Sinking of submarine deal a sign of hopelessness

If the acquisition of 12 French-­designed conventional submarines does fall over — if Canberra actually takes an off-ramp — it will not be a sign of a new hard-headedness in defence acquisitions.

It would be a sign of utter hopelessness and an inability to stick to even the most basic of decisions.

And it would almost certainly mean we would end next decade without any modern subs at all.

Any exit ramp would be incredibly expensive in dollars — literally money for nothing — but even more expensive in time.

Australia is like the traveller in the Irish joke.

How do we get to our destination of a capable submarine force as soon as possible? Answer: don’t start from here.

But here is where we are.

No one has been more critical of the subs acquisition process than me — it’s been a national ­disgrace for much more than a decade.

But the chief problem with the French subs is nothing technical, it’s that they’re going to take so long.

However, there are ways we could accelerate the build. Once we’ve built the first, we could probably build one a year instead of one every two years, a schedule designed to support the permanent build culture rather than get capability as soon as possible.

Much of the cost has nothing to do with French avarice but flows from our decision that the subs be built, or at least assembled, in South Australia. But we have had a series of elections which have ­established that as a national decision which is now settled.

The subs are opposed by a motley crew of earnest and patchily informed ex-officials, other cranks and conspiracy theorists who know not much about defence at all, and those who don’t believe we should spend a lot of money on defence at all, or even have subs at all.

Every jackass claims to know better than the Australian navy just how subs work.

All big new defence capabilities are over time, over budget and have early problems.

There is one way to avoid all that: don’t have a defence capability at all.

The coalition against the French subs has several elements. One is folks who favour nuclear subs.

There is no doubt nuclear subs would be more capable and better. But there is not the slightest chance that we could get one in the next several decades.

Virtually all nations which run nuclear subs have some kind of nuclear industry, normally a ­nuclear power industry.

You cannot just buy a nuclear sub on the internet. Our most ­likely suppliers, the Americans, would need to be convinced this was a deeply settled, bipartisan commitment, that it would not make the alliance an issue of partisan dispute, that even if the Labor Party agreed the inevitable anti-nuclear campaign by the Greens would not sway Labor.

Here’s a challenge for nuclear sub advocates. How about you convince one side of politics to embrace nuclear power, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide energy security?

We cannot even decide on a place to store the tiny amount of nuclear waste we generate in medical laboratories. There are no shortcuts in this business. If you want nuclear subs, build a nuclear industry. Best case scenario, we would still be decades away.

Those who want a larger number of short-range European subs really want to make sure we can never join the Americans, our real defenders, in any regional operation.

And those sublimely dotty folks who think subs are already obsolete technology should break that news to every significant navy in the world, all of which are building subs at a great rate.

A sub-optimal capability delivered late and over budget is still infinitely better for our national security than no capability at all, which is the alternative.