From its origins in 1901 until the late 1950s, through its deep association with the Royal Navy, the Royal Australian Navy became unmistakably British in outlook, practices and culture. It was a relationship of great value to Australia. That comfortable symbiosis had reached its zenith by 1957, when Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced to parliament that Australia would be moving towards standardising Australia’s military services with those of the United States.

The outcome of that decision was that the RAN would successfully transition to be a highly valued ally of the US Navy, already the RN’s replacement as the world’s most powerful maritime force. On that journey, the RAN progressively underwent a major transformation in virtually every dimension, the catalyst for which was its operation of the Charles F. Adams–class guided-missile destroyers.

By 1957, Australia’s government had a clear-eyed view that the nation’s security was much more closely linked with America than with Britain. The Cold War had started, and the threat of communist expansion in Asia was taken seriously. Indonesia was, for a while, regarded as a threat because of its alignment with the Soviet Union.

With the impending demise of its carrier-based aircraft in the early 1960s, the RAN needed an air-defence alternative to fighter planes and decided to acquire ships fitted with surface-to-air guided missiles. The navy’s leaders wanted an extensively modified RN County class. The British beam-riding Sea Slug would be replaced with the US Navy’s semi-active homing Tartar, and the Australian-designed Ikara anti-submarine missile system would be installed. One can only guess what the technical risk, cost and schedule implications would have been.

Fortunately for Australia, that solution didn’t fit with the government’s primary objective of having elements of its navy standardised with America’s navy for the lowest possible price to demonstrate its commitment to ANZUS and SEATO. The RAN had a Hobson’s choice: take the Adams-class guided- missile destroyers or get nothing. The US sold Australia two, and then a third (after Australia asked for it), which were named HMA Ships Perth, Hobart and Brisbane. It was the first time the US had sold its most modern warships to another country.

Soon after arriving in Australia, the Hobart joined the US 7th Fleet on combat operations in Vietnam; the Perth and Brisbane were also rotated in. The destroyers were manned by well-trained crews, with captains who were usually on at least their second command. They wore the RAN’s new white ensign and were unmistakably Australian—a distinction that mattered to both navies. That distinction and mutual respect, earned by a combination of high standards and skills, still underpins one of the great enduring naval associations of the modern era.

New methods of operational logistic support, weapons systems management, air defence, command and control and replenishment at sea were just some aspects of naval warfare brought back to the broader RAN from the destroyers’ experience in Vietnam. The RAN also adopted a much more intensive, multifaceted and independently assessed work-up regime in preparing its ships for deployment based on US Navy practices.

As the destroyers entered service in the mid-1960s, the US Navy was already introducing its digital combat system and had started work on what eventually became Aegis. The RAN was offered software at no charge for a scaled-down tactical data system, which became the RAN’s naval combat system. It was primarily an air-defence system and integrated with the digital Standard Missile system. Management of anti-submarine operations was analogue and clumsy, and electronic warfare integration was poor. All three ships later underwent further modernisation but retained the relatively short range and obsolescent SM1 missile system, making them vulnerable to emerging capabilities in Australia’s region.

Australia’s experience with the Adams destroyers led to the purchase of three, and later a fourth, Perry-class guided-missile frigates from the US. Two more were eventually built in Australia, the last of which has only recently been decommissioned. The RAN therefore operated nine ships of US origin with fundamentally the same combat system and weapons and benefited greatly from that standardisation.

Between 1976 to 2001, officers who had been a head of department in a destroyer had markedly better prospects for promotion to star rank. With two exceptions, in the 53 years from 1955 to 2008, the most senior leadership of the RAN was exercised by 17 officers who came from two distinct backgrounds.

First, for about 27 years, former commanding officers of aircraft carriers were ultimately chosen to become the chief of naval staff. Second, from 1982, for 26 years, the chiefs were former commanding officers of destroyers. Having such an influential group of senior officers ensured that there was a deepening and integration of knowledge acquired from the US Navy, enabling the RAN to unmistakably Australianise its methods and culture, born of its immeasurably valuable RN heritage.

The plan for extensive modernisation of Anzac frigates as replacements for the destroyers was cancelled because of technical risk and cost. This was matched by a drawn-out and expensive modernisation program for four of the RAN’s six Perry-class frigates. Those ships were equipped with the SM2 missile and anti-ship missile defence capabilities but lacked the command and control facilities necessary for modern task group operations. A planning failure meant that the destroyers were in service for at least a decade too long. When HMAS Brisbane was retired from the RAN in 2001, it took until 2017 for HMAS Hobart, the first of the Aegis-equipped Hobart class, to restore the RAN’s capability for advanced air defence and command and control.

For nearly 36 years, the destroyers gave naval options to Australia’s political decision-makers during cold war, limited war and peace. The Adams class empowered the RAN in developing a much greater understanding of what it means, and what had to be done, to become a distinctly Australian and self-reliant medium-power navy.

The transition from the Collins-class submarines to the future submarine fleet will be longer and more complex than any previous capability transition the Department of Defence has undertaken. Today ASPI released a special report, Thinking through submarine transition, which examines the key risks on this journey and recommends ways to address them.

The submarine enterprise will be in constant transition, rather than a short, bounded process. Traditional distinctions between design and build, between upgrade and sustainment, and indeed between different classes of vessel won’t be as absolute as they once were, requiring Defence and its industry partners to think differently. They’ll need to address challenging risks to prevent a decline in submarine capability and, ultimately, grow the submarine force and supporting enterprise. Overall, Australia’s submarine capability must be treated as a single enterprise, not two distinct fleets.

Even if the government tries to get out of the Collins business as soon as possible, it will still need to extend at least three Collins submarines and operate them to around 2042 to prevent a capability gap. However, that approach wouldn’t provide a greater number of submarines until around 2044.

Extending all six Collins would provide more submarines from 2032 and also help to mitigate one of the key challenges in the transition: the development of a much larger number of submariners. Under this option, the last Collins would be in service until around 2048, and it would be 45 years old. Regardless of which option the government chooses, it’s likely that some Collins boats aren’t even halfway through their service lives, and some members of the last Collins-class crew haven’t yet been born.

There doesn’t appear to be any way to achieve a fleet of 12 submarines before roughly 2054 without breaking out of the two-year future submarine production drumbeat. Doing so would require even greater spending on submarine construction and disrupt the continuous build cycle that the government is committed to.

At least three, and probably more, Collins boats will need to undergo ‘life of type’ extensions and serve for at least another 20 years, so maintaining ASC’s ability to sustain and upgrade them is essential to a successful transition. If ASC can’t preserve its Collins sustainment workforce, there will be a capability gap.

One way to preserve ASC’s viability is to decide now that it will also be the sustainment entity for the future submarine. That will allow it to balance the workforce between the Collins and the future submarine as well as provide its current workforce with career certainty and development as part of a planned transition from one fleet to the other. It will also help to ensure sovereign sustainment of Australia’s submarine capability.

However, to provide ASC with the understanding necessary to sustain and upgrade the future submarine throughout its service life, it would be beneficial to bring ASC into the boat’s design and build process. One potential commercial model for this could be similar to that adopted by the government for the future frigate project, in this case with Naval Group taking on ASC’s submarine arm as a subsidiary that may revert to full government control at some point. This model, however, is not yet proven. Whichever way ASC is brought into the build, it will require careful negotiation.

Bringing ASC into the future submarine’s design and build process would also allow it to apply its considerable expertise in sustaining submarines under Australian conditions with Australian industry partners. That approach would also allow greater coordination between the upgrade and extension of the Collins and the design of the future submarine. Collins could serve as a testbed for potential future submarine systems—provided that didn’t reduce the capability or availability of the Collins.

Moving the Collins’ complex two-year maintenance procedures (known as full-cycle dockings) to Western Australia and then conducting future submarine dockings there could also address sustainment workforce risks. But a decision to shift such work will need to balance the short-term disruption against the longer term gain.

Growing the size of the submariner workforce is another key challenge. It will need to be much larger than it is now—potentially more than three times the size. Two measures can help to address this. One is to extend the life of all Collins boats, as the navy will need more boats to train more submariners. The Collins could become a dedicated training fleet as more future submarines enter service, meaning that the government wouldn’t need to invest as heavily in maintaining the Collins’ regional capability edge.

But the most important measure to grow the uniformed workforce will be to establish a submarine base on the east coast to provide access to Australia’s largest population centres. Without that, it’s very difficult to see how the navy could ever crew the future submarine fleet, rendering the massive investment in the vessels nugatory.

There are no clear, stand-out options for an east coast base and all viable locations are currently occupied. Therefore, the earlier a decision on a location is made, the more time Defence, industry and those members of the community who’ll be affected will have to prepare. We should also not assume that it will be the last future submarines delivered that go to the east. Because the point of having an east coast base is to recruit and retain the workforce, it may be necessary to access that labour source sooner rather than later and base either some Collins or early future submarines there.

The government has some hard decisions ahead, and they can’t be put off indefinitely.

Building the joint and integrated ADF goes to the heart of how we must position the ADF of the future. My aim is to provoke discussion by proposing that we need to shift gears on a couple of key conceptual and intellectual points. More of the same won’t work for us.

We have come a long way since the department first started to embrace the concept of ‘One Defence’. We are about to enter a new phase of reform with the stand up of the Joint Capabilities Group next month. Since early in this process, I’ve felt we need to change our language. ‘Joint’ doesn’t cut it today given the ubiquitous involvement of the civilian component of the Department and other Government agencies in just about all we do. ‘Joint’ is an inherently military term and while the notion was confronting and challenging a few decades ago, it is now, in my view, a limiting descriptor. We need to talk about the integrated force, integrated at an organisational level and integrated technically and culturally.

In the Middle East I was privileged to watch our E7 Wedgetail Airborne control aircraft crew on one of their 14-hour missions over Iraq and Syria, operating one of the most advanced air battle space management capabilities in the world. This capability typifies an integrated capability rather than a joint one given the multitude of feeds it relies on, the different actors it advises, manages and controls.

Integration has often been seen through the somewhat superficial lens of platform and system connectivity but this is no longer good enough. Our people also need to be increasingly sophisticated in the way they assess, interpret and interact across both our currently interpreted and the emerging war fighting domains. A real behavioural shift is required because those domains are blending, and we have been forced out of our respective comfort zones. The three traditional domains of Air, Sea and Land are what we know best; they are what we have studied, what we have trained to operate in, and they are where we have traditionally prioritised our capital investment. We’ve added space and cyber in recent years and they’ve gained a firm foothold in the domain debate.

We are moving, inexorably, towards a single warfighting domain. Our ability to operate effectively across this ‘One Domain’ will depend on our ability to build an Integrated Joint Force by design. We need a new intellectual focus on the single domain concept so we understand what it means and what it looks like. First Principles is helping us in this regard. The strengthening of the strategic centre and the establishment of a single end-to-end capability development function is reshaping how we think and act. The challenge to gaining superiority across the contemporary battlespace is effective integration not just across our own force but also across government and with our key ally and partners, in the context of both global and regional security.

The challenges we face are increasing complex and they come in an increasingly contested operating environment. At the heart of the FRP implementation has been the Capability Life Cycle redesign, which is heavily focused on tailoring, streamlining and better integrating our capability solutions. It is equipping us to take that conceptual journey towards a single domain.

The Joint Force Authority has been boosted by the stand-up of Force Design Division and the transfer of full C4ISR Design Authority to me, with the resources to enable it. Having a dedicated Force Design workforce within VCDF Group cannot be overstated. Force Design has become a business as usual function; an almost continuous ‘Force Structure Review’ focused on identifying potential capability and integration gaps before they arise. In this they are supported by a robust contestability function that in my view is adding real value.

Integration is the force multiplier that allows the relatively small force like the ADF to maintain a higher operational tempo, optimal agility and superior manoeuvrability. As programs advance we are ensuring integration remains front of mind, not just for current platforms but across the ADF capability development process. As challenges arise and solutions are developed, knowledge is now flowing both forward into planning and back into the force design process. This feedback process is particularly important, because it is forces us to think about how a program fits into the bigger picture, rather than simply assessing just the task at hand. It is a major behavioural shift. As I mentioned earlier, up until now we have often viewed integration as a largely technical endeavour.

True integration is far more than just technical. Those aspects of increasingly complex, congested and contested environments means we have to find better ways of integrating across our Force, and across the warfighting Domain. Technical integration is certainly important, I am not denying that and the 5th generation capabilities coming into service will test that. But integration at its core is not about primacy of one aspect – it’s about how it all works together. So how we integrate with our people, how we train, and how we use whole of nation capability to produce more efficient, effective and agile outcomes cannot be overlooked.

Essentially, what we need is to step back and think about what integration for a force of our scale means. We need to face up to the fact that previously when we spoke of domains, sea, land, air, it was really giving us an ability to continue to talk about the services while looking like we weren’t. I think we were all guilty of it. But our scale, and the complexity of our operating environment means staying in that particular comfort zone is no longer viable.

The emergence of cyber and space has certainly challenged this service-orientated mindset a little and in our doctrine we even have the human domain. Left unchecked, further domain proliferation will muddy the waters even more and undermine the utility of the domain construct. Is Space, at this time, in the Australian context (please note those very deliberately chosen caveats), a domain or is it an enabling function like logistics, critical to the fight but for us, right now, hardly a warfighting domain. Until we move from being a ‘customer’ of space products (including the bearers it provides) to possessing serious space capabilities, its status as a domain in the Australian context is contestable. Cyber is a different story, we have real capabilities and are generating effects from them. We have a clearer and more sophisticated view of the role we want to play, how we operate in it and where we can influence.

I am not an adherent to the multi-domain warfare construct, its smacks a little of a fad. The bottom line is that as long as we talk and think in a segmented framework (such as domains) we inevitably think in a sectorial way, one that leads to a focus on the ‘seams’ rather than the system as a whole. That’s the leap we need to make, that’s why a One Domain concept is intellectually important if we are to design and build an Integrated force.

Our specialist and Service building blocks will always be crucial and I think the post First Principles Review era has absolutely reinforced the crucial role of the Service Chiefs. Our geo-strategic realities setup an inherent tension between our ultimate role in the physical and self-reliant defence of our homeland and that of our daily operating reality which sees us working collaboratively in coalitions far from home to ensure the former is never required.

In a small force such as ours we need appropriate levels of horizontal interoperability across the services, particularly when it comes to ensuring effective C4ISR. But, we do not need everything to talk to everything else. Of course the majority of our war fighting and our day-to-day operations, is conducted within a coalition in a component based construct where what I would call vertical interoperability up the component chain is crucial. There is a challenge in getting the investment balance right between the vertical and horizontal demands as we struggle to understand what ‘appropriate’ means on both axes. This is complex work but the sophistication of the force we are acquiring demands innovative and deep intellectual engagement, open communication and collaborative behaviours across all stakeholders who are a part of our Defence Fundamental Inputs to Capability, including industry.

Assessing and prioritising gaps and opportunities is always front of mind, with designing our response as force options and deciding, with Government approval, our future force structure. Certainly there is no perfect plan; no matter how much thought that goes into design it is inevitable that we will need to make trade-offs as the dynamic strategic environment and the budget envelope change. Discussions in the Investment Committee are becoming deeper, more intellectual, collegiate and strategic.

The conversation is significantly enhanced by the presence and contribution of very senior representatives from Departments of Finance and the Prime Minister and Cabinet. That presence and participation has also transformed the dynamic between central agencies and Defence which has had a materially positive impact on the capital investment approval process in both time taken and providing government a more strategic view of force structure decisions outside of the formal White Paper process. We still have a way before we can realise all the benefits that true, and appropriate, integration brings to our force.

The Opposition’s defence policy (PDF) released yesterday was perhaps more notable for commitments it didn’t make rather than ones it did. It’s a cautious document, light on for hard timings for major decisions. But that’s no bad thing—taking the time to get decisions about complex issues right is eminently sensible. And when it did make a firm commitment with a date—the promise to increase defence spending to 2% of GDP in ten years—the outcome is both difficult to achieve and divorced from a coherent strategic framework.

It’s hard for oppositions to make defence policy as issues require detailed knowledge of costings, technical performance or intelligence that simply isn’t available to them. In part, this is an unavoidable consequence of the secrecy attached to national security matters. But it also reflects the tendency of incumbent governments, and indeed Defence itself, to withhold information from the public. Doing so creates an information asymmetry that protects the government from scrutiny and confers considerable power to Defence in advising government. Then there’s the sheer volume of information. Even incumbents have difficulty sifting through all of the open source, commercial-in-confidence and classified information. The net result is that oppositions often don’t know what they don’t know. Read more