Hans Kristensen published his annual overview of Russia's submarine patrol rate. According to the data that he obtained from U.S. naval intelligence, Russian ballistic missile submarines "conducted ten patrols in 2008, compared with three in 2007 and five in 2006."
As I understand from various discussions, Russian ballistic missile submarines probably go to sea somewhat more often, but most of the time they don't go very far from a port. The U.S. naval intelligence most likely does not count short trips as "patrols".
The book
Comments
Interesting table on the history of patrols in 1981-2008 in Hans Kristensen's article:
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/_images/ruspat.jpg
Is there any reason for the subs to patrol outside of the White Sea and the sea of Okhotsk. ie: the SSBN bastions? The White Sea is perfect since it is Russian Territorial waters, it easy to support from shore based aviation etc. The same with the Okhotsk Sea.
Does patrolling outside of these areas have any advantages?
Couple of question
1 ) Should we take the RuN SSBN patrol numbers in a year as the gospel truth , it is possible that the ONI might have missed quite a few patrol and they simply went undetected
2 ) Assuming that ONI knows what it knows and goes public with it like 10 patrol in 2008 , wouldnt it alert the RuN that the SSBN patrol are being tracked regularly and hence would take extereme caution ?
Likely, these are the patrols just detected by US. Even the American intelligence gathering system is unable to detect all SSBN and SSN movements. No way.
Kolokol: These are different things - even if U.S. cannot detect all submarines all time, I'm sure it has no problem telling if a submarine is at port or not.
So Pavel, do you say Hans Kristensen report is based on “vessel counting” in harbours?
The information is provided by the U.S. naval intelligence. I'm sure they do a lot of different things to detect submarine patrols.
You could do a combination of things. Seeing if a vessel is in port. Seeing if the crew of the submarine are in their barracks (harder), seeing how much food was delivered to a sub before it was no longer in port (also harder). Lots of small tidbits of information would combine to tell you how long subs were gone for, maybe even how far they travelled, etc.
Kolokol
Oleg
Or, someone could just tell us. Never forget, the simplest technology is "human technology". I suspect ONI knows when a "boomer" is preparing for sea and has a pretty good idea of the patrol area. We’ve been playing this game for a long time; I think there are few real secrets.
Frank Shuler
USA
I found this picture
http://www.defencetalk.com/pictures/data/3135/medium/955_Borei.JPG
Is it really borei class submarine?
Correct, that is Borei class. Not the best looking sub......