WI: Soviets commit to Naval Aviation?

how hard would it be for a major carrier strike group say 3 or more NATO carriers to penetrate sov air defenses and blow the Russians to pieces? They can't stand up to Allied naval aviation any deployment of sov carriers in Atlantic and they will live a short and very exciting life
 
No, They die when the USN with decades of experience in carrier ops catches them with a massive air group and blasts their ships to scrap in WW3. The advantage the US and its allies will have are tremendous as they have already ironed out the problems with their own carriers the Soviets need to start completely from scratch. Russian carriers will be inferior and very sub-optimal considering the Soviet obsession with putting missiles on everything that floats.
But in the meantime the soviet subs can get beneath the soviet carriers air cover to avoid detection by ASW aircraft and those USN fighters attacking the carriers aren't attacking the Soviet mainland
 
This is the USSRs first FIRST carrier it took the western powers the entirety of the inter war period and WW2 to develop a reliable and effective carrier doctrine and design the soviets don't have that. They have 2nd or third hand accounts of the various carrier battles in WW2 it would take them at least a decade to develop workable carrier just look how long it took the chinese. Then they need the training the steam catapults the massive nuclear or oil power plants and then they need the escorts and the doctrine to use them. How useful are carriers in closing Atlantic trade? Attacking US allies and bases in asia and the pacific? The only use for carriers are show pieces they soviets main goal in WW3 is winning in Germany carriers won't help with that, they can't win the altantic they can't win anywhere they will be symbols very very expensive and very very useless and expensive symbols in wartime.

Yes, you've made it clear that all Soviet carriers would have been annihilated by the USN if the balloon went up, there's no need to keep belabouring the point.

However, we managed to get by IOTL without the Cold War going hot, and while Soviet Carriers' utility would certainly be situational in the event of a full-scale war, the power projection might prove useful.
 
The best bet for the Soviet Navy to have a greater commitment to carrier aviation would be to have things go their way more often starting from having the Soviet government approve conversion of the incomplete Borodino-class battlecruiser Izmail into a aircraft carrier in the mid 1920s.
 
The best bet for the Soviet Navy to have a greater commitment to carrier aviation would be to have things go their way more often starting from having the Soviet government approve conversion of the incomplete Borodino-class battlecruiser Izmail into a aircraft carrier in the mid 1920s.
So, sort of like a Soviet Lexington class?
 
Since a Soviet Carrier Force would be extremely useful for gunboat diplomacy / brushfire war style missions, but useless if the Cold War actually went hot, why not base them in places like North Korea or Cuba from the get-go?
 
For all the focus on the GZ I think another crucial point has been overlooked: Soviet planes are shit!

I seriously doubt that the Soviets could build a decent family of carrier planes until the 70s or 80s even if they did have GZ as a guinea pig from the 50s. Their engine life was tiny compared to western types, availability is down in the 50%s, they were very short range compared to the counterparts and attempts to make long range aircraft lead to the Tu28. So what they'd end up with is a CAG with short endurance aircraft that are never available in numbers that the CVAG size would suggest until the engine stocks are run through and then they wouldn't be available at all! But that's probably OK given their short endurance means they'd ditch at lot of planes into the drink anyway.
 
Stalin was planning carriers post war, hence the Tu 91. They, along with the battleships, cruisers and others got cancelled when he died for exactly the reasons being presented here. So you need a PoD to keep the program going post Stalin.
 
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