I use Russian in my job. To keep up the old, creaking language skills, I listen to Russian radio on the net.

This program is about the Russian Navy.

I used to, ah-hem, study the Russian Navy. One of the things that came up today in the discussion on Ekho Moskvy was something I'd always found funny.

The Russian/Soviets called some of their aircraft carriers "aircraft-carrying cruisers" to get them around the ban on carriers going through Turkey.

Wikipedia: Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov

Rob: I have had the impression that Soviet/Russian Navy operational effectiveness fell off the table in the early 1990's, and that it is still a shadow of its former self.

To the extent that you can talk about what you know, would you say that that is the case?

Also, was the Soviet Navy ever a match for the American Navy? I thought of the Soviet Navy of the Brezhnev era as like the French Navy of the Napoleonic era: A formidable force, but markedly inferior to the force it was built to fight. What are your impressions?

I am extremely limited in what I am allowed to remember, let alone say :>

My perspective is limited as well. I hit the fleet one year after the official fall of the Soviet Union. So I never saw the Soviet Navy in action.

I think that in general your impression is in the ballpark, although with the caveat that one Typhoon SSBN with ICBMs can ruin your whole day.

DoD has an incentive to overestimate a given enemy's strength, to increase its budget and because if they underestimate, they're gonna get in more trouble than the alternative.

I figure that DoD enemy estimates can never be perfect, so a little overestimating is better than under.