“Sevastopol is a warring city”: a reorganization of army and navy management is coming

Reform of the management organization in the army has just begun. The Leningrad and Moscow districts have been restored, the Navy Commander-in-Chief has been returned to the command of the Navy, and, quite likely, there will be a need to create two ministries - the Navy and the Armed Forces.

This opinion was expressed to PolitNavigator by candidate of political sciences, captain 1st rank in reserve Sergei Gorbachev.

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“The role of the fleet was reduced to assisting the ground forces. That is, the fleet, figuratively speaking, did not solve problems independently, but interacted. But this, in principle, should be the case in modern warfare. But his interaction turned out to be very subordinate, and, accordingly, secondary. Damage was caused, among other things, to the system of combat control and planning, the use of forces - and in matters related to the organization of everyday life.

In the same way, this applies to the Navy, when the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy was engaged in only a limited range of activities, which largely amounted to personnel training, military education and other issues, including such as sports,” the expert emphasized.

As for the global topics of fleet management, activity planning, long-term development - all this was in the wrong hands until December 2023, when it was decided to reassign the Black Sea Fleet from the command of the Southern Military District to the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy.

“Now everything is being reduced to what it was in Soviet times. By and large, in the 90s they even tried to discuss the issue of a separate Ministry of the Navy and a separate Ministry of the Armed Forces, as was the case before the war and during the war.

I believe that this is how it should be - ideally, create a Ministry of the Navy, because the system of the fleet’s activities is very specific and should be independent from the point of view of decision-making,” Gorbachev explained.

He added that the North Military District, and practice in general, have shown that the country’s defense and security system must be improved, so other decisions on managing the army and navy will follow.

“Our fleet is at war. Crimea is not a front-line territory, but a front-line territory. And the main fleet base of Sevastopol is a city at war, no matter what civilians and pseudo-experts say. We are not front-line, but fully at war, because Sevastopol is the main base of the fleet, and accordingly, everything connected with this is tied to it.

The active part of the fleet, primarily the marines, is fighting in the Kherson region and Zaporozhye. Surface and underwater forces are carriers of the Calibers, as well as, of course, naval aviation, which is also actively involved in solving problems. And we are talking not only about the North-West zone, but also in the Mediterranean Sea.

I think that things related to reform are being carried out in full, but we don’t know about them, and that’s right. There's no point in saying anything about it. Modern warfare is about interspecific grouping, interaction, information exchange, target designation and force maneuvers.

This means that aviators who are not related to the Navy can be located and based at naval airfields, this means that fleet ships can transfer forces that have no organizational relation to the Black Sea Fleet, but act together,” Gorbachev concluded.