Ukraine's sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva is a 'wake-up call' for the world's top navies, experts say

• The cruiser Moskva's sinking is a "wake-up call" to powerful navies like those of the US and UK.
• Ukraine showed a weaker adversary doesn't need advanced capabilities to neutralize powerful warships.

The final image of the guided missile cruiser named for Russia's capital is wretched: a ship devoid of its crew listing ominously to port, black smoke obscuring its superstructure and the fearsome missiles on its deck.

The Moskva, the Black Sea flagship, sank not long after.

One or two relatively unsophisticated Ukrainian missiles claimed one of the largest warships sunk in combat since World War II. The disaster — the causes and timeline of which are being suppressed by the same Russian authorities who insist they are not at war — is in part a likely outcome of a complacent naval force and outdated ships and systems.

But it is also an unmistakable warning — that today's run-of-the-mill missiles and commercial data systems can knock even the world's top warships out of a fight.

"It's a wake-up call for other navies to say, it only takes one missile to essentially sink or at least mission-kill a ship," Bryan Clark, an influential naval expert at the Hudson Institute, told Insider. "You really need your air defense systems to work every time."

Leading navies like those of the US and UK have long faced quandaries about confronting the rising threat posed by anti-ship missiles, like China's so-called "carrier-killer" missiles that can menace ships 2,500 miles at sea.

But Ukraine has shown that a weaker adversary doesn't need military satellites, warplanes, and data networks to neutralize powerful warships anymore.

'Maybe 10 seconds to respond'

The Moskva was a Cold War-era combatant built to strike enemy ships and defend a force against aerial attack, outfitted with radars to detect enemy fighters and six rotary cannons to down incoming missiles.

It remains unclear whether the crew of more than 420 knew about the Ukrainian threat or took any defensive action to down the incoming Neptune missiles by firing those close-in weapons systems. But even a fully alert crew would have had seconds to react.

"You've got maybe 10 seconds to respond from the time you detect the threat to the time you have to have responded to it," said Rick Hoffman, a retired US Navy officer who commanded the cruiser Hue City. "If they didn't suspect the weapon, they might not have been manned to respond to it, they might not have had their weapon systems configured to respond to it."

US warships have missile interceptors like the SM-2, Rolling Airframe Missile and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) to take out incoming threats, as well as electronic warfare jammers and decoys to fool the missile's guidance, with 20mm Phalanx rotary cannons as a last-resort.

But are those systems fast and accurate enough to effectively counter this expanding threat?

"In the NATO and US navies, we've sort of gotten used to this idea that our defenses are really good," said Clark, the Hudson Institute senior fellow who is a retired US Navy officer. "They're going to be able to protect against a certain number of attacks and so it forces the enemy to overwhelm you with a large salvo. Some of those things may not be nearly as true as we think they are."

Naval combat power and human lives are concentrated in ships that are targets for precision missiles, as well as weapons like torpedoes and mines, which is why they are ringed by layers of sensors and defensive systems. Armies, by contrast, are much more dispersed, but armored vehicles are increasingly at risk — as the war in Ukraine has shown. Researchers have tallied that Russia has now lost 531 tanks, a calamity that's opened a debate over whether the tank's long primacy in land warfare may be ending.

Powerful navies must be ready to counter missiles fired by bands of rebels or terrorists. Clark pointed to the 2016 targeting of the destroyer USS Mason. The Houthis, a rebel group in Yemen, fired two cruise missiles at the US warship as it was patrolling the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and east Africa. The ship's crew responded within 90 seconds, and launched a decoy and fired an ESSM and 2 SM-2 missiles. USNI News reported it was the first time a US warship had fired interceptors from its internal Vertical Launch System (VLS) against an incoming missile.

"They shot everything," Clark said. "And it's unclear if it worked or not. The missile just didn't hit them for whatever reason."

Other powerful navies should take heed

Effectively targeting a modern warship has, to date, required expensive infrastructure: radar installations, patrol aircraft, and satellites that can relay high-resolution images or detect an enemy's radars and communications. But that may be changing.

The Moskva was over 60 miles from Ukraine when it was hit, well beyond the distance from which a Ukrainian could have seen the ship and fired a truck-launched missile on its subsonic attack path.

Previously, spotting a ship in its position would require assets like long-range radars, patrol aircraft, or signals intelligence sensors, including satellites. But reports suggest Ukraine discovered Moskva's general location via commercial satellite imagery, and then they flew out a Bayraktar TB-2 drone to distract the ship. With this geolocation, the missile's guidance was able to do the rest.

"The fact that these battle networks can now be assembled from commercial parts suggests that we need to worry about precision weapons and lethality as being much more than just the province of the great powers," Clark said.

"It seems like you don't need much to create a precision strike network," Clark said, adding: "You might be able to do this mission from somebody's else's territory without them knowing it."

There is little evidence to emerge indicating the Moskva was aware of the threat. The ship loitered within the missile's range; it's unclear if they set the hatches and scuttles below decks to more rapidly contain a fire or flooding that can be caused by battle damage, a measure the US Navy regularly uses in hostile areas.

Hoffman, the retired cruiser skipper who's the president of the Orion Solutions consultancy group, said "it could be as simple as failed intelligence to let them know there was an operational, surface-to-surface missile system that was capable of targeting them." He noted that the targeting of a ship, via a radar or a missile system coming online, is an opportunity to bring all the ship's combat systems to their highest readiness and be prepared for an imminent threat.

There's other evidence that Russian Navy leaders may have been blasé toward this threat. In late March, Ukrainian missiles struck two Russian warships by in an occupied port. Images captured the Project 1171 landing ship Saratov engulfed by flames as two other ships sped away.

'I could take that ship out with .50 cals'

On Friday, eight days after the ship's sinking, Russia's state-run TASS news agency said that 396 crewmen had been evacuated from the Moskva, with one dead and 27 missing.

Families are desperate for news of their loved ones, many of whom were conscripted sailors, and say they are being left in the dark.

Russia has refused to say if the Moskva was hit by missiles at all, only saying that there was a fire and ammunition explosions. This complicates the picture of how one or two cruise missile strikes led to the ship's sinking, which may have been preventable. The US frigate Stark, by contrast, was hit with two missiles in 1987 but the crew was able to save the ship from sinking despite a major damage to its hull.

The Moskva's unique silhouette may offer a clue as to what happened.

The ship's bow is zig-zagged with diagonal lines of nearly 40-foot-long anti-ship P-1000 missiles, eight on each side. These missiles contained some liquid propellant that would ignite in a fire, and are highly exposed on deck as opposed to inside an armored space like a VLS magazine. The US Navy opted for solid-fueled missiles decades ago out of concern for this risk, Hoffman said.

"Well, I don't have to shoot the ship now do I? I just have to shoot the launcher. I could take that ship out with .50 cals [machine guns]. All you've got to do is ignite the fuel of the missiles that are surrounding the bridge."

In that final image of the Moskva, smoke billows from the main deck where the port side launchers were, with apparent splats of black soot.

"That's the most likely scenario," Hoffman continued. "They hit that sucker around the main deck, forward of amidships and got those."