Rogozin: No new aircraft carriers for now
The link is in Russian, but the text is from a guy I consider a Russian Alex Jones
Unreported is the fact that Russia has 20 surface combatants building, as I write this, corvette class or larger. That we know of...
On Wednesday, Deputy Chairman of the RF Government D O Rogozin said that building an aircraft carrier in Russia just isn't worth the expense and bother. As previously reported by the Minoborony, Russia won't authorise any new aircraft carriers for at least another five years. The state armaments programme doesn't plan to authorise building a new aircraft carrier until 2020, at the earliest.
Rogozin told reporters after a meeting with President Putin on the 2016-20 state armaments programme, "Whether or not to build aircraft carriers is more of a geopolitical decision than a military-technical one. We proved that we had the military-technical capability to do so on 16 November last year [the commissioning date of INS Vikramaditya, built at Sevmash: editor], when we showed that Russia had competence in building fleet aircraft carriers. If we need to do so, we'll be able to do it. However, such a task isn't necessary now".
Meanwhile, as reported, the idea of contracting with France to build the Mistral LPHs came about as Russia needed to get experience with the technology and skills needed to build such ships. At present, the Russian Navy has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.
Posted by: badanov 2014-09-14 |