getting nearly as much capability for their money. The current estimate is that the ship will operate no more than 16 MiG-29s. A U.S. carrier can operate nearly 100 aircraft, although in practice the number is somewhat smaller. That is aside from the advantages associated with nuclear power.
The purchase of the Russian carrier was part of a larger effort by the Indian Navy to expand, which means trying to shift its government’s outlook from the land (facing Pakistan and, to an extent, China) to the sea. Senior Indian naval officers often point to the country’s dependence on seaborne trade, including for critical energy supply. They also claim that China is building a naval presence in the Indian Ocean to use against India (the Chinese generally deny this).
The Indian Navy has managed to increase spending toward a quarter of the Indian defense budget. Among other things, the money is for two home-built carriers. The first, now described as 40,000 tons, is to be named Vikrant, after the first Indian carrier. Work has been proceeding since 2007, and current reports have the ship ready for launch in August 2013 and at sea in 2018 (the date was formerly given as 2017). A much larger carrier, the 65,000-ton Vishal, is to be completed in 2025. An official drawing of the Vikrant shows a ski-jump like that on the Vikramaditya, but presumably the larger carrier will have catapults. They are part of an overall expansion program that includes home-built nuclear submarines (plus one and probably two Akulas leased from Russia) and new surface combatants. There has been considerable domestic criticism of the escalating cost and rather late delivery of the new Vikramaditya, and it remains to be seen whether it will affect support for Indian naval expansion.