Russia Covers Pacific Submarines With Anti-Drone Netting
Satellite imagery taken in early August shows more than half a dozen Russian submarines covered with netting at a naval base on the Kamchatka peninsula, in the latest sign that protective measures adopted in response to Ukrainian drone attacks have spread to forces stationed thousands of kilometres from the war. The base lies more than seven thousand kilometres from Ukraine, on Russia's Pacific coast, facing the northern Pacific rather than any theatre of the current conflict.
The measure itself is crude and effective. Netting strung over a moored submarine does nothing against a guided missile, but it defeats the small first-person-view drones that have been used with great success against ships and shore installations, by causing the drone to detonate on the net rather than the hull, or by fouling it before impact. The same principle has appeared as cages welded over the bridges of merchant ships and as overhead screens on armoured vehicles, and it works for the same reason in each case.
What makes the imagery notable is the location. Ukrainian drones have no plausible reach to the Pacific coast, and no attack has occurred there. Fitting protection at a base that far from the threat means either that the navy has issued a fleet-wide instruction irrespective of local risk, or that it now considers long-range attack against distant infrastructure a realistic possibility. Neither reading is comfortable, and both suggest an institution recalibrating its assumptions about where it is safe to sit at anchor.
The precise submarine count comes from Ukrainian outlets analysing the same imagery; other analysts examining it have declined to give a figure. The imagery provider, the date and the base are all well established, but the exact number of boats netted rests on a narrower base of reporting and should be read as approximate.
The broader significance runs beyond the Russian navy. For most of the modern era a warship in a defended home port was safe from anything short of an act of war by a peer state. Cheap, long-range, hard-to-detect drones have removed that assumption for everyone, and the consequences are already visible in the design of naval bases, in the cost of protecting them and in the operating patterns of fleets with no connection to this conflict. Netting over submarines on the Pacific coast is a low-technology answer to a problem that navies have not yet solved at any price.
