Sometimes, putting ships out of action if the damage is so bad that is as good as sinking them. It costs valuable resources, time and manpower to repair heavily damaged ships which can take months if not years. Putting these ships out of action is a force multiplier.
Like, ships? Honestly, I’d say probably not that much, because they’d be visible and vulnerable, like Russia’s ships are.
Warships are useful if you want to project power over long distances, which this war doesn’t have a lot of.
Maybe you could do a behind-the-lines landing to avoid having to push through someone’s defensive line, kind of in line with the Battle of Anzio or Battle of Inchon, but that’d take a lot of amphibious assault capabilities.
I mean, Russia hasn’t really had her own warships accomplish a whole lot in the war. They disrupted seaborne trade to Ukraine, but Russia’s got coastal access in many places, so it’s not really practical for Ukraine to blockade Russia.
They fired some cruise missiles at Ukraine, but Russia had the ability to hit the same places with land- or air-based cruise missiles.
With ships, you’ve got an asset that can be sunk, whereas that’s not the case on land. If you can fight a land war, you’re probably going to get more bang for your buck out of land forces than naval.
Also the Black Sea, while massive for Army-standards is fairly small for Navy standards. There isn’t really much space to operate without danger of being attacked by land-based systems. Especially when there’s the chance that US-drones keep surveillance of the entire area and relay that info to Ukraine
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