Russia's bombers may be rusty, but there's always the astral plane. The ensigns may droop from rotting submarines, but Neptune dives and surfaces forever in the House of Aquarius.
And black-bearded Capt Alexander Buzinov of the Russian navy, self-proclaimed head of Moscow's military astrology programme, will be there to read the heavens.
Capt Buzinov, a serving officer based at a naval institute in St Petersburg, has become a media celebrity with his glowing accounts of how Russian military astrologers have outstripped their rivals in the US and Japan and are now able to predict the time and place of air disasters, assassinations and military escapades with great accuracy.
The navy admits Capt Buzinov is a genuine officer, but denies that he runs a state-funded astrology unit, saying his interest in the stars is a personal affair.
Yet the fleet's high command is oddly reluctant to take action against the paranormal mariner, despite his claims on national television that his unit is responsible for a quarterly astrological report sent to Russia's chiefs of staff.
Capt Buzinov's skills certainly match those of the best professional prophets. He claims to have predicted events which have already happened with blinding accuracy, warns of earth-shaking catastrophes five years down the road, and grows vague when asked about the next three months.
In a front page interview in the popular newspaper Komso molskaya Pravda yesterday, the astrologer claimed to have forecast the date of the end of the Chechen war, a series of Chechen hostage-taking episodes, the date of death of the late Chechen leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and the sinking of the ferry, Estonia. In a TV interview on the serious current affairs programme Hero of the Day last month, Capt Buzinov claimed his September astrological round-up for the general staff had predicted the crash of a transport aircraft on Irkutsk in Siberia on December 6th, but nothing had been done.
"There are periods when aircraft are prone to accidents," he said. "We did a forecast on 30th September which predicted an accident and mentioned a transport aircraft, the air force and Irkutsk."
Mr Igor Dygalo, chief spokesman for the Russian navy, said: "Captain Buzinov is in our service, he does work at one of our institutes in St Petersburg, but the things he is saying are no more than self-promotion." He denied that the military was working on astrological research. "Suppose I had an interest in, say, rock music. I could say I was part of a naval rock unit."