In January this year, the Russian Northern fleet’s flag was officially hoisted on the “Yury Dolgoruky” – the first new strategic ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) to be assigned to the fleet since 1992. Today, four months later, the submarine and her crew is still at the yard in Severodvinsk in the White Sea region where she was built.
Russia’s Commander in Chief, President Vladimir Putin, said at the time that the “Yury Dolgoruyi” would become “a critical element of the naval component of Russia’s strategic forces, a guarantee of global balance and the security of Russia and its allies,” BarentsObserver reported.
The new missile submarine is not the only one that stays at port. The Federation of American Scientists has obtained data from U.S. Naval Intelligence showing that the entire Russian fleet of nine ballistic missile submarines sailed only on five deterrent patrols in 2012. The SSBN fleet consists of six Delta-IV submarines based on the Kola Peninsula and three Delta-III submarines based with the Pacific fleet.
With nine submarines and five longer voyages, the “patrol level is barely enough to maintain one missile submarine on patrol at any given time,” the reports says.
Five patrols in a year have the consequence that each submarine’s crew cannot be certain to get out of port even once a year.
At the peak Cold War year of 1984, the Soviet Union carried out 102 patrols.
The author of the report, Hans M. Kristiansen, writes that the five 2012-patrols mean that submarine crews do not get much hands-on training in how to operate the SSBNs so they actually have a chance to survive and provide a secure retaliatory strike capability in a crisis. Kristiansen believes the crews probably compensate for this by practicing alert operations at pier-side at their bases.
The six Northern fleet Delta-IV submarines are all based at the Gadzhiyevo naval base northwest of Murmansk, less than 100 kilometers from the border to Norway.
