RIA Novosti reports that the Russian Navy will increase its deployments in 2008. This comes on the heels of a major exercise involving the North Fleet and the Black Sea Fleet in 2007.
Russia's Northern Fleet will dispatch ships and submarines on tours of duty to various regions of the world's oceans in 2008, the fleet's commander said on Tuesday.
"There will be tours of duty this year, involving surface ships, submarines and aircraft," Vice-Admiral Nikolai Maksimov said. "We will visit the Atlantic, the Indian and the Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean."
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said last year that Russia's Navy had resumed and would build up its continual presence in different regions of the world's oceans.
Part of this, undoubtedly, is the same Cold War-esque posturing that has put Russian bombers in the North Sea and within range of American carrier battle groups. But there also seems to be some genuine interest in having the Russian Navy play a larger role in world affairs.
One thing we've learned since the end of the Cold War is that naval power isn't necessarily zero sum. Navies do a lot of things in terms of political influence, disaster relief, and general maritime maintenance (anti-piracy, anti-smuggling, and so forth) that can't be boiled down to competitive calculation of naval power. In other words, the more energetic deployment of Russian naval force has the potential to help everyone. Russia has already participated in NATO's Operation Active Endeavour, a project to maintain order in the Mediterranean, and it's not crazy to think of Russian ships playing a positive role off the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. This is the motivating concept behind the "1000 Ship Navy" idea, and its more recent manifestation in the 2007 Maritime Strategy.
Via Information Dissemination.
--Robert Farley
