Defence Review: Australia must increase military power — and fast
In a turbulent and darkly threatening environment, the Albanese government is about to announce a series of fateful decisions designed to put our defence capability on steroids.
Anthony Albanese, possibly next week but no later than the week after, will stand with Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak in Washington to announce the nuclear-propelled submarine Australia will get under AUKUS, while the world unravels into an intense and bitter system of three-way hostility and suspicion.
The AUKUS leaders perfectly symbolise one point of global leadership – the US and its allies. Ranged against them is the new alignment led by China, which includes Russia and Iran, and the dependencies of those three nations: North Korea, Belarus and various Iranian proxies.
The third player is the global south, which still tends to see the US as the dominant global power, so their popular opinion is often sullen, if not downright hostile to Washington.Their leaders play Washington against Beijing, seeking attention and money from both. Thus South Africa joins naval exercises with China and Russia but also wants global warming payments from the West.
Polarisation between the US-led and China-led blocs is growing. A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows China gaining an edge in key hi-tech research.
There’s no pretty way to say this, but the chance of major power war is increasing. It’s still not likely, but it’s more possible than at any time since the height of the Cold War.
In this turbulent and darkly threatening environment, the Albanese government is about to announce a series of fateful decisions designed to put our defence capability on steroids. Albanese will stand beside Biden and Sunak, three unlikely partners in a civilisational project to weave together three industrial bases and make them bigger than the sum of their parts.
We’re still agonisingly short of knowing exactly what the nuclear submarine will be. When it makes the AUKUS announcement, the government will probably also reveal the site of the new nuclear submarine base to be built on the east coast. The hot tip is Port Kembla, though no one knows for sure. If it is Port Kembla, this will help with the navy’s most debilitating difficulty – recruitment. Not every naval officer – and certainly not every naval officer’s spouse – wants to live in Perth, where the Stirling submarine base is located. Opening a submarine base near Sydney will do more than anything to help recruitment.
The late mail was that we would be getting an evolved design from the British Astute nuclear attack sub. But Peter Dutton shook up the debate by pointing out the obvious. The design of a brand-new sub, which is what an evolved Astute with an American combat system (which we are rightly and deeply attached to) would be, would take at least 10 years. Then probably another decade to build the first boat.
You can’t start building until the design is finished. The Brits have only just started the design process for the successor to the Astute. For the next 10 years, in any event, they’ll be fully occupied building the replacement for their much bigger guided missile submarines, which carry nuclear weapons and which must always be able to survive any attack on Britain so they can exercise a second strike. This threat of a second strike is the ultimate deterrent.
The Opposition Leader, though much criticised by the government, makes a pretty rational case that the Virginia would be right for Australia. It’s the world’s best nuclear sub, it’s an existing and evolving design. Even the successor to the Virginia will probably use the same reactor and the same combat system as the Virginia, which is the same as we use in the Collins.
But the Americans, like the Brits, are 100 per cent occupied with their own requirements. Nuclear submarines are one area where the Americans are clearly superior to the Chinese, but they don’t have enough subs for the jobs they must do.
Leaders still talk mysteriously of a “common AUKUS sub”. What can this mean? Could it be that we start by building, in Adelaide, a Virginia or two and then switch to the AUKUS sub when it’s finally designed? This is not as daffy as it sounds. If there is to be a common AUKUS sub, it means it has to be powerful enough to satisfy America’s military needs.
Perhaps the Australian and British version of the AUKUS sub could be a bit smaller. Then, instead of America struggling to produce enough nuclear subs in its two US yards, you have four yards – two in the US, one in Britain and one in Australia – all producing allied nuclear subs with an extremely high degree of interoperability.
The navy is much concerned with the crew size of the different subs. The Collins has a crew of 55, the Astute 98 and the Virginia 135. It would certainly be challenging to crew eight Virginias.
But by the time we have a fleet of eight nuclear subs, Australia’s population will be 50 per cent, or 70 per cent, more than now. There is less risk in crew size than there is in anyone other than the Americans being the lead designers of our new sub.
Vice-Admiral Jonathan Mead, who led Australia’s AUKUS sub study, has talked with confidence of being able to start the build of the new sub in Adelaide by 2030. Obviously Australia will need a massive amount of help to get to such an industrial capability by 2030. But it’s not absolutely out of the question.
In the meantime, what do we do about the capability gap, which we have right now with only six Collins subs when we identified, way back in 2009, that we urgently needed 12, and that in a much more benign strategic environment? More frequent visits by US and even British nuclear subs would give us some comfort but would not add to allied capability.
If we got a Virginia from the Americans late this decade or early next, it would come out of their line. A refuelled LA class nuclear submarine, though very old, would still be capable and could act as both a training boat and some kind of capability.
Here is a critical consideration for the government. This nuclear submarine program has its best chance of survival, its best chance of not losing community and political support, once a real, live, flesh-and-blood boat, bearing an Australian flag, comes along.
If it’s just a design, an empty shipyard and a budgeting process for the next 10 years it could well die the familiar death of a thousand cuts at Senate estimates hearings where every inevitable delay and cost overrun will get ventilated, dramatised and mocked.
Nuclear subs are a historic, game-changing, nation-building, security-defining investment for Australia. Whatever mishmash, hybrid process gets us one as quickly as possible is the way we must go.
In the meantime, we are going to have to face whatever dire security emergency comes along in the next 10 years without nuclear subs. These are very troubled days. It’s irresponsible to exaggerate the threat of war, it’s irresponsible to ignore the threat of war. Beijing could conclude, with the US distracted, Western armouries depleted by the righteous needs of Ukraine, and Western military manufacturing slow to respond to the new needs, that the correlation of forces regarding Taiwan favours them now more than it ever will in the future.
War in the Pacific would be disastrous for Australia. The best way to stop it is to have a powerful deterrent capability by the US and its allies. There are just so many uncertainties, so many different ways everything could play out, that Australia should give itself the maximum military effectiveness as soon as possible. Here’s where the Defence Strategic Review comes in.
It will be published in early April. The government will treat it like a budget lockup. The report is 157 pages long, with 18 chapters and 108 recommendations. The report’s public version will of course have the most sensitive material removed. One chapter will focus entirely on workforce issues as Defence has consistently failed to recruit enough people for the military and even for civilian roles. A big part of the report will concern the defence acquisition process, which in Australia is a bureaucratic disaster.
Defence Minister Richard Marles says the DSR will produce a new defence posture for the country. Former defence minister Kim Beazley suggests it will move from defence of Australia to deterrence from Australia, with the much-heralded move to long-range missiles, drones, aircraft and unmanned underwater vehicles designed to keep potential enemies at risk a long way from Australia. Apart from the “deterrence from Australia” mission, there will also be an emphasis on the ability to join with US-led forces in the Indo-Pacific, and the ability, if necessary, to lead a regional operation, presumably most likely in the South Pacific, ourselves.
As this column has previously noted, we’re likely to get three new air warfare destroyers, six mini-frigate corvettes that we can load with missiles, another squadron of F-35 aircraft, lots more missiles of various types, sea mines, aerial armed drones and underwater drones, plus hardening and expanding of our northern air bases, as well as missile defence systems for our northern bases and perhaps more broadly.
There will be an instruction to hurry up on the missile manufacturing initiative, and no doubt more money for the unmanned Ghost Bat plane, though that is still developmental and years at best from actual military deployment.
The government, in talking up the DSR, has created high expectations. That’s a very good thing. The Prime Minister, Marles, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy have set the government a high standard to live up to. They deserve credit for that. They would look, and be, utterly ridiculous if after all this they don’t produce significant increased military capabilities.
But given how much illusion, how much spin, how much outright intentional deception there is in defence, not to mention repeated vast unrealised promise, how can we tell if it’s real?
The best metric is the simplest. What is the quantum of spending, during the forward estimates (the next four years) above what has already been announced or budgeted for? How much above 2 per cent of GDP does the spending go?
And second, what new capabilities do we actually get within the next five years? So much of the kit on which Australia squanders precious dollars never actually comes into service. It’s always and forever in development. It’s important to keep doing developmental defence science, but it’s infinitely more important – let’s say that again, infinitely more important – to get weapons that work now. Any government spending commitment beyond the forward estimates is pretty much worthless. That may be too harsh. Ministers are sincere in their plans. But ministers come and go. You can’t rely on anything beyond the forward estimates. And we need capability right away.
There’s a lot of money in the defence budget that could be saved and directed at more effective weapons. Presumably the government will drop the ludicrous order for future tanks. The infantry fighting vehicle order is reported to come down from 450 to 290 or thereabouts. The troubled Hunter frigate program will likely be cut from nine to six and moved off into the future.
The government, paradoxically, is also saving huge money on submarines. Nuclear subs are immensely expensive but they are a long way away under any scenario. There will be some cost in establishing a submarine yard in Adelaide. This can be done only once we know what kind of sub we’re going to build. But the big money we were meant to be paying over the next few years on building the abandoned French subs will not be required.
Similarly, with corvettes, the simplest, best and quickest way to get them is to get Luerssen to stop building our oversized but undergunned offshore patrol vessels and switch to building the slightly larger corvettes and load them with missiles. We probably don’t need both OPVs and corvettes, and might have trouble crewing both. By negotiating with Luerssen to switch to a big order of corvettes we don’t have to pay it an enormous amount of money not to do something, as we did with the French when we cancelled their sub. And we can move almost straight away into one of their corvette designs.
There will be a lot of objection in Defence to this kind of common sense. But if the major muscle movements in the DSR involve new competitive tenders, new rounds of competition, then really we are a joke because that will take years and years. It would be a decision positively not to get capability in a relevant time frame.
There is a dismal but somewhat compelling line of analysis that holds that a lot of the Australian Defence establishment actually never wants a government in Canberra to have the ability to deploy serious combat power. The method for achieving this state of constant incapacity, where we can just manage to supplement American operations with niche deployments but no more, is the oldest bureaucratic tactic in the book – delay. This is often achieved by the pursuit of a distant dream of new technology to the utter neglect of the weapons available today in quantities that enable a strategic effect.
The queue for most of the weapons we need is already long. We are decades late to the effort of our own defence. When AUKUS and the DSR are announced, the government must move urgently.
More Coverage
