Today’s White Paper launch saw the two ‘lower’ options for the future submarine taken off the table. We now know that the RAN’s future boats won’t be an existing off-the-shelf design or a relatively modest derivative of them. This decision was taken on the basis of a judgement that existing designs that were available for export or licence production in Australia didn’t have the performance—especially the range and endurance—needed for operations across the Asia-Pacific theatre.

In effect, this decision has removed the two least expensive, least risky, (probably) fastest and least capable options from the potential solutions. What we’ll see is either an evolution of the Collins class or an entirely new design. Both of these options are likely to be expensive and involve significant project risk. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, of which more shortly.

Also announced today was that there was a viable way ahead to keep the Collins boats operational for an additional duty cycle of eight years. (That was actually a re-announcement of comments made by Defence officials at last year’s Submarine Institute of Australia conference and in the second part of the Coles Review.) That’s important because, as Mark Thomson and I found last year, the only credible ways of avoiding a collapse of Australia’s submarine capability some time next decade was to either move to rapid acquisition of an existing design or to extend the Collins life to provide the time to design and build a replacement. Read more

Andrew Davies makes some points about maritime operations which need teasing out.

The first is in relation to maritime trade and the ability to protect it. It seems to me that in making the declaration that such protection is getting more difficult because of the reducing numbers of warships and the increasing numbers of merchant ships, there is an inherent assumption that such protection has to be achieved by mechanisms such as convoy. In other words, there has been a default to what is a particular operational/tactical method rather than an attempt to consider the issue as a whole. I find it interesting how often this happens when naval/maritime questions are raised in public, perhaps much more often than is the case on land or in the air.

There can be no doubt that the protection of shipping is a complex and constantly evolving problem. But that complexity needs to be borne in mind, because it works both for and against would-be protectors. There are many techniques for the protection and control of shipping, some time-honoured and some very new. Close protection of merchant ships by warships is a tool that may well be employed in particular circumstances, but it would be wholly impractical in others. Arguably, there have been a whole host of developments, such as the much improved maritime domain awareness systems now multiplying around the world, as well as remote and very long range sensors (such as passive and low frequency sonars) which provide much greater support to what needs to be at least a theatre (and potentially global) effort, and about which all too little has been said in public. What is also clear about the protection of maritime trade as a whole, as opposed to securing specific vital supplies to particular destinations, is that it would need to be on a coalition basis. As, arguably, it always has been. Read more