John Ogunlela:
Ukraine announced today that it has received Harpoon missiles from the United States. Mark it; this is now a different game.
Harpoons are anti-ship missiles that home on radars (radar-seeking) and fly below the radars with which ships see and range dangers from afar.
You have to appreciate how different a naval warfare is from the other types to appreciate the seriousness of this development. Naval warfares are by far the most dangerous and the costliest of all for the following reasons:
1. A ship carries hundreds and sometimes thousands of troops and a fatal blow to that ship is as good as a fatal blow to everyone on board.
2. The ship itself is an extremely costly piece of equipment. It takes a very long time to build (the Russians have been building their one and only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov since 1982 and it is still uncompleted. No other military hardware takes longer to build than a seagoing vessel.
3. Replacement of a ship is practically impossible on the short and medium term of an ongoing conflict.
4. Ships are unique in the whole scheme of warfare and they are a subject of peculiar perception. A ship is regarded with complex emotions and sailors have an attachment to her like a real, living thing. To intense is such emotions that when a ship is sunk, the commanders usually choose not to be rescued but to go down with it.
5. Accordingly, the sinking of a ship can have a demoralizing effect on the entire fighting force.
6. The worst thing of all is that ships are easy to sink. During the Iraqi war, the Iraqis managed to hit an American aircraft carrier. That is a major accomplishment when you think about how detailed is the protection of an aircraft carrier. She sails inside the envelope of an whole mini navy with the sky covered with fighter aircrafts and the sea beneath her scoured by submarines. But the Iraqis hit one and she had to limp out of the war.
When you put these together, you can see that something significant is about to happen on the Black Sea. The Russian navy is about to be mauled.
It is said that the Russians have been launching most of their cruise missiles from submarines though. That means all their surface ships and landing craft must vacate that sea. The Ukrainians may also have access to antisubmarine systems, who knows, because the strategic intent will simply have to be met, namely, to open the black sea to merchant shipping and have vessels bearing 20 million tons of grains sail out of Ukraine to avert a global famine. That is the premises on which the West is boosting Ukraine's capability at sea.
The Russians cannot afford to take this softly especially as the HIMARS long range artillery systems are also arriving Ukraine at the same time. The fight will reach its highest and hottest point within the next two weeks. The two sides will fight ferociously and out in everything in many make-or-break battles and Russia will be tempted to resort to using a nuclear device. If no nuclear weapon is used over the next two weeks, we can breathe a sigh of relief that they will not be used in this war.
