Originally published on 26 May 2023.

The defence strategic review highlighted the need for the Royal Australian Navy to have two levels of surface combatants to provide ‘increased strike, air defence, presence operations and anti-submarine warfare’. While the DSR doesn’t directly recommend changes to the structure of the surface combatant fleet, it says: ‘Enhancing Navy’s capability in long-range strike (maritime and land), air defence and anti-submarine warfare requires the acquisition of a contemporary optimal mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 surface combatants, consistent with a strategy of a larger number of smaller surface vessels.’

The requirement for more smaller vessels, combined with the need for strike and anti-submarine warfare, has fuelled public discussion on whether the RAN requires corvettes to deliver the range of effects the DSR describes. The discussion has intensified following the release of the Australian National Audit Office report on the Hunter-class frigate program, which confirms that the cost of the nine vessels has already increased by 50%, years before the first is to be delivered.

In late 2022 there were reports of offers to the RAN of corvettes from TKMS and Navantia, which are delivering such vessels to Saudi Arabia, and Luerssen, which is overseeing the construction of offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) for the RAN and has delivered K130 corvettes to the German navy.

In considering corvettes for the RAN, it’s fair to ask what a corvette is, and what the navy needs them for. A corvette is not as simple as it would first appear. Although naval history buffs will likely baulk at the comment, there’s no strict definition of a corvette—and the RAN has a history of not sticking to strict definitions of types of ships.

The hierarchy of ship types is generally determined by the size, weight, firepower and employment of each vessel. One might accordingly define the hierarchy from smallest to largest, with associated growth in firepower from a patrol boat to a corvette, then a frigate, then a destroyer, then a cruiser, and so on.

The RAN’s fleet structure demonstrates that this hierarchy isn’t strict. The 10,000-tonne Hunter-class frigate is to be almost three times the displacement of the Anzac-class frigate at 3,600 tonnes. On the other hand, the RAN’s Hobart-class destroyers are based on the design of the Spanish F-100 frigate and have a displacement of about 7,000 tonnes, which makes them more akin to a traditional frigate. A modern corvette can range anywhere between 500 tonnes and 3,000 tonnes, almost the size of an Anzac-class frigate. You can see the conundrum.

Picking the term ‘corvette’ and attaching it to a particular naval task doesn’t help.

Any discussion about the RAN’s force structure must focus on the effects it needs to deliver, balanced against its key constraints.

The DSR recommends: ‘Australia’s immediate region encompassing the northeastern Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific, including our northern approaches, should be the primary area of military interest for Australia’s National Defence.’

This highlights what the RAN has known for some time, that force generation no longer relies on producing one major surface combatant to deploy on a unique operation in a far-off place. The RAN fleet requires flexibility and persistence. Australia has the world’s third largest economic exclusion zone and achieving flexibility and persistence requires scale—a surface combatant fleet much greater than the 11 vessels now in service, or the 12 planned for the future fleet.

In heralding the ‘missile age’ in modern warfare (although decades late), the DSR by implication also highlights that the littoral zones of Australia’s immediate region will likely be a contested environment. By implication, not only does the RAN need flexibility and persistence at scale, it also requires its platforms to have a minimum degree of air-defence capability. This puts the Arafura-class OPV in the firing line both literally and figuratively, noting its extremely limited armament.

In addition to flexibility, persistence, scale and self-defence capability, the RAN also has challenges in the number of missiles it can put to sea from an offensive-capability perspective. This has been explored in the ASPI publication The Hunter frigate: an assessment and won’t be revisited here, except to say that it will need to be a key consideration of the fleet mix. The RAN must be able to get more missiles to sea than it can now. This uncomfortable fact has led to calls for more Hobart-class destroyers to be produced, and offers from Navantia to do so. While the acquisition of further destroyers, or ‘Tier 1’ capabilities, is not the subject of this article, it must be acknowledged that the ability to put missiles to sea in as many platforms as possible must be a key consideration for the RAN.

Given the distances the RAN will be required to project across, a key ingredient of persistence and presence is speed. Another limitation of the Arafura OPVs is their maximum speed of 20 knots, slow for a modern naval vessel. The transition to a ‘focused force’ in light of the DSR must not lose sight of the reality that Australia’s maritime strategy still requires the RAN to deliver a constabulary function while the Australian Border Force fleet remains constrained. The rightful focus on warfighting capability for the RAN must not ignore the fact that, under the current construct, the RAN’s smaller vessels, be they patrol boats, OPVs or corvettes, will be required to undertake constabulary roles. The RAN couldn’t trade this role away without it having to be resourced elsewhere.

While this all points to solutions requiring several new platforms, the RAN’s key constraints of workforce and strategic warning time must be taken into account. The DSR reinforces the finding in the 2020 defence strategic update that Australia can no longer rely on having 10 years’ warning of a major conflict. That means the fleet to support the DSR’s requirements—noting the limitations of the current fleet—must be acquired quickly to be strategically relevant. So, is it possible to modify the Arafuras to meet the capability the RAN requires, or should a new platform of a developed design be acquired quickly through some form of commercial off-the-shelf agreement?

The DSR acknowledges that the RAN faces significant workforce constraints. Increasing the number of surface combatants will require a large increase in the number of personnel to crew them. That will come on top of the need to expand the submarine workforce to crew the nuclear-powered submarines coming under the AUKUS agreement. Each US Virginia-class boat will require three times more personnel than the RAN’s Collins-class boats. Consequently, the RAN is unlikely to be able to support significant growth in the requirements to crew surface combatants. Transitioning some of the roles assigned to the RAN’s fleet to uncrewed capabilities may be a future option, but it’s unlikely to resolve some of the key challenges faced by the RAN fleet in the near term.

All this demonstrates that rather than focusing on a specific type or class of ship with dubious definitions such as a corvette, we should focus on the effects that need to be delivered. Flexibility, persistence, scale, self-defence, offensive-strike capabilities and constabulary operations must be weighed against the clear constraints, delivery timeframes and workforce constraints. Consideration of these elements will lead to some clear conclusions about what is in the art of the possible for the future fleet mix.

The government has announced an 18-month delay to the Royal Australian Navy’s Hunter-class future frigate program. Is this a sign that the project is in serious trouble? Or is it simply an overdue recognition of the reality that there’s no getting around the timeframes required for highly developmental projects involving complex crewed platforms? In my view, it’s the latter, but either way the Defence Department needs to get real about the schedule’s implications for Australia’s maritime capability.

Let’s review the wishful thinking that has reigned in the history of the future frigate program. But first, as a benchmark, we should reacquaint ourselves with the timeline for the Hobart-class air warfare destroyers. The selection process included a two-year, $200 million design phase in which two competitors were funded to develop their designs. The government gave second-pass approval in June 2007 to acquire Navantia’s design, known as the ‘existing’ design because it was based on a vessel that was already in service in the Spanish navy. Importantly, that vessel already used the Aegis combat system and AN/SPY-1 radar that were to be installed on the Hobart class. Despite that, it still took five years and three months for construction to start in September 2012.

Certainly, there were problems in the ramp-up of the AWD program, but to achieve a faster schedule in the future frigate project one would have expected to see significantly less risk. That, however, was not the case.

In August 2015, concerned about the prospects of a shipbuilding ‘valley of death’ between the close of the AWD project and the start of construction on the future frigates, the government announced it was bringing forward the frigate program with construction to start in 2020—that is, construction would start in five years, even though the government had not yet selected a design, let alone funded any work on it.

Later that year, the government commenced a competitive evaluation process to identify a reference ship design that was mature, in the water and in service. However, it said it also required five significant modifications to the successful design: integration of the Australian CEA radar, the Aegis combat system, US weapons which were already in Australian service, the MH-60R Seahawk maritime combat helicopter and any modifications necessary to meet Australian regulatory requirements.

The list of contenders was whittled down to three, who were funded to conduct design activities such as assessing the risk of modifying their designs. Those risks forced the government to acknowledge that it wasn’t possible to meet the 2020 construction deadline. So the 2020 milestone was redefined as the start of ‘prototyping’ (that is, demonstrating that the new shipyard in South Australia worked), while the start of construction on actual ships was moved to the end of 2022.

In June 2018 the government announced that it had chosen BAE Systems’ Global Combat Ship based on the Type 26 frigate being built in the UK. This was in some ways surprising since the Type 26 was the only one of the three contenders that was not mature, not in the water and certainly not in service. We have continued to see instability in the reference ship’s design and it also didn’t use the radar, combat system, weapons or helicopter required by Australia. In essence, the government accepted Defence’s recommendation to choose the least mature design and then perform fundamental modifications to it.

In that light, the four and a half years available to achieve the start of construction by late 2022 seem quite inadequate, compared to the AWD design that needed more than five years despite starting with a more mature design requiring fewer modifications. The growth of the Hunter’s design from around 8,800 tonnes to 10,000 tonnes confirms the immaturity of the initial design.

If we add into the mix the fact that the UK’s program still requires design resources, the Canadians have also selected the Type 26 and are also seeking to implement substantial design changes, and Covid-19 has disrupted everybody’s plans, the announcement of a further 18-month delay to the start of construction simply confirms that reality beats wishful thinking every time.

So, what does that delay mean? It would appear that the desperate attempt to bridge the valley of death by short-circuiting the selection and design processes for the future frigate has achieved little except to inject additional risk into the program. The 18-month delay to the start of construction—presumably to mid-2024—will create uncertainty for the ramp-up of BAE’s workforce. The first two offshore patrol vessels are being built in Adelaide to ensure some continuity of workforce after the completion of the AWDs, but they are due to be delivered in late 2021 and 2022 (noting there are also signs of some delay there). How long can workers usefully conduct ‘prototyping’ activities for?

Second, the delay increases the capability risk. I’ve noted previously that the RAN is undergoing two major transitions in its submarine and surface combatant fleets that are marked by substantial strategic risks. We’ve seen that those risks are being realised in the submarine transition. It’s clear that that is now the case in the surface force as well. Getting real about the Hunter-class schedule, and the transition from the Anzac class that they’re supposed to replace, means Defence can’t simply sit and watch those risks grow.

We’ve known for a while that the government’s $575 billion in spending on defence this decade wasn’t going to get a single additional missile launcher to sea. That picture is now even worse. Defence officials recently informed a Senate committee that while construction has been delayed by 18 months, delivery of the first ship has been delayed by two years to 2031. Since Defence’s master schedule indicates a further two-year testing and evaluation phase before the first ship is deployable, that suggests that initial operational capability has now moved two years to the end of 2033. Or put another way, even though the government’s 2020 defence strategic update said we can no longer rely on 10 years of warning time, we’re looking at 12 years until the first of nine planned Hunter-class frigates provides useful capability (and 13 for the Attack-class submarine).

The officials did state that the schedule would be recovered by ship four. Since its acceptance date is scheduled for the third quarter of 2034, that suggests BAE will be delivering a ship a year following ship one in 2031. Defence has previously informed the Senate that the Adelaide shipyard has the capacity to deliver ships faster than the two-year drumbeat currently built into the naval shipbuilding plan, but such a pace still seems like an ambitious ramp-up.

If it’s achievable, it demonstrates once again the fundamental contradiction built into the shipbuilding plan: we are deliberately paying more to slow down delivery, sacrificing capability at the holy altar of ‘continuous naval shipbuilding’.

The hard reality we’re continually relearning is that the design and build of complex, multirole, crewed platforms is taking longer and longer as they aggregate more and more systems to survive the rapidly multiplying threats they face. Not only are their schedules increasing but so are their size and their cost. Despite the combined $52 billion investment in our surface combatant fleet ($8 billion for the AWDs and a predicted $44 billion for the Hunters), fleet numbers aren’t growing.

We’re also learning the true financial and capability costs inherent in an approach to continuous naval shipbuilding built around the achingly slow delivery of exquisitely expensive multirole platforms. So there’s no viable Plan B involving a different frigate.

Getting real about the Hunter schedule means taking a hard look at the options the government has to enhance maritime capability (and not just ‘mitigate risk’) and actually pursuing some of them, even if they’re outside Defence’s comfort zone. We need achievable Plan Bs that complement continuing with Plan A.

As with the future submarine, a life-of-type extension is already built into Plan A for the frigates, with the Anzac-class vessels already in the middle of a substantial upgrade program. If the first of the Anzacs is retired when the first Hunter achieves IOC, it will be 37 years old. The last will be around 40 should the eighth Hunter arrive on schedule in 25 years’ time—and it’s hard to see us squeezing more blood out of that stone.

So, getting real about the schedule for the Hunter class means pursuing complementary capabilities that break the vicious cycle of cost, capability and schedule we’re mired in. Several ASPI authors have addressed the need to pursue the small, the smart and the cheap—autonomous capabilities that can be quickly and inexpensively acquired in numbers. Certainly, development work needs to be done, but the funding required is orders of magnitude less than the $140+ billion naval shipbuilding program.

A key part of Plan B is staring us in the face. The first Arafura-class offshore patrol vessel is due to be delivered soon (page 207). The OPV can be enhanced with tailored mixes of anti-ship missiles, towed array sonars, lethal and surveillance drones, and many other capabilities. For less than a tenth of the cost of a Hunter-class frigate, we can get the same surface warfare capability, potentially a decade earlier. Why not keep building them in Adelaide in parallel with the build program in Perth? With the navy’s next new warship not coming for 12 years under the current plan, what have we got to lose?