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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/04/in- ... o-iceland/ has much more...December 4, 2017, 6:22 AM
In Return to Cold War Posture, U.S. Sending Sub-Hunting Planes to Iceland
NATO and the United States are confronting years of neglect of their submarine-detecting capabilities, while Russia has pulled even.
The Pentagon is preparing to spend millions of dollars
to fix up a Cold War-era air base in Iceland
as Washington rushes to keep an eye on a new generation of stealthy Russian submarines slipping into the North Atlantic.
Tucked away in the 2018 defense budget / https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-con ... -bill/2810
sitting on President Donald Trump’s desk is a provision for $14.4 million to refurbish hangars at Naval Air Station Keflavik
to accommodate more U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft,
a key surveillance asset for locating and tracking submarines, a defense official confirms.
The move comes as new Russian nuclear and conventional submarines
have been making more frequent trips through the area known as the “GIUK gap”
— an acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom — the route for the Russian Northern Fleet to enter the Atlantic Ocean.
The United States and Iceland have agreed
to increase rotations
of the American surveillance planes to Iceland next year,
Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael confirmed.
After allowing its naval forces to fall into disrepair in the 1990s,
Russian President Vladimir Putin set out on a major military overhaul in the 2000s,
clawing back capability by designing and building
new diesel- and nuclear-powered boats, making them quieter, more lethal, and longer-legged than their Soviet predecessors.
Russia’s undersea fleet
“is in the best state it has been in since the fall of the Soviet Union,”
said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at the Center for Naval Analyses.
“A lot of effort has been spent on drilling, training, and readiness.”
The Russian submarine force of about 50 hulls is a fraction of the 400
the Soviet Union floated during the Cold War,
but they boast vastly improved technical capabilities
that put them on par with their American rivals, experts said.
“This time they’re going for quality rather than quantity,” added Magnus Nordenman of the Atlantic Council.
In an unclassified assessment of Russian military strength issued earlier this year,
the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that
Moscow’s new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines are
“capable of delivering nuclear warheads from thousands of kilometers away.
This strategic capability puts the Russian Navy in the top tier of foreign navies.”
The pride of the Russian fleet is the nuclear-powered Yasen-class guided missile submarine, which can carry 32 Kalibr cruise missiles.
While the missile’s range isn’t known for sure, Russian subs have fired the Kalibr into Syria from about 700 miles away.
Moscow has two Yasen-class subs operational, and plans to build an additional eight in coming years.
In late November the British first sea lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones,
said that the naval superiority Western navies have enjoyed in recent decades
is disappearing
and resurgent powers like Russia are testing the Royal Navy in home waters.
“It’s now clear that the peaks of Russian submarine activity that we’ve seen in the North Atlantic in recent years are the new norm,” he said.
“Iceland is key,” Nordenman added.
During the Second World War, U.S. anti-submarine forces in Iceland
helped hunt down German U-boat wolf packs
that had enjoyed a safe haven in the middle of the ocean,
a role the island seems set to reprise.
“It’s the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic that you can fly from,” Nordenman said.
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