Tag Archive for: RAN

Does the Royal Australian Navy need Tomahawk missiles?

In my most recent article, I noted that the Department of Defence appears to be in the early stages of identifying a ship-launched land-attack missile for acquisition. The government assessed in its 2020 defence strategic update that it is ‘essential that the ADF grow its self-reliant ability to deliver deterrent effects’. A recent government announcement hints at acquiring a weapon like the Tomahawk land-attack missile, or TLAM. Could it provide a deterrent? Or, if it failed as a deterrent, could it provide a robust strike option? I’m sceptical. (For some context on the Australian Defence Force and strike, see my earlier pieces.)

The TLAM or a similar weapon might appear to be a boost for the ADF. It would be a new capability in an area where the ADF sorely needs more tools. The Royal Australian Navy currently doesn’t have a land-strike capability, beyond the very limited effect provided by its guns and the Harpoon anti-ship missile. Even the Royal Australian Air Force has very few arrows in its strike quiver. The land-strike role was performed for a long time by its F-111s. When they were retired, the government acquired the JASSM strike missile and integrated it into the air force’s F/A-18 A/B ‘classic’ Hornet fleet as a partial replacement. Since the JASSM hasn’t been integrated into any other RAAF aircraft, the question mark over the ADF’s long-range strike capability is getting larger as the classic Hornets are retired.

But something like the TLAM probably isn’t the answer. That’s because the navy’s planned fleet isn’t going to have anywhere near the capacity to carry the number of missiles that would be necessary to make a difference in a conflict.

Let’s look at how the TLAM has been used. There are two broad scenarios. The first is as part of a large air campaign in which weapons such as the Tomahawk have been used to ‘kick down the door’—disabling command and control networks and air defence systems at the start of the campaign to allow sustained sorties by manned aircraft.

For example, in 1999, in an effort to persuade Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and remove its forces from there, NATO bombed Serbia. During the campaign, NATO launched 218 Tomahawks, less than 1% of the 28,108 munitions delivered. TLAM strikes were followed up by 38,004 aircraft sorties, of which 10,484 were strike sorties. Ultimately, it took something like old-fashioned carpet bombing by heavy bombers to induce the Serbs to leave Kosovo.

Four years later, in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the US and its allies expended 29,199 munitions, of which two-thirds were guided. That included 802 sea-launched Tomahawks. Put another way, a huge number of long-range missiles made up only 2.7% of the total number of weapons used.

The problem for Australia in this kind of scenario is that, even if Tomahawks kicked in the door, we don’t have the air force with the size and range needed to follow up. I’ve discussed this challenge previously, and my colleague David Millar has discussed the lack of concrete in the Pacific necessary to support air combat operations.

The second use has been as a way for the US to send a signal without getting involved in a prolonged campaign. An example of this was Operation Infinite Reach in 1998, in which the US launched 79 Tomahawks against several al-Qaeda targets. Another was the 2017 strike on Syria’s Shayrat air base using 59 Tomahawks in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons.

The effectiveness of such strikes is debatable—al-Qaeda was still able to conduct the 9/11 attacks, and Shayrat was back conducting air operations within hours of the US strikes. The signal such strikes seem to send is ‘We aren’t willing to commit the resources that are needed to stop you.’

Just as importantly, the RAN will find it difficult to mount even those numbers of weapons. At the moment, its only surface ship capable of carrying the Tomahawk is its main air defence platform—the Hobart-class destroyer. The three destroyers have 48 vertical launch cells each, a number dwarfed by the capacity of both allies (the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers have 96) and potential adversaries (the Chinese Type 055 destroyer has 112). Once they’ve been loaded up for their air defence role, there’s likely to be little capacity left for land-strike weapons. The Hunter-class frigate will have only 32 cells, and the first ship won’t arrive for another decade.

This is one of the outcomes of the exponentially upwards spiralling cost of our ships. The head of the US Navy, Admiral Michael Gilday, said ‘we cannot afford to wrap two billion dollars’ worth of ship around 96 missile tubes’. Unfortunately, Australia is wrapping $2–3 billion worth of ship around one-third that number of tubes. And despite the government’s planned $575 billion spend on defence in the next decade, the navy won’t get an additional vertical launch cell to sea in that time.

The submarine force is unlikely to add much. While the US Navy is adding modules with vertical launch cells to future tranches of its Virginia-class submarines, the first of our Attack-class boats won’t have them, so any potential strike missiles would have to compete for very limited space with the torpedoes or anti-ship missiles being launched through their torpedo tubes.

It’s hard to see how a RAN taskforce could carry more than a dozen or so land-strike missiles without sacrificing its air defence capability and, through the government’s shipbuilding plan, that’s essentially baked into the navy’s force structure over the next three decades.

Even if we go up against an adversary with no anti-ship capability, allowing the navy to increase the number of land-strike missiles its ships carry, there are probably vanishingly few scenarios in which they’ll make much of a difference. If al-Qaeda and Syria can ignore a strike, then any local adversary could too.

But suppose an adversary established a forward operating base in our region that threatened our interests. It’s conceivable, for example, that in time of conflict the ADF could use ship-launched TLAMs against it to degrade its force-projection facilities or destroy aircraft on the ground. But once the taskforce’s small number of missiles had been delivered, it would take several weeks to rearm in southern Australia, giving the adversary time to regroup, reinforce and get ready for round two. That load-out also couldn’t be changed at sea should the nature of the fight change from land strike to maritime strike or air defence or anti-submarine warfare.

Another use could be to contribute to a US-led coalition, much as the UK has employed submarine-launched TLAMs. It’s true that as the US Navy’s vessels age out, its numbers of vertical launch cells are likely to fall. But again, it’s unlikely that any number Australia could provide would make much of a difference. Moreover, the defence strategic update states clearly that the ADF needs to increase its self-reliant ability to deliver deterrent effects. Therefore, niche contributions to the US should not be the primary lens through which to assess the potential capability.

In short, the opportunity cost of ship-launched land-strike weapons in both dollars and competition for limited space on our ships seems to outweigh the benefits.

There are, however, other potential ways to provide a credible land-strike deterrent. Land-based missiles, for example, are an approach that Defence is also exploring and which has a funding line in the force structure plan. They come with their own calculus of cost and risk. A large number of missiles could be based in Australia and they would be difficult to detect and destroy, but they might not have sufficient range to reach potential targets. And deploying them overseas would require a large, costly overhead in other capabilities needed to transport and protect them.

There are, then, many possible strike options to evaluate. But there’s one that so far doesn’t seem to have received much attention. The number of strike missiles that a naval taskforce could carry is roughly equivalent to the number that a bomber could carry in a single sortie. Plus, a bomber can rearm and return the next day. It can also both kick in the door with long-range weapons and follow up with direct attacks using cheaper, more plentiful short-range weapons (potentially in the same mission). It can adjust its load-out every day for different missions. And a bomber has a human crew of only two who are in danger, in contrast to the 500 or more in a maritime taskforce.

Most of the cost of maritime platforms is due to the integrated systems needed to defend them, not their offensive capabilities. Why not put some of that investment into more cost-effective ways of striking an adversary? The B-21 bomber is certainly not cheap, but, in deterring an enemy and altering their cost and risk calculus, it may be a far more cost-effective strike platform than a ship.

Australia’s naval presence in the South China Sea is nothing new

In recent years, China has taken a dim view of Australian naval and air activities in the South China Sea. Australia is considered an intruder, an external power that has no right to deploy into the area. But the fact is that Australian units have operated regularly, if not continuously, in the South China Sea and its surrounds for more than a century. They have been there because their activities were and are considered to contribute to the safety and security of the region, on which Australia’s own security has long depended.

Ironically, in their first deployments during World War I under the control of the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy on what was termed the China Station, ships of the Royal Australian Navy were chasing Americans. They were trying to stop the movement of agents and arms into Malaya, Singapore and India by German-American groups using the Philippines as a conduit. Australian units functioned in some ways as shock troops for the British admiral, taking a harder line against American flag vessels than might have been possible for RN ships. Because of official American embarrassment over the activities of the subversive groups, British apologies about the overenthusiasm of Australian officers ‘might almost have become an expedient by which British and US officials were able to excuse, if not officially overlook, some transgressions’.

The 1920s saw occasional Australian visits, such as that of the cruiser Brisbane which conducted an exchange deployment on the China Station in 1925, visiting Malaya, Japan and China. One member of Brisbane’s crew distinguished himself in rescue operations after a landslide in Hong Kong.

In December 1941, the Australian destroyer Vampire was one of the escorts for the ill-fated Royal Navy ships Prince of Wales and Repulse when they were sunk by land-based Japanese naval aircraft in the South China Sea. The Vampire rescued many of the survivors and returned them to Singapore. The Royal Australian Air Force’s Malaya-based 453 Squadron Buffalo fighters had been called too late to provide cover. In contrast, RAAF 1 Squadron’s Hudson bombers had some success over the South China Sea with the destruction of a Japanese transport ship in an invasion convoy, although the squadron soon lost most of its aircraft in Japanese raids on Kota Bahru airfield.

On 26 January 1942, accompanied by the British destroyer Thanet, the Vampire fought a sharp night action in the South China Sea against the escorts of a Japanese invasion convoy off the Malayan east-coast port of Endau. The Vampire survived the battle against a much superior force; the Thanet did not.

In June 1945, RAN units were back in the South China Sea, covering the invasion of Brunei by providing gunfire support, amphibious transport and precursor surveys for the Australian troops who went ashore there. Some months before, RAAF aircraft had played an important part in hindering Japanese naval operations in the weeks leading up to the Battle of Leyte Gulf by seeding aerial mines outside the Japanese main-fleet anchorage in Brunei Bay.

In the years following the end of World War II, Australia worked closely with the United Kingdom and New Zealand to contribute to the defence of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo, Sarawak and Brunei under the ANZAM agreement. The creation of the Far East Strategic Reserve in 1955 brought operational commitments to the defence of Southeast Asia that saw the continuous deployment of two frigates or destroyers and the annual visit of an RAN carrier task group to the region for many years.

Much of the ships’ time was spent in the South China Sea, operating with the British Eastern Fleet and contributing to coastal security patrols. They were also involved in increasingly sophisticated SEATO naval exercises, in which RAAF maritime patrol aircraft took part as well. Going ‘Up Top’ became a central part of the RAN’s routine—and a frequent event for many RAAF force elements, not to mention the fighter squadrons permanently based at Butterworth and in Singapore.

Between 1964 and 1966, during the Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation, or Konfrontasi, Australian escorts and coastal minesweepers had a leading role in anti-infiltration patrols. Australia also played a key part in the development of the Royal Malaysian Navy with the provision of loan personnel (including the RMN’s commander from 1960 until 1967) and material support. After 1967, training places were provided to the armed forces of the newly independent Singapore.

Following Britain’s decision to withdraw from east of Suez, through a series of iterations Australia’s primary defence contribution moved into the framework of the Five Power Defence Arrangements in 1971. Although the strategic situation which created the FPDA has changed dramatically since that time, their existence has helped maintain defence links between Malaysia and Singapore, as well as provide confirmation of Australia’s continuing interest. An Australian two-star RAAF officer commands the Integrated Air Defence System, supported by a multinational staff.

Australian aircraft continue to transit through the Royal Malaysian Air Force base at Butterworth. Notably, the Operation Gateway patrols by RAAF maritime patrol aircraft operating from Butterworth which began in 1981 continue to this day. They once had a Cold War focus on tracking submarines but have evolved into a much wider maritime security effort in Southeast Asian waters, including the South China Sea, that makes a significant contribution to the maritime awareness of Malaysia in particular. The initiation of the Bersama Lima series of exercises in 2011 and of the Bersama Shield series in 2012 have helped take maritime interoperability within the FPDA to new levels.

Since 2017, the annual Indo-Pacific Endeavour deployments have involved Australian task groups spending significant time in and around the South China Sea. Although Covid-19 restrictions have affected such deployments, they did not prevent the frigate Parramatta from operating with an American carrier battle group in the region in April 2020, or a RAN task group’s involvement in trilateral exercises with Japan and the US in the Philippine Sea in July—or a further trilateral exercise in the South China Sea in October including the frigate Arunta.

Australia’s South China Sea presence is not all about the major powers, something highlighted by the visit of the submarine Dechaineux to Brunei in March 2020. Over the past century, Australia’s activities in the South China Sea have reflected the reality that it is no ‘external’ state. Australia’s security was, is and will continue to be closely associated with the security of maritime Southeast Asia. Given that Darwin is 450 kilometres closer to Singapore than the latter is to Shanghai, this could hardly be otherwise.

Australia’s Hunter-class frigates are coming, but maybe not soon enough

In the first part of this series, I looked at what we’ve learned recently about Defence’s naval shipbuilding enterprise. In this instalment and the next one, I’ll focus on what we’ve learned about individual projects, starting with the Hunter-class and Anzac-class frigates.

First Hunter frigate won’t sail until 2031

The Hunter class’s schedule is under pressure. Granted, the government and Defence are confident they will achieve the milestone of prototyping on schedule by the end of 2020, so pretty much right now. Since that’s purely an exercise in checking that the shipyard’s systems work, it doesn’t really say anything about maturity of the Hunter class itself, particularly since the prototyping will start by building blocks of the UK’s Type 26 version of the frigate, not ours.

Defence put the Hunter on its list of projects of interest (that is, not exhibiting symptoms bad enough to make it a project of concern but sending up some red flags requiring high-level attention) earlier this year ‘due to delays in finalising the design documents and weight increases to the Type 26 Frigate design’.

That doesn’t mean the project will miss the key milestone of starting actual construction by the end of 2022, but it may well mean that construction will begin with a design that is less mature than is desirable. As the Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board noted in last month’s Senate estimates hearings, all shipbuilding projects start construction with an incomplete design. Defence says the Hunter’s final critical design review is planned for mid-2024, around a year and a half after construction starts.

It all comes down to where you’re willing to accept risk. But as bitter experience has shown—for example, with the Collins-class submarines and air warfare destroyers—when a project starts with unresolved risks, redesign and rework increase both the cost and the timeline.

Considering the government picked the most immature of the three participants in the frigate project’s competitive evaluation process and then agreed to five major modifications to the original design, it’s not surprising that schedule risks are mounting. No doubt the pandemic isn’t helping.

We also learned at estimates that the government is considering options to manage the emerging schedule risks, but based on its reiterated commitment to start construction by the end of 2022, moving that date doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Defence has now disclosed the date of a key milestone at the other end of the Hunter schedule (document 26). Considering the government stated in its July defence strategic update that we can no longer rely on 10 years of warning time ahead of a major conflict, it’s cold comfort to know that initial operating capability (the first ship being available for operations) is still 11 years away.

Upgrades and crew numbers will keep the Anzacs afloat

In light of the Hunter class schedule and the two-year delivery drumbeat, it’s vital to keep the Anzacs a relevant capability for another 20 years. So it’s good that the upgrades being performed under the Anzac midlife capability assurance program (AMCAP) appear to be going well, including the new long-range air-search radar.

There’s been some news for those following the long saga of HMAS Perth’s efforts to get back into the water after it was taken out of service in late 2017 because the navy couldn’t crew it. Originally it was due to return to service before January (ANAO audit report, page 39). That’s now shifted to late 2021 after the navy decided to put the ship through the AMCAP since it was already out of the water (page 20).

The good news is that the navy is now confident it will have enough personnel to crew all of its Anzacs as well as the Collins-class submarines, which is quite a turnaround from where it was only a few years ago.

It’s a salutary reminder that it doesn’t matter how much you spend on ships if you don’t have the people to operate them. How many personnel the navy thinks it will need for its much more substantial future fleet is one of the pieces of this complex puzzle that is still unresolved. The 2020 force structure plan says the government will consider Defence’s long-term personnel requirements next year. With the navy acquiring a larger fleet of much larger ships, that could require a substantial increase.

Australia’s submarines need east coast base

Launching ASPI’s latest special report, Submarines: Your questions answered, Peter Jennings interviewed retired admiral James Goldrick on the question of why the Royal Australian Navy needs submarines.

The submarine’s great strength is the extent to which it complicates an enemy’s planning once it’s deployed, says Goldrick. Submarines have played a key role in the protection of Australia since World War I, he says, and now it’s time to consider an additional base for them on the east coast.

On the issue of whether Australia’s manned submarines are likely to become outdated or lose their usefulness, Goldrick says they need to be seen as mother ships from which unmanned craft will be deployed on a wide range of tasks. He says technological advances are unlikely to make crewed submarines obsolete.

Goldrick notes that by opting to build a new fleet of conventionally powered boats, Australia has missed an opportunity to consider a transition to nuclear propulsion. But choosing to build nuclear-powered submarines would have added an additional level of difficulty to the already demanding task of building 12 Attack-class boats.

In memoriam: Sam Bateman, a sailor with the sea in his soul

We’ve just lost one of Australia’s and the region’s finest maritime and strategic thinkers and leaders. Sam Bateman died this week aged 82.

Sam seemingly had the sea in his soul. He was a true giant in the field of the law of the sea, oceans policy and maritime security. He was an intellectual pillar of the maritime security community in Asia.

Sam had a long-held belief that Australians should see themselves as part of a maritime nation and that maritime issues should be a key component of our national strategy. Sam was my mentor and mate for 40 years.

Sam had so many accomplishments. He joined the Royal Australian Navy as a 15-year-old cadet and, during his decades of service, had commands at sea and several stints in strategic policy planning in the Department of Defence. He left as a commodore and in 1993 was made a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his service.

Sam didn’t relax. He was a key player in the formation of the Australian Centre for Maritime Studies and the editor for many years of its journal Maritime Studies (now the Australian Journal of Maritime & Ocean Affairs).

He was a member of the Australian National Oceans Advisory Group established to advise the federal government on the implementation of Australia’s ocean policy.

He earned his doctorate at the University of New South Wales on a topic we were both passionate about: the strategic and political aspects of the law of the sea in East Asian seas.

Sam set up what became the Sea Power Centre – Australia, where he insisted that everything the centre did should be from a wider maritime, not purely naval, perspective. He was a strong advocate of encouraging all members of the RAN to understand the strategic rationale for their work.

Sam was the inaugural director of the Centre for Maritime Policy (which became the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security) and a long-term adviser to the maritime security program at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

He was co-chair of several working groups at the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) and appointed to the ASEAN Regional Forum’s Expert and Eminent Persons Group where he co-chaired the Maritime Security Working Group.

His views on the importance of maritime strategy for Australia were probably first articulated in his master’s thesis on the economic importance of Australian shipping, later published by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre as Australia’s overseas trade: strategic considerations. Sam firmly believed that Australia needed a strong national merchant fleet.

Sam had a wide network of research collaborators and friends in maritime affairs throughout the world and especially in the Indo-Pacific. News of his death brought an outpouring of messages on maritime discussion groups.

His friends and admirers were all in the same boat in talking about the collective loss to the maritime community: what a great man, friend, mentor and colleague Sam had been and how respected and admired he was for his scholarly integrity and policy contributions over the decades. Many commented on Sam’s honesty and integrity.

Many spoke of his collegiality and warmth and how caring he was in all his personal interactions: kind, gentle and nurturing to younger analysts. It was these qualities that made Sam such a brilliant mentor to so many of us in the maritime community.

Sam’s international profile was probably higher overseas than in Australia, which became obvious to me at a maritime meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum in Manila. Sam and I were the only non-officials there. Sam was the keynote speaker and it was very obvious that he commanded enormous respect from senior officials in the audience as he addressed regional maritime security challenges. He confidently handled a huge press conference after the speech was delivered.

His prolific writing, analysis and commentary has long been, and will continue to be, widely appreciated across the regional maritime security community.

Sam was very active in second track diplomacy over many years, especially in the CSCAP maritime working group, where everyone who worked with him appreciated his wise counsel. Sam integrated his practical seagoing experience with concern for good governance and stable security regimes.

He had the calmness of a captain handling a ship in stormy seas. He was always a balanced, fair and free thinker. In presenting his views, he was patient, measured and reasonable. In sometimes choppy waters at these meetings, Sam always steered the discussion towards a safe harbour.

Sam helped shape the CSCAP agenda, particularly regarding freedom of navigation. He understood that to build a stable maritime regime, there would have to be compromises between the interests of coastal states and those of maritime powers.

He had special credibility in pointing this out because of his long and distinguished naval career. His recent book Freedoms of navigation in the Asia–Pacific region is an excellent analysis of the debate and offers ways forward.

He also believed that military hydrographic surveys in a country’s exclusive economic zone cannot be easily separated from marine scientific research and should thus be subject to coastal state consent, a view denied by some maritime powers but now gaining wider traction.

At regional meetings, Sam’s seamanlike understanding of the most complex and intractable maritime security issues was appreciated, as was his lack of conceit. He encouraged others who held different views.

Sam devoted his working life to making the region and the world’s oceans safer and better managed with fairer and more stable regimes. His measured, objective contributions to better ocean governance will be greatly missed.

It was typical of Sam that he was working fruitfully on a range of research and policy projects before his death, including a book on the South China Sea. It’s hard for many of Sam’s friends and colleagues across the globe to deal with losing such an inspirational person. I count myself among those very privileged to have been his friend and to have learned so much from him.

While I worked with Sam on various projects, presented with him on many occasions, and co-authored with him—including ASPI reports on topics ranging from maritime terrorism, Australian oceans policy, the Indian Ocean and defence diplomacy—the thing I’ll treasure most is our time working in the Pacific and East Timor on maritime projects.

Sam had a soft spot for the Pacific islands and their peoples. He spent many happy years in his early naval career as captain of an Attack-class patrol boat HMAS Aitape, which formed part of the Papua New Guinea patrol boat group. During our many visits to the islands, at the end of each day I loved sharing a drink, a tale and a few laughs while looking out at the blue Pacific with him.

Sam, you were one of the finest people I have ever known. We have all been enriched by having known you. May you have fair winds and following seas. Vale, my friend, Commodore Dr Sam Bateman.

Editors’ note: Sam Bateman had been a contributor to The Strategist almost since its inception. One of his pieces has been among the top 10 most read Strategist posts of all time since it was published on 11 December 2018: ‘Norwegian frigate sinking has far-reaching implications’. We will miss his always knowledgeable, insightful contributions to Australia’s maritime security debate.

The strange submarine saga: nuclear-powered poser

Submarines are so vital to Australia that two of our past prime ministers have publicly pointed to the nuclear-powered option.

Shifting from the conventional power of the existing Collins class and the planned Attack class to nuclear propulsion would take the subs saga to a whole new depth.

Before reading the nuclear-powered musings of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (a rare meeting of minds), turn to the other part of the proposition: subs are vital.

A couple of episodes into this five–part series, I got a note from one of the smartest men I know—an economist with a long history in the Canberra policy jungle and an equally deep understanding of East Asia. He is a master at posing the simple Delphic question that forces lots of devilish detail through its paces.

And so my master posed this question:

Although I try to take an interest in these things, I really don’t know why Australia needs submarines. What—exactly—do we want them for? I really don’t know. We’re spending at least $100 billion (probably more) on something which somebody like me has no idea what it’s for. I’ve been keeping an eye on the literature. This matter—i.e., what we actually get from the submarines—doesn’t seem to be explained. I guess I’m slow, right? But my bet is that I’m not the only one.

A fine reminder of an enduring truth: the Canberra defence consensus isn’t always what the rest of Oz understands or believes.

Whenever military types berate me for the ignorance of journalists about defence, I respond they should be grateful to us: we’re merely showing them how much the rest of the population lives in a different place with a sky of a different colour.

On why subs are vital, turn to two politicians responsible for explaining defence to the voters.

Here’s Defence Minister Linda Reynolds:

Submarines are fundamentally important to our defence strategy. They are a unique—and powerful—deterrent to any adversary, and they are critical to protecting our national security interests. Submarines secure Australia’s strategic advantage—through leading-edge surveillance and the protection of our maritime approaches.

Our sophisticated level of interoperability with the United States is a critical aspect of our submarine operations in our region. As are our air warfare destroyers and also anti-submarine warfare frigates. Submarines are also the vanguard of strategic lethality and deterrence. With substantial firepower, with stealth, with endurance and also with sustained presence.

Our regionally superior Collins-class submarines are already very capably demonstrating all of these effects. We will see further refinements to our future Attack-class submarines—ones that will strengthen our capability to maintain peace and security in our region.

Singing from the same page, Labor’s deputy leader and shadow defence minister, Richard Marles, says Australia’s national security ‘desperately requires’ the evolution of its long-range submarine capability:

Australia having the power to deploy this capability, with its lethality, a long way from our shores is the single biggest question mark that we can place in any adversary’s mind. So, when we buy a submarine, we buy that question mark. They are a powerful deterrent. And more than any other military platform that Australia has today, submarines can shape our strategic circumstances in a way which empowers our nation and gives Australia sovereignty.

Because subs are so important, our two previous prime ministers—united in little but their hatred for each other—agree on the need to consider nuclear-powered subs.

Turnbull writes that shortly before his prime ministership was rudely interrupted he’d taken the nuclear subs out of the too-hard basked and started to investigate: ‘My judgement then, and today, is that this is a debate that will continue, so the government should make sure it’s well informed.’

Abbott declared in 2017 that the taboo must be tackled: ‘Australia has not made a formal decision against acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, so much as studiously avoided even asking the question.’

Recalling that Abbott’s prime ministership crashed a few days short of the two-year mark, it’s remarkable he proclaims his biggest regret from that time as PM was not challenging the nuclear-no-go mindset:

In the Abbott government’s discussions about getting the best possible submarine for Australia as quickly as possible, we more or less assumed that our (currently limited) nuclear engineering capacity precluded that option.

Creating a nuclear industry to service subs here would take a decade, perhaps more, yet might turn out to be a lesser challenge than designing and building a new class of submarine almost from scratch. Within the 15-plus years that it’s currently planned to take to get even the first of our new conventional subs into service, we could develop a nuclear servicing capability—and if we were to buy or lease a US submarine it could initially be supported at the American bases in Guam and Hawaii.

In the 1960s, we relatively swiftly developed a civilian nuclear capacity, mainly for medicine, centred on the Lucas Heights facility in Sydney. So it can be done if the will is there.

Turnbull says any country with a nuclear navy has to have a civil nuclear industry. Australia would have to justify that shift as ‘support for the navy rather than its offer of cheap electricity. It would need long-term, bipartisan support and well over a decade would be needed to establish the pool of skilled personnel in every field to support it.’

The two former prime ministers confront the question of whether the US would sell or lease nuclear-powered subs to Australia. Abbott says we won’t know if we don’t ask:

The US already provides Australia with its most advanced aircraft and tanks and its most sophisticated submarine torpedo weapons system. The US has previously provided Britain with its most sensitive nuclear submarine technology …

We have nothing to lose from starting a discussion on this issue with our allies and friends—Britain and France—as well as primarily with the US.

Turnbull, however, embraces the view that leasing US subs would mean Washington has an effective veto over an Australian capability—especially if the boats had to go to Guam or Hawaii for maintenance:

There’d be no point in us having a nuclear navy if it wasn’t completely sovereign and able to be operated by, and at the direction of, the Australian government. That means the submarines and their nuclear power plants would have to be maintained in Australia.

With France, Australia is building Attack-class submarines that are cousin to the French Barracuda nuclear-powered boats. And that nuclear capability is one element in Australia’s decision to partner with France rather than Germany or Japan, as Turnbull states: ‘It wasn’t the reason for the choice, but accepting the French submarine bid, as opposed to the Japanese or German bids, at least gives us a potential option to move to a nuclear design in the years ahead.’

Reaching for that option would confront many dimensions of Australia’s nuclear taboo. The Labor and Liberal parties would have to agree. The people would have to be persuaded. There’s the small matter of building the nuclear industry. And we’d have to do a lot of talking and explaining to the neighbours—especially Indonesia.

All that could only happen in a darkening strategic environment. It’d be ‘a post-Covid world that is poorer, that is more dangerous, and that is more disorderly’. The quotation marks around that poorer, dangerous, disorderly quote are because that’s what Prime Minister Scott Morrison described in launching the 2020 strategic update.

Tough times will put more twists into Australia’s strange submarine saga.

The strange submarine saga: vital yet vexed

‘Our submarine capability underpins Australia’s credibility and influence as a modern military power. And let me make that statement again: Our submarine capability underpins Australia’s credibility and influence as a modern military power. This is not about politics. This is not about partisanship.

‘This is about the security and the future of our nation.’

Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, 2 July 2020

‘The consequences of the failure to manage the Future Submarine Program properly are profound. Australia is now faced with the most wicked problem. We have seen continuing delays in the build from [France’s] Naval Group … But any thought of ending the contract with Naval Group and pursuing another alternative would obviously be very expensive and involve enormous delay of itself. The Morrison Government has put Australia’s national security between a rock and a hard place.’

Deputy Labor leader and Shadow Defence Minister Richard Marles, 4 August 2020

Both sides of Oz politics love what submarines offer Australia.

Subs are a fundamental element of the bipartisan consensus on defence. But the love quickly becomes agony and angst when we turn to building them.

For a couple of decades, the problems of the Collins-class submarines drove governments nuts.

In office, both Labor and Liberals hated the complexity and cost of the Collins. The dud subs have slowly transformed into six beaut boats, but the agonising journey left deep scars on the political and defence classes.

The Collins was a wicked problem (a complex, interdependent challenge with no ‘stopping rule’; solving one aspect leads to other problems). Now, getting the 12 Attack-class boats is equally wicked.

The strategic importance of the subs is matched by their degree of difficulty. Vital yet vexed.

The strange submarine saga of the past decade has significant sliding-door moments, when decisions were made (or surfaced) to become today’s reality, while other different futures didn’t get through the door (the possibilities that sank).

The Collins agony/angst and the political choices of the past decade have shaped where we are now. Give this a personality—call it Industry Oz, expressing the determination to build our own subs, the road we’ve been trudging for 40 years.

Industry Oz could have several versions, and some choices we’ve shunned or bungled look like valuable, missed opportunities.

Contrast Industry Oz with another personality that nearly walked through a different door to a different place: Customer Oz—buying the new submarines off the shelf overseas. (A future sliding-door possibility—the nuclear sub option, Nuke-Powered Oz—will surface later in this saga series.)

The might-have-beens of Customer Oz offer contrasts that can clarify the costs of choices taken. The way Australia has pursued its partnership with France and Naval Group has hints of Customer Oz, thinking more like a buyer than a builder. The customer has discarded options in dealing with Naval Group that you would have expected a hard-headed Industry Oz to have kept available.

The flippant version of Customer Oz is that it would be cheap and cheerful. The boats would be cheaper. We’d get ’em quicker. Australia would not be the builder, merely the buyer. Cheers! Sign the cheques, police the schedule and sail them home. We’d have much less control over what we got, but the customer would off-load lots of angst and responsibility.

The serious version of Customer Oz is that it would be totally defence-driven, stripped of the ambitions and compromises of industry policy. The focus of Customer Oz would be the defence need in a darkening strategic era, operating within the parameters of quality and price. The spend would be defined by defence, not twinned with domestic economic imperatives.

Back in 2014, Customer Oz was our submarine future. Last week’s column outlined Tony Abbott’s determination to buy Japanese subs. Abbott was set to create a Customer Oz future for subs.

We know now that Abbott lasted only two years as prime minister (2013–2015). In 2014, though, that’d have been a bizarre prediction. Slip through the sliding door to see a different reality unfold.

Over two elections (2010 and 2013), Abbott as opposition leader had clawed 25 seats from the Labor government. As the Liberal minister Christopher Pyne observes, the comeback Abbott engineered ‘was a remarkable achievement’. Stress that: remarkable. Abbott was only the fourth Liberal leader to take the party from opposition to government. The others were Robert Menzies, who stayed as PM for 17 years; Malcolm Fraser, PM for over seven years; and John Howard, who was PM for nearly a dozen years.

Political arithmetic and history suggested Abbott would be a two- to three-term PM, delivering a Customer Oz future. Recall that in 2014, Abbott’s defence minister, David Johnson, declared he wouldn’t trust the government’s Australian Submarine Corporation to build a canoe. That explosive ‘rhetorical flourish’ was quickly disowned, but the Abbott government was paddling towards a Customer Oz outcome.

Australia’s navy hated the Japanese sub, disliking the technology and damning the boat’s range. If Abbott had lasted six to nine years as PM he’d have prevailed over the navy, and Customer Oz would be today’s reality.

Instead, the sub saga became a minor strand of the dramas that saw the Liberal caucus depose Australia’s 28th PM after he’d had only two years on top.

In turning away from Abbott, the Liberal government gave a passionate new push to Industry Oz, setting off towards today’s wicked reality. That vexed place will be explored in the next column on this strange submarine saga.

Naval investment in northern Australia will strengthen national security

The government’s continuous shipbuilding program has provided a fillip for defence industry in South Australia and Western Australia, but benefits are also set to flow to other parts of the country. Importantly, Australia’s north, particularly Cairns and Darwin, will see an increased naval presence that will not only strengthen the security of the north, but provide additional economic opportunities.

With a displacement over four times that of the Armidale-class patrol boats they are replacing, and a crew twice the size, the much larger and more capable Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels will bring a new level of capability to surveillance of the north. They will also bring an increased level of complexity to and demands on the regional defence industry capability required to support them.

The arrival of the Arafura class, scheduled for delivery between 2021 and 2030, coincides with a substantial program of infrastructure works at Darwin’s naval base, HMAS Coonawarra. The works will remediate years of inattention during which capital investment in facilities failed to keep up with the growing size of the Royal Australian Navy’s fleet.

Infrastructure improvements include a new fuel storage facility for ready-use fuel and a new wharf capable of berthing all classes of ships the RAN operates. The new fuel facility will be configured to refuel vessels alongside and will be able to pump fuel from the wharf to the storage tanks to refill them.

This will lessen the reliance on the Landbridge-leased East Arm port facility and reduce the number of fuel tankers on Darwin’s roads, adding some resilience to fuel supply and storage. But with no refining capability in Australia’s north, and limited bulk fuel storage, fuel supply remains a vulnerability.

With continuous shipbuilding comes the need for continuous sustainment. Under Plan Galileo, the RAN intends to establish a regional maintenance hub in Darwin to provide logistic and maintenance support to any ship, current or planned, in the fleet. The hub will be made up of navy personnel, primary contractors, small businesses and service providers.

It will enable HMAS Coonawarra to act as a main operating base for the vessels on constabulary duties and a forward operating base for major fleet units. This should lead to more time spent in the north and less time transiting to and from the main bases in Sydney and Perth.

With enhanced sustainment, maintenance and training facilities, Darwin will also become an attractive location for allied and regional maritime forces. This provides a unique opportunity to establish Darwin as the Asia–Pacific centre for multinational patrol boat training and deeper maintenance.

In a further sign of a strengthened naval presence in the north, in May the government announced that six more Cape-class patrol boats would be built for the RAN. The new vessels are scheduled to be delivered between 2021 and 2023, allowing some of the Armidales to be withdrawn from service earlier than anticipated. As a majority of the Armidales are based in Darwin, it’s likely that a majority, if not all six, of the new Capes that replace them will also be based there.

The additional Cape-class boats will also give the RAN the opportunity to further Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell’s goal of increasing the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ADF. In a similar concept to the army’s regional surveillance units, such as the North-West Mobile Force (or Norforce, as it’s more commonly known) and the 51st Far North Queensland Regiment, the RAN could recruit crews for one or two of the boats from the Torres Strait Islands and Tiwi Islands.

Both the Tiwis and the Torres Strait have a history of seafaring and their locations mean they’re already invested in the security of the north. While maintenance would be conducted in Darwin, the boats could share the homeporting at NT Port and Marine’s facility on Melville Island near Darwin and on Queensland’s Thursday Island.

Training programs designed around the Cape class to develop these crews could be conducted through the Navy Indigenous Development Program. As Campbell has said, increased recruitment of Indigenous Australians to the ADF will create a more inclusive and agile workforce, ‘bringing diversity, bringing insights, bringing perspective that we cannot otherwise realise’.

While Defence is investing in capability and infrastructure for an enhanced naval presence, the Australian and Northern Territory governments and the private sector all have roles to play. Darwin needs to be ready to accept the increased numbers of personnel and their families. That will mean providing more educational and recreational facilities for families and employment opportunities for partners.

The success of the regional maintenance hub will rely on industry investing in facilities and providing the workforce to fill the range of roles required to support and sustain the force. Inpex Australia’s LNG project has shown that Darwin can sustain an ‘if there are jobs people will come’ model. While this may work for the private sector in major critical infrastructure projects, defence industry may require further guarantees to secure its workforce.

The investment in new facilities and ships in the north provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build an interlinked mutual support system. By working together, all parties can optimise the investment to make sure that national and regional security are strengthened.

Has the cost of Australia’s future submarines gone up? Part 2

In the first part of this series, we saw that by late 2015, before the Defence Department had received industry responses in the competitive evaluation process for selecting the designer and builder of the future submarines, its cost estimate for the program was $50 billion ‘outturned’.

A defence white paper and supporting investment program were released on 25 February 2016. By that time, Defence had had industry responses to the competitive evaluation tender for nearly three months, so it would have had time to adjust the $50 billion figure if it had been incorrect.

But the estimate wasn’t changed, other than the addition of a ‘greater than’ sign—‘>$50bn’. Defence works in outturned dollars, which takes inflation into account, and there was nothing in the 2016 investment program to suggest the number was different.

However, at Senate estimates hearings in late May 2018, the program head, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, stated that the acquisition cost estimate was ‘$50 billion on a constant price basis’. I estimated at the time that in outturned dollars that would be around $79 billion. Since then, Defence has been using an $80 billion outturned figure as equivalent to its $50 billion constant figure.

How did the estimate go from $50 billion outturned to $80 billion outturned in the space of two years? First, we should note that Sammut also implied at the May 2018 hearings that the cost hadn’t changed since DCNS was announced as the preferred contractor on 26 April 2016:

Senator Patrick: It has been two years since DCNS, now Naval Group, were announced the winners. You’ve done a bit of work. Are there any updated costs on the acquisition for the submarine?

Rear Adm Sammut: It’s still in the order of $50 billion based on the work that we’ve done to date on early design activities.

Senator Patrick: Do you have any idea of, say, the design cost or the build costs?

Rear Adm Sammut: Those costs are being determined in greater detail as we complete preparations to enter the full contract for design and build of the submarine. At this stage, as I said, total acquisition for the 12 submarines is remaining at $50 billion.

If the $50 billion constant/$80 billion outturned estimate hadn’t changed since Naval Group was selected, then the window in which the estimate increased must have been between the receipt of bids from the participants in the competitive evaluation process at the end of November 2015 and the announcement in April 2016.

What caused the change? Recently there’s been discussion—for example, at Senate estimates—about whether the Commonwealth has been commercially ‘captured’ by Naval Group because it chose a single provider too early, exposing itself to cost increases. While that’s an ongoing risk to guard against, it doesn’t explain cost increases during the competitive evaluation process when there was still competitive tension.

There are likely two reasons for the growth of the estimate during the competitive evaluation process. The first is that Defence’s $50 billion outturned figure was already too low. ASPI’s 2009 estimate of $36.5 billion constant becomes around $42 billion constant when rebaselined to 2015. Outturned, that becomes $67 billion.

The second reason for the increase is the more demanding performance requirements. The 2016 white paper moderated the requirements for the future submarine by dropping its strategic strike role, which should also have reduced the cost. But the white paper also introduced the undefined term ‘regionally superior’. If anything was going to lead to an open-ended expansion of requirements, that would be it.

The Attack class will be in around 4,500 to 5,000 tonnes, up to 50% larger than the Collins. The size is no doubt driven by the range and endurance requirements, but it’s also related to the pump-jet that will propel it. The acoustic benefits of a pump-jet appear to have been a key discriminator in Defence’s selecting DCNS over the other competitors. But a pump-jet is viable on a conventional submarine only if it’s big. It’s not clear whether the Attack class is big because it uses a pump-jet, or, conversely, is capable of operating a pump-jet because it is big. Either way, the Attack class is big. That is a key cost driver, and there are likely others.

ASPI’s original estimate of $67 billion was for a 4,000-tonne submarine, so an additional 500 to 1,000 tonnes per boat gets the figure close to $80 billion in a parametric cost estimate. If we also take into account the overheads associated with being the parent navy for what is essentially a unique class of submarine, it’s easier to see how the cost became $80 billion as Defence worked through the competitive evaluation process and understood what it was getting itself and the country into. Unfortunately, it didn’t update the price tag in the 2016 white paper so that the country would also know what it was on the hook for.

We don’t need speculation about whether the French are taking advantage of us to understand why the future submarine is costing $80 billion. Those who think that the Germans can deliver something similar for only $20 billion are deluding themselves and simply wishing away the iron laws of defence costing. An extremely large, unique, manned conventional submarine that seeks to be ‘regionally superior’ will inevitably come at an exquisite cost, regardless of who designs and builds it.

We are potentially at the end of the development curve for conventional submarines. Andrew Davies has written, ‘We are investing many billions of dollars to get small, incremental improvements in stealth, range and endurance while the counter-technologies are on the cusp of massive, and potentially relatively cheap, increases in performance.’ Keeping the future submarine regionally superior means being superior not only to adversary submarines, but to the full range of counter-technologies—a challenging, expensive and increasingly futile task.

Defence has stated that the future submarine will be built in batches, with the design progressively updated to adapt to developing technologies. It would be interesting to know how much funding Defence has factored into its $80 billion cost estimate to keep the design regionally superior, because that quixotic chase will surely be a source of future cost growth.

The looming threat of sea mines

In mid-2018, the Chinese navy conducted one of the largest mine warfare exercises in living memory, involving some 60 minelayers and minesweepers, aircraft and submarines practising laying and countering live mines. This unprecedented exercise, supported by some of China’s top scientists and mine development specialists, increased the already growing unease about China’s expansion into the South China Sea.

Some 10 years ago, a US Naval War College study revealed that China possessed over 100,000 sea mines, and that their use was fundamental to its strategy of constraining US naval forces operating in Beijing’s area of interest. While, at the time, most strategists saw this as a direct reference to the Taiwan Strait and North Korea, that’s no longer so.

With China’s expansion into the South China Sea and its militarisation of several reefs far from its shores, its minelaying forces have a more expansive role to play. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has a fleet of ships and conventional submarines with crews that are well practised, and indeed lauded, for their minelaying skills. They also possess very capable minelaying aircraft. The exercise demonstrated China’s commitment to mine warfare as a pillar of its naval strategy.

Notwithstanding China’s potent capabilities in laying mines, many strategists wrongly believe they’ll be used in offensive operations, but they’re more versatile than that.

One possible scenario is that China will use its growing mine stocks in a period of tension to further control access to areas surrounding its South China Sea claims by laying protective minefields—or even just claiming to. International law allows for protective mining in a nation’s own waters, though an international court has ruled against part of China’s claim after it was challenged by the Philippines. By announcing the presence of such protective fields, it would provide the necessary warning to all comers. The answer, then, is for concerned nations to do something about the mines.

In 2018, Senator Jim Molan and the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Andrew Hastie, drew attention to the parlous state of Australia’s fuel stocks with only three weeks’ supply in the country. All of Australia’s imported fuel passes through the Malacca Strait via Singapore and through other narrow passages through the Indonesian archipelago. We are particularly vulnerable to the closure of any of these vital seaways.

So how well prepared is Australia to counter a mining incident to our north, or near our priority ports or trade routes? After six Huon-class coastal minehunters were built in the late 1990s, two of the ships were laid up in 2014 due to defence cut backs. Both were so badly cannibalised that they have since been sold. The Royal Australian Navy once had a world-class minesweeping capability but it’s seldom used now.

It was recently announced that the four remaining Huon-class vessels will not have life-of-type extensions but will be retired within five years. A very modest program to introduce a minesweeping and mine-hunting capability is running years late and will provide an almost experimental-level capability of small individual technologies. The government announced last year that two steel-hulled ships, based on the offshore patrol vessel, will be built in Western Australia and designated for mine countermeasure operations to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of the Huons.

It appears that these ships will be built without any shock hardening, magnetic degaussing system or acoustic silencing and will carry some autonomous systems augmented by other systems yet to be announced. So, it would seem that the answer to the question ‘how prepared are we?’ is self-evident.

Close to two decades of underinvestment and neglect has once again rendered the navy’s mine-clearing force impotent. The last major strategic review, in 1991, was highly critical of the lack of attention to the mine threat and called for action. Out of that inquiry came the six coastal minehunters, a command support system, new sweeping systems, exercise mines and a completely rebuilt headquarters at HMAS Waterhen in Sydney.

Fast-forward to 2020 and we now face a much greater mine threat in our region than ever before, with most of our mine-hunting capability in decline—even though Australia remains totally dependent on sea-borne trade. A potential adversary to our north has the mine stocks, aircraft and submarines to completely shut down all sea traffic into our ports or sea lines of communication.

If our strategic situation turns bad, our maritime lifeline can easily be targeted, and we don’t have the means to stop that happening.