From Bismarck to Moskva: Trapped Fleets, Space Wars, and the Potemkin Navy That Ukraine Sank

From the lessons of the Bismarck to the humiliation of the Moskva, naval warfare keeps proving that even the most powerful fleets can be outgunned by smaller, smarter weapons. Russia’s forces now find themselves trapped in maritime chokepoints, hemmed in by NATO, and struggling to adapt to a fight increasingly decided in space. The United States faces the same choice every great naval power has—invest in real capability, protect intelligence at all costs, and avoid the Potemkin trap of believing appearances over reality. Ukraine’s success shows that innovation, backed by strategy and ruthless counterintelligence, can sink giants.

By Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder & President of The Truesdell Companies

Let’s Begin

We are in one of those rare moments in military history when the old playbooks are being shredded in real time. The breakthroughs in energy transmission, data processing, digitization, and material science are happening so fast that anyone claiming to know the definitive weapon system of five, ten, or twenty years from now is bluffing. We are inventing the future as we go, but first, let’s look backward.

This is not the first time the United States has stood on the edge of such a shift. In the Revolutionary War, the American colonies leveraged what was then cutting-edge for the period: long rifles with greater range and accuracy than British smoothbore muskets, coupled with irregular guerrilla tactics that undermined the rigid formations of European armies. The introduction of naval innovations like the Continental Navy’s small, maneuverable ships and privateers disrupted the British supply chain and proved that smaller, adaptive forces could counter even the most dominant fleets of the era.

By the Civil War, industrialization had transformed the battlefield. The adoption of rifled artillery, ironclad warships like the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, and the extensive use of railroads for troop movement and supply lines represented a leap forward in mobility and lethality. The telegraph compressed decision-making time from days to minutes, changing command and control forever. These technologies did not just enhance existing strategies—they rewrote them, forcing generals to adapt to warfare on an industrial scale.

In World War I, the United States entered a conflict defined by mechanization and mass production. The introduction of machine guns, chemical weapons, tanks, and aircraft changed the pace and brutality of combat. Even in its relatively short participation, the U.S. military recognized that the integration of new technology—particularly in coordination between infantry, artillery, and aviation—was no longer optional. The lessons learned in trench warfare would directly influence American military doctrine for decades.

World War II accelerated that technological arms race to a breakneck pace. The U.S. perfected mass production of advanced weapons systems: aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, radar, and, ultimately, the atomic bomb. Amphibious assault tactics, exemplified in the Pacific campaign, combined naval, air, and ground forces in ways that demanded precise coordination and innovation in logistics. The war ended with the United States not only as a military victor but as a technological superpower, having set the stage for the Cold War’s decades-long competition.

The Korean and Vietnam Wars pushed the U.S. to refine its understanding of asymmetric conflict. Jet aircraft, helicopters for rapid troop deployment, and precision-guided munitions were matched against guerrilla strategies that negated some of America’s technological edge. In Vietnam, the proliferation of portable anti-aircraft weapons forced changes in flight tactics, while the use of electronic sensors and early computer systems began to shape modern battlefield intelligence.

The Gulf War in 1991 marked the coming of age for networked warfare. Satellite reconnaissance, GPS-guided bombing, stealth aircraft, and integrated command-and-control systems allowed the U.S. military to dismantle Iraq’s forces in a matter of weeks. Precision weapons and real-time targeting data became the gold standard, changing expectations for what a modern military campaign could achieve with minimal collateral damage.

Following September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq introduced a different challenge—fighting insurgencies that blended into civilian populations. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) evolved from reconnaissance tools into precision strike platforms, revolutionizing the concept of persistent surveillance and targeted engagement. Advances in armor, counter-IED systems, and battlefield communications reflected the rapid adaptation to an enemy that relied on small, dispersed units and improvised weapons rather than conventional forces.

Now, as we look forward, the pace of change rivals or exceeds any of these past eras. Just as rifled muskets overturned linear formations, ironclads rendered wooden navies obsolete, and drones reshaped counterterrorism, today’s advances in energy systems, AI-driven targeting, and unmanned platforms promise to redefine every assumption about power projection. History’s lesson is clear: the nation that integrates new technology fastest, and adapts its doctrine to match, will dominate the battlefield. The United States has done it before—and must do it again.

If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that the surface fleet is living in a different reality now. In the old model, a conventional warship could operate within a hundred miles of the enemy coastline and still carry out its mission. Today, that is practically a suicide run. If a naval vessel can be seen, it can be targeted—and with weapons you might never detect until your ship is already a smoking hole in the water.

The Bismarck

This vulnerability is not entirely new. During World War II, the German battleship Bismarck was considered one of the most powerful warships afloat—a symbol of naval dominance. Yet despite its armor and firepower, it was hunted relentlessly by the British Royal Navy. The key blow came not from another battleship’s guns, but from an aerial torpedo launched by a Swordfish biplane that damaged the ship’s rudder, leaving it unable to maneuver. Once crippled, the Bismarck was overwhelmed and sunk. The lesson was stark: even the most formidable warship can be brought down by a smaller, cheaper, and seemingly outdated weapon if it strikes at the right weakness.

In May 1941, the Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, slipped into the North Atlantic on a mission to disrupt Allied shipping. Within days, it had sunk HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, in a brief but devastating engagement in the Denmark Strait. The loss of the Hood, with all but three of its crew of over 1,400, galvanized the British into mounting one of the largest naval hunts in history.

The pursuit of the Bismarck involved dozens of Allied warships, including battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, coordinated across thousands of square miles of ocean. Reconnaissance aircraft scoured the seas for any sign of the battleship, while British and American codebreakers worked feverishly to predict its movements. The decisive moment came when a squadron of antiquated Fairey Swordfish biplanes from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal braved fierce anti-aircraft fire and launched a torpedo strike. One torpedo hit proved critical, jamming the Bismarck’s rudder and leaving it unable to maneuver effectively.

The next morning, May 27, 1941, the Royal Navy closed in. HMS King George V, HMS Rodney, and several cruisers opened fire, pounding the Bismarck with heavy shells until its superstructure was shattered and its main guns silenced. Torpedoes from British destroyers finished the job. The Bismarck sank in the Atlantic approximately 400 miles west of Brest, France. Of its crew of more than 2,200 men, only 114 survived. The rest went down with the ship, many trapped below decks, in one of the most dramatic and costly naval engagements of the war.

The Sheffield

Four decades after the sinking of the Bismarck, during the Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina, the vulnerability of modern surface ships was again on full display. The conflict began in April 1982 when Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic that Argentina had long claimed as its own. Argentina’s military junta, facing economic crisis and political unrest at home, believed that seizing the islands would rally national support and force Britain into negotiations. The United Kingdom, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, viewed the invasion as an unacceptable breach of sovereignty and quickly assembled a naval task force to retake the territory.

The British destroyer HMS Sheffield was struck by an Argentine Exocet missile launched from a Dassault Super Étendard aircraft. The missile’s impact and subsequent fire led to the ship’s loss, despite the Royal Navy’s training and advanced systems. The attack occurred on May 4, 1982, during the Falklands War, while Sheffield was on picket duty providing early warning for the British task force. The missile, traveling just above the sea surface, evaded detection until it was too late for defensive countermeasures. Upon impact, the warhead did not fully detonate, but the missile’s unspent fuel ignited a massive fire that spread rapidly through the ship’s aluminum superstructure.

The intense heat and toxic smoke overwhelmed firefighting efforts, forcing the crew to abandon ship. Twenty sailors were killed and twenty-six others injured in the attack. Despite efforts to tow the damaged vessel back to safe waters, Sheffield eventually sank six days later on May 10 while under tow in heavy seas. The loss of the ship—valued at roughly 40 million pounds at the time (about 176 million pounds in today’s money, roughly a quarter of a billion in U.S. dollars) —was a sobering reminder that even modern destroyers equipped with advanced radar and missile defenses were not invulnerable to a single, well-placed strike from a relatively inexpensive anti-ship weapon.

That single strike became a defining moment of the conflict, proving that a relatively low-cost, precision-guided missile could neutralize a major naval asset—an idea that resonates even more in today’s drone and missile era.

The Ukraine Invasion by Russia

Fast forward to the present, and Ukraine has brought naval warfare into yet another new chapter. Using unmanned waterborne drones—fast, low-profile craft loaded with explosives—the Ukrainians have managed to sink or severely damage multiple Russian vessels. These attacks have not been limited to the Black Sea; the ripple effect has extended to Russian operations in the Mediterranean. The loss of ships and the constant threat from unmanned systems have effectively pushed Russia out of business in that theater, constraining its naval mobility and undermining its strategic influence in the region.

Russia's Naval Constraints

Contrary to perceptions of raw naval power, Russia's operational reality at sea is much more constrained. Its only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, hasn't been operational since 2017. Years of stalled repairs—due in part to costly setbacks like a fire and labor accidents—have made its potential return increasingly unlikely . With that carrier out of action, Russia effectively lacks true blue-water strike capability, limiting its influence beyond coastal zones.

Blue-Water

“True blue-water strike capability” means the ability for a navy to project sustained combat power far beyond its own coastal waters, operating effectively across open oceans without constant resupply or shore-based support. It requires long-range ships—especially aircraft carriers—that can launch air, missile, and naval strikes anywhere in the world while maintaining their own defense and logistics at sea. In practical terms, it is the difference between defending your front porch and being able to fight—and win—on someone else’s continent.

Baltic

Russia’s premier Baltic naval base is located in Baltiysk, just outside Kaliningrad—a small, isolated fragment of Russian territory wedged tightly between NATO members Poland and Lithuania. From the start, the geography is unforgiving. To leave port and head toward the open Atlantic, Russian warships must navigate a narrow, heavily monitored stretch of the Baltic Sea. Every mile of this passage is hemmed in by the coastlines and territorial waters of NATO-aligned nations—Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia to the north; Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden along the approaches. It is a maritime gauntlet in the truest sense, a real-world echo of Clint Eastwood’s 1977 movie “The Gauntlet,” where every forward move meant taking fire from all sides.

In wartime, this geography turns from inconvenient to catastrophic. A Russian vessel leaving Baltiysk would immediately pass under the eyes of NATO surveillance aircraft, submarines, and shore-based missile batteries. The bottleneck at the Danish Straits—between Denmark and Sweden—functions as a maritime chokehold, one that NATO could close within hours. Once trapped inside the Baltic, Russian ships would be unable to maneuver freely, and those caught in port would be little more than high-value targets for long-range precision strikes. The danger is twofold: warships at sea could quickly find themselves with no safe harbor to return to, while those still tied up in Baltiysk would be sitting ducks under constant threat.

This is not a hypothetical. NATO’s presence in the Baltic is persistent, and the region is crowded with patrol vessels, maritime patrol aircraft, submarines, and surface combatants from multiple allied nations. U.S. carrier strike groups, while not stationed in the Baltic itself due to its tight confines, routinely operate in the North Sea and Norwegian Sea—well within rapid strike range. The reality for Moscow is stark: any sortie from its Baltic base is a high-risk gamble, one that could end in disaster before the ship even clears the Skagerrak and Kattegat en route to the North Sea, let alone the open Atlantic.

Black Sea

Russia’s Black Sea Fleet faces a maritime gauntlet every bit as dangerous as its Baltic counterpart. Based primarily in Sevastopol, Crimea, and Novorossiysk on Russia’s mainland coast, these ships are boxed in by the narrow Bosporus and Dardanelles straits—controlled entirely by NATO member Turkey.

The Bosporus Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, is only about nineteen miles long and varies from less than half a mile to roughly two and a half miles wide. Its winding channel forces ships to navigate sharp turns and strong currents, often at reduced speeds for safety—typically under ten knots for large vessels. South of the Sea of Marmara lies the Dardanelles Strait, stretching about thirty-eight miles and narrowing to less than one mile across at its tightest point. Together, these two straits form the sole maritime exit from the Black Sea to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. The passage is not only long and slow but also under constant observation and control by Turkish authorities, who have the legal authority under the Montreux Convention to regulate or even close it entirely during wartime.

In peacetime, passage to the Mediterranean is heavily monitored; in wartime, Turkey could close the straits, trapping the fleet inside. This is why the United States has never taken a full-sized aircraft carrier through the Bosporus and Dardanelles—both because of the treaty’s tonnage restrictions and because the confined waters make a carrier an enormous, slow-moving target with no room to maneuver. To the north and west, Ukrainian missile batteries, naval drones, and Western-supplied precision weapons have turned large swaths of the Black Sea into a no-go zone. Just as in the Baltic, Russian vessels here risk destruction in port from long-range strikes or at sea from mobile, hard-to-detect threats, with no guaranteed safe route to escape or resupply.

Russia’s Pacific Presence

Russia’s Pacific Fleet is headquartered in Vladivostok, with additional naval facilities at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Vilyuchinsk. While these ports give Russia access to the vast Pacific, they fall short of offering true blue-water reach. The fleet includes approximately forty-five core warships—about nineteen submarines (both nuclear-powered and conventional), along with a mix of corvettes, frigates, and support vessels—but it lacks the deep logistical network and carrier strike capability enjoyed by U.S. forces. Many of these ships are aging Soviet-era designs, and operational tempo is limited compared to the U.S. Navy and its allies, who maintain a constant, layered presence in the region.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did deploy limited aviation-capable warships to the Pacific. One of the most notable was the Minsk, a Kiev-class “aircraft-carrying cruiser” that combined the roles of a missile cruiser and a light carrier. Commissioned in the late 1970s, Minsk operated Yak-38 vertical take-off jets and a complement of helicopters while carrying heavy anti-ship missiles—a hybrid design that reflected the Soviet Navy’s doctrinal preference for missile firepower over large carrier air wings. The Minsk was assigned to the Pacific Fleet and spent its career as a regional power-projection tool, more a political symbol than a sustained global strike platform.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economic crisis made the upkeep of such large warships impossible. By the early 1990s, Minsk had deteriorated badly. She was decommissioned in 1993 and sold to a South Korean consortium for scrap in 1995, then resold to Chinese investors who turned her into Minsk World, a floating theme park in Shenzhen. The attraction eventually closed in 2016, and the ship was dismantled. Contrary to some misconceptions, Ukraine never sank the Minsk—by the time the Russo-Ukrainian conflict began, she had been out of military service for more than two decades and was long removed from combat relevance.

Today, with no aircraft carrier presence in the Pacific Fleet and no realistic plan to deploy one, Russia’s ability to project power across the Pacific remains severely constrained. The fleet functions largely as a regional defense force, hemmed in by geography, dependent on a limited number of operational ships, and overshadowed by the overwhelming presence of U.S. and allied naval forces in the theater.

Ukraine’s War and the Attrition of Russian Naval Might

The Ukraine war has further chipped away at Russia’s naval power. Ukraine’s use of drones, cruise missiles, and asymmetric tactics has destroyed or disabled roughly 40% of the Black Sea Fleet, including the flagship Moskva, forcing Russia into a reactive, defensive posture . The result? The Black Sea Fleet is now often described as “functionally inactive,” with vessels relocated from Crimea to safer Russian ports like Novorossiysk .

Moskva

The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—a Slava-class guided-missile cruiser laid down in 1976 at Mykolaiv, Ukraine, and commissioned into the Soviet Navy in 1983 under her original name, Slava. Renamed Moskva in 1995, she was a 12,500-ton surface combatant equipped with sixteen supersonic anti-ship missiles, the S-300F long-range surface-to-air defense system, and designed to lead naval task forces and counter NATO carrier strike groups. With a crew complement of around 510 personnel, she served as the symbolic and operational backbone of Russia’s Black Sea presence for nearly four decades.

Throughout her service, Moskva played prominent roles—from the Cold War-era Malta Summit to combat operations in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and the Syrian theater (2015), where she formed the air-defense shield for Russian forces off the coast of Latakia. The Malta Summit, held in December 1989 aboard ships in the Mediterranean, was a historic meeting between U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Often described as the symbolic end of the Cold War, it took place during stormy weather that forced much of the discussion aboard the Soviet cruiser Slava—later renamed Moskva. The original plan was for the two leaders to hold the bulk of their talks aboard separate ships—Bush on the U.S. cruiser USS Belknap and Gorbachev on Slava—with formal meetings and ceremonies conducted on open decks or in port. However, the severe weather in the Mediterranean that December made outdoor events and ship-to-ship transfers risky, forcing adjustments that saw more of the summit conducted indoors aboard Slava, giving the Soviet vessel an outsized role in hosting one of the most historic diplomatic exchanges of the 20th century.

While exact accounting is elusive, the financial cost of the Moskva to Russia over her nearly forty years of service was staggering. In current U.S. dollars, the original construction in the late 1970s and early 1980s would equate to roughly $2–3 billion. Over decades, maintenance, crew training, refits, and operational deployments—especially her major modernization in 2000 and subsequent repairs in 2020—likely added another $1.5–2 billion. The loss itself carried not only the material replacement value, conservatively estimated at $750 million to $1 billion, but also the strategic cost of losing Russia’s primary Black Sea air-defense platform. In total, factoring in construction, upkeep, and operational investments, the Moskva represented an investment of roughly $4–6 billion in today’s dollars—an investment that went to the bottom of the Black Sea in a single evening.

On April 14, 2022, while enforcing a naval blockade, Moskva was struck by two Ukrainian R-360 Neptune anti-ship missiles fired from near Odesa. The hits triggered a raging fire that detonated onboard ammunition, and amid severe weather, the cruiser capsized and sank east of Snake Island. Reports vary, but of the ship’s 510 crew, around 396 were evacuated, while Russian sources later confirmed additional casualties—hundreds killed or missing. This marked the largest warship Russia had lost since World War II, and the first flagship sunk in combat since 1905. Her absence left a dark hole in Russia’s air-defense coverage at sea, forcing the Black Sea Fleet into a defensive posture, relocating vessels to safer ports, and exposing how even the most formidable warship can be rendered impotent by asymmetric tactics and evolving technology.

The Ukrainian R-360 Neptune anti-ship missile is a domestically developed weapon system, conceived and built in Ukraine as a modernized evolution of the Soviet-era Kh-35 design. Development began in earnest after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, when Ukraine recognized the urgent need to defend its coastline without relying on foreign suppliers. Produced by the state-owned Luch Design Bureau, the Neptune was designed for mobility, with launchers mounted on trucks and a range of roughly 175 to 200 miles, allowing it to strike ships well beyond the horizon. It incorporates Ukrainian-made guidance, electronics, and propulsion components, underscoring that not all of Kyiv’s battlefield capabilities come from Western hand-me-downs or direct U.S. supply. Instead, Neptune represents Ukraine’s own defense industry adapting Cold War blueprints into a modern, lethal system tailored to counter Russian naval threats.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a vast, multi-national state that emerged after the Russian Revolution and the end of the Russian Civil War, formally established in 1922. It encompassed fifteen republics spanning Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, the South Caucasus nations, and the five “Stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. At its height, the USSR was the world’s largest country by land area and a superpower rivaling the United States in military, economic, and ideological influence. Today’s Russian Federation, while geographically still the largest single country, represents only a fraction of that former union—both in population and in economic potential. Adding to this diminished position, the Central Asian “Stans,” once key economic partners and buffer states, have increasingly sought to distance themselves from Moscow’s orbit, deepening ties with China, Turkey, and Western nations. This shift has further eroded Russia’s ability to project influence across the vast territory it once controlled.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of the primary engines of Soviet industrial and technological might, particularly in the defense sector. Its factories, research centers, and shipyards were responsible for producing everything from strategic missiles and guidance systems to aircraft engines, armored vehicles, and warships. The Mykolaiv shipyards, for example, built most of the Soviet Union’s aircraft carriers and large surface combatants, including the *Moskva* and her sister ships. The Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv produced world-class transport aircraft, while the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Dnipro developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that formed a core part of the USSR’s nuclear deterrent. Ukraine’s deep industrial integration meant that Moscow depended heavily on Ukrainian know-how, materials, and manufacturing capacity to sustain its military edge.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union took place officially on December 26, 1991, under the watch of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) had unintentionally accelerated nationalist movements and economic instability across the USSR. Ukraine’s independence referendum on December 1, 1991, in which over 90% voted for sovereignty, was a decisive break that left Russia suddenly without its key southern industrial base. For decades, Soviet defense procurement chains had assumed Ukraine’s factories, scientists, and engineers were simply part of the Union’s centralized network; overnight, that network fractured along national borders. The Kremlin lost not only production facilities but also critical expertise that could not be replaced quickly or cheaply.

Ukraine’s subsequent tilt toward Western institutions, culminating in growing cooperation with NATO, has been a strategic blow to Russia on multiple levels. Instead of serving as a dependable supplier of advanced systems, Ukraine’s defense industry began reorienting toward Western standards, partnerships, and export markets. This shift meant that technologies once destined for Russian arsenals could now be adapted to counter them—such as the R-360 Neptune missile. From Moscow’s perspective, Ukraine’s alignment with NATO effectively turned a former cornerstone of Soviet power into a potential forward operating base for the alliance. The loss of Ukraine’s industrial capacity, combined with its emergence as a direct military rival, is one of the most significant long-term geopolitical setbacks Russia has faced since the end of the Cold War.

Aging and Struggling

This attrition has extended Russia’s isolation in the Mediterranean. Its once-regular deployments—and logistical use of bases like Tartus in Syria—have declined drastically. Aging ships struggle under maintenance burdens, compounded by diverted funding and manpower redirected to the war effort . Naval Day parades have even been scaled back or canceled outright due to security concerns from Ukrainian drone attacks.

In sum, while Russia still maintains nominal naval forces, the combination of aging infrastructure, geographic blocks, and heavy attrition from Ukraine’s asymmetric strategy has severely narrowed its operational window at sea. Gone are the days when Russian fleets could project power globally—today, they are largely confined, overextended, and under pressure.

Summary

These examples, spanning eighty years of history, underline the same truth: the cost and complexity of building large warships do not guarantee survivability. From torpedoes and anti-ship missiles to modern sea drones, smaller, smarter, and more agile weapons have consistently rewritten the rules of naval engagement. In today’s environment, where detection and targeting can occur at long range and attacks can come from above, below, or across the water’s surface, the survival of any ship depends as much on evasion, electronic warfare, and layered defenses as it does on armor and guns.

Ukrainian Creativity

The Ukrainians have been particularly creative. We have seen them adapt civilian motorboats, jet skis, and other small craft into strike platforms—sometimes for shooting down aircraft and drones, sometimes for ramming naval ships directly. Considering the price tag of a modern warship, getting sunk by what amounts to a recreational watercraft is not just a tactical loss—it is a political and financial embarrassment. To put it in perspective, imagine the United States losing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—a \$13 billion floating city—to an improvised attack from a recreational skidoo. The national outrage would be immediate and seismic, dominating headlines for months and triggering intense political fallout. In essence, that is exactly what Ukraine has managed to do to Russia. When the Moskva went under, it was not just a loss of steel and electronics—it was the symbolic gut-punch of seeing the pride of the Black Sea Fleet taken out by an asymmetric strike. One can only imagine Vladimir Putin’s fury when the news reached him, as the reality set in that decades of investment and prestige had been erased in a single, humiliating blow.

How Far

So the natural question is: How far out does a warship need to be to survive? If the answer is “so far it cannot contribute to the fight,” then the ship is no longer an asset—it is a floating liability. Right now, in Ukraine, that danger zone is about one hundred miles from shore for Russian vessels. And while Ukraine can strike much farther—up to three hundred fifty miles—they can only do so against fixed targets like ports, not against mobile ships. It is highly likely, however, that Ukrainian engineers are continuing to refine their missile and drone technologies, extending range, improving targeting, and developing systems whose true capabilities are not publicly disclosed. As with many wartime innovations, the most effective tools are often the ones the enemy does not realize exist until they are used.

That means the old World War II tactics of sending destroyers to find enemy carriers are out the window for now. A decade from now? Possibly back on the table. But today, the game has shifted.

Detection and Jamming

For the near term, two technological races will define naval survival: detection and jamming.

Detection will rely on blending old and new—surface radar, satellite reconnaissance, and swarms of drones sharing their data. The bottleneck here is communication range. The farther the drone, the harder it is to control and the easier it is to jam. Fiber-optic spools give you a few miles of secure tethered control, but that is useless if you need the drone operating one hundred miles from shore.

Which brings us to the second race—jamming. How much jamming power can you fit on a naval platform, and how effectively can you knock out your opponent’s sensors and comms before they can do the same to you? Right now, there is no definitive answer, because every navy is experimenting on the fly.

Visionary Reagan and Trump

Here’s where space becomes the tie-breaker. In 2018, when President Trump pushed the creation of the U.S. Space Force, a lot of people laughed. I immediately saw the core common-sense logic: if detection and jamming are the new decisive factors at sea, then the side that controls the satellites that move targeting data and resilient comms wins the naval fight before a ship ever fires. Space Force and the Space Development Agency’s proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations (now the PWSA) are being built to do exactly that: move targeting-quality data, jam through interference, and stitch ships, aircraft, and drones together beyond line-of-sight. In late 2023–2024 they provided Link-16 tactical data flowing from satellites to receivers on the ground and at sea—precisely the kind of backbone you need when enemies are blasting the airwaves and your assets are 100+ miles offshore.

Stupid Is As Stupid Says

Politically, the rollout was rocky. Three prominent Democrats publicly mocked or dismissed the idea at the time: Sen. Brian Schatz called Space Force “a silly but dangerous idea,” urging the administration to focus on Medicaid expansion; former astronaut (now Sen.) Mark Kelly labeled it “a dumb idea—The Air Force does this already”; and House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith blasted the early proposal as “highly problematic,” “top-heavy,” and too expensive. Today, those same critics (and the broader caucus) largely accept the mission because the threat picture matured—and the tech proved out. By 2021, Democratic committee chairs were on record supporting Space Force’s continued existence under President Biden.

Reagan’s Vision

If that storyline feels familiar, it should. Reagan’s “Star Wars” (the Strategic Defense Initiative) drew ridicule in the 1980s, but its strategic effect was to force the Soviets to contemplate huge new spending and hard choices. Historians still argue how much SDI itself “ended” the Cold War, but there’s broad agreement the USSR couldn’t economically keep pace with the combined strain of military modernization, internal inefficiencies, and technological competition. The lesson rhymes: vision that seems outlandish in the moment can reset the game when the tech and economics shift underfoot.

Control of space isn’t optional anymore; it’s the scoreboard. Satellites move targeting data, navigation (PNT), missile warning, and jam-resistant comms that keep your drone swarms and surface groups coherent at range. Space Force’s approach—hundreds of smaller, networked satellites in LEO that are harder to kill and quicker to refresh—aims to deny adversaries the single-point-of-failure shots they used to dream about. That’s the connective tissue for the “detection + jamming” duel we just described.

Meanwhile, Russia’s ability to compete in space has slipped. After 2022, Western customers abandoned Russian launchers, and Russia’s orbital launch share fell into the single digits—only 17 launches in 2024 versus 145 for the U.S. (driven by SpaceX) and 68 for China. That’s not “zero,” but it’s a far cry from Soviet-era heft. Fewer launches mean fewer new satellites and slower refresh of aging systems—the opposite of what a modern navy needs to survive a data-centric fight.

The International Space Station

One important correction: Russia has not stopped going to the International Space Station, but its role has changed dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Roscosmos still launches both crewed Soyuz capsules and uncrewed Progress cargo ships, maintaining a physical pipeline to the station. As recently as July 2025, the Progress 92 mission docked successfully, delivering supplies and fuel to the orbital complex. However, the cadence of these missions is thinner and more fragile than it was prior to the war, and Russia’s share of ISS traffic has diminished sharply as NASA and its partners increasingly rely on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon for both crew rotation and cargo delivery.

What has shifted most is the political and economic backdrop. In the months following the invasion, Russian officials—most notably then–Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin—issued public threats about withdrawing Russia from the ISS partnership, detaching its modules, or allowing the station’s orbit to decay by withholding the periodic reboosts provided by Russian thrusters. While these threats have not been acted upon, they exposed a longstanding vulnerability: the ISS’s orbit maintenance has historically depended on the Russian segment. The war accelerated Western efforts to mitigate that dependency, with NASA and other partners fast-tracking systems that allow U.S. and allied spacecraft to perform reboost maneuvers independently.

At the same time, the Ukraine war and associated sanctions have squeezed Russia’s space program from multiple angles. Western nations and commercial customers have abandoned Russian launch services, ending a revenue stream that helped subsidize Roscosmos’s operations. Sanctions on high-tech imports have disrupted supply chains, making it harder to source the advanced electronics and materials needed for both launch vehicles and spacecraft. Budgetary pressure from the war has shifted resources toward military priorities, leaving fewer funds for civilian space projects. Even the missions that do launch are often delayed, scaled back, or rely on domestically sourced substitutes that may not match the performance of pre-war components.

The result is that while Russia’s physical presence on the ISS remains—for now—the broader picture is one of decline and uncertainty. The ISS itself is expected to be retired around 2030, and the United States and its partners are already designing next-generation orbital platforms that do not include Russia. Without a comparable international partnership or the funds to independently sustain a large station, Russia’s human spaceflight program risks shrinking to a fraction of its former prominence. In short, the Soyuz and Progress flights still come and go, but the geopolitical and economic context is very different: Moscow is hanging on to its role rather than leading it, and the long-term trajectory points toward diminished influence in low-Earth orbit.

The Big Picture

The big picture is relatively simple. The Ukraine war is pushing Russia deeper into a war economy. Defense outlays have surged to roughly 6–7% of GDP—post-Soviet (USSR) highs—crowding out investment and forcing the Kremlin to lean on debt and oil revenues. Even Russian officials and state-aligned analysts concede the strain. You can keep GDP afloat for a while with “military Keynesianism,” but it’s brittle growth: inflation fights, high interest rates, and stressed supply chains. That’s not the foundation you want when your navy depends on satellites, precision weapons, and electronic warfare that must be refreshed fast.

At sea, the decisive edge now sits above the sea—on orbit. The fleets that can see first (via satellites), share fast (via proliferated, jam-resilient networks), and blind the other side (via electronic attack and cyber from seabed to space) will write the next chapter of naval warfare. Space Force was an unfashionable bet in 2018; in 2025 it looks like table stakes.

China and the Nation of Taiwan

The “easy” amphibious landing—if such a thing ever existed—is now essentially extinct. The days of patrolling close to a hostile coastline without constant threat are over. In practical terms, if your ports are within five hundred miles of a potential adversary, you have to assume those ports are not safe for military operations. That includes every Russian port. Every Saudi port. Every Chinese port.

And So, Naval Power - Pro, Con, Realities

Naval power is going to have to be reimagined for flexibility and reach, not just tonnage and firepower. The future fleet will have to operate farther from shore, rely on layered detection networks, and be built around a cat-and-mouse game of electronic warfare that is as decisive as any missile strike.

The Blunt Truesdell Truth

Potemkin village or the real thing—the difference can be the gap between winning and losing a war. A Potemkin village, for those who do not know the origin, is a façade—something built to deceive observers into thinking a situation is far better than it is. In military terms, it is the danger of convincing ourselves that our forces, readiness, or technology are unbeatable when, in reality, vulnerabilities are quietly multiplying. If we get it wrong—if we believe our own propaganda instead of hard intelligence—we invite disaster.

The key to avoiding that trap is relentless, accurate, and actionable military intelligence. Intelligence is not just about satellites and drones; it is about understanding the enemy’s capabilities, intentions, and weaknesses before they become battlefield realities. In today’s environment—where detection, jamming, space-based communications, and asymmetric tactics define the fight—intelligence is the connective tissue that holds every operation together. It is the reason Ukraine has been able to cripple a much larger Russian fleet. It is the reason a swarm of low-cost drones can find and kill billion-dollar warships. It is also the reason our own ships, aircraft, and satellites must never be caught by surprise.

But intelligence is only as good as its protection. Domestic spying, infiltration, and sabotage are the cancers that eat away at national security from within. In a war footing—which, whether Americans admit it or not, we are on—there can be no tolerance for those who sell out their own country. This includes Americans who spy for foreign governments, corporations that funnel sensitive data abroad, and ideological actors who knowingly undermine national security. It is radical to say it, but it is reality: those who engage in such acts must face the maximum penalty, including execution. History shows that soft punishments for espionage invite more of it. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union understood this truth, and neither hesitated to make examples of traitors. The stakes are no lower today.

We also need to face the hard truth about the changing nature of naval warfare. I believe in a deep blue navy—capable of projecting power across the globe, not just defending coastlines. But strategy and tactics evolve. We have seen it in the arc from the Bismarck’s demise in World War II to the Falklands’ Exocet missile strike to Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva. What has not changed is the ocean itself. The physical terrain—chokepoints, deep-water lanes, and open seas—remains the same. The fight for control of those waters will always matter, but the methods have shifted from ship-to-ship gunnery duels to precision missile strikes and networked drone swarms.

That shift means we must pair hardware with brains. Space Force’s satellite networks, resilient communications, and real-time targeting systems are not optional—they are the new high ground. The same principle applies to counterintelligence: a carrier group is only as secure as the data streams it depends on. We have seen what happens when an opponent controls the narrative, the sensors, or the targeting picture—ships are trapped, forced into defensive postures, and in some cases erased from the battlefield in seconds.

If we mistake illusions for reality, if we allow spies to compromise our edge, if we fail to adapt our doctrine to modern threats, then we will find ourselves in the same position Russia is in today—hemmed in, losing assets faster than we can replace them, and scrambling to protect our shrinking sphere of influence. The oceans do not change, but power over them does. It is earned through readiness, protected by ruthless counterintelligence, and maintained by those willing to see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

Think About It

Paul TruesdellAugust 10, 2025