Let's have a Charter of Defence Honesty. A key part might be to institutionalise the role of the CDF in publicly giving his expert opinion on what is needed in Defence. The Charter would have to ensure that what the CDF said is understandable because he is speaking to uninitiated voters and the military is normally unintelligible.

In the absence of a direct and recognisable threat, a Charter would also need to impose some mechanism such as a 'generic operational concept' to manage long-term defence planning. Such a concept is key because it states 'The How' of defence and not just 'The What'. At some stage you always come down in voters' minds to numbers of major pieces of equipment, but without the voters understanding what the expert considers to be the need we can at no stage understand the risk that the government is taking in underfunding defence.

Alan Dupont's view that we might be able to fund other capabilities by having fewer subs and fighters can only remain Alan's personal opinion. His and my judgment about the mix of capabilities is much less than that of the one national expert, the CDF, yet he is not allowed to tell us. So we will never know if 100 fighters or 12 subs is sufficient, because we don't know the answer to the basic question: 'Sufficient for what?'

Photo by Flickr user luigioss.

One of the 2009 White Paper's most widely recognised failings was the paper-thin (literally) discussion of how to pay for its changes. Yet, aside from a few good reports that specifically examine defence funding, most defence-related papers still separate the strategy and the equipment from explicit discussion of how to fund them.

To reiterate, it is the Government's responsibility to decide between these perennial differences, and if anything I wish there was ten times as many people arguing and discussing these issues. But, after the intense criticism of the 2009 White Paper and, assuming the plan for a 2014 White Paper is still in place, the wider defence community should spend the next two years trying to find some common ground that can give the federal Government a solid direction.

Given the current Government is somewhat distracted from defence issues, while the Opposition is showing little interest in them, if the wider defence community isn't helping to set the country's path, who will?

The Navy's inability to deploy any of its three amphibious transport ships in February 2011, following Cyclone Yasi, forced a review of maintenance procedures and an interim restructuring of the transport fleet. The Collins' problems prompted the Coles Review, which, in its interim report, identified many deficiencies. Late last month, the Chief of Navy indicated that operations by Armidale class patrol boats, the major component of maritime border security, would be reduced for the rest of 2012; the fleet has been overworked since 2005 and requires urgent maintenance. And last week it was revealed that the aging support ship, HMAS Success, was the next focus of fleet maintenance problems.

I suspect that the Minister has deferred consideration of the future submarine Cabinet submission hoping the final report of the Coles Review, due this month, can provide viable solutions.

Sustaining the operational capability of submarines is a challenging and central issue in submarine warfare. It has generally been frustrating and expensive. The first major maintenance docking of an RAN Oberon class submarine, HMAS Oxley, was performed at the Vickers Cockatoo Island, Sydney, facility of the boat's overseas builder. Finished in 1973, it took longer and cost more than the original purchase. By the 1980s these five-yearly refits were costing four times the acquisition price of the submarines.

The Collins fleet was intended to avoid these costs and improve availability through local production, eight-year refit cycles and other factors. Instead, for a number of reasons outlined in the interim Coles Report, sustainability of the Collins class has been poor.

A more direct strategy to minimise maintenance demands was considered early in the Collins evolution. Important items of equipment, usually mounted outside the pressure hull, could be located inside to reduce exposure to seawater. However, none of the submitted designs met this requirement and the performance sacrificed by limiting space within the pressure hull saw the end of the concept.

Such prioritisation is not unusual. The Astute class (pictured), latest of British submarines, was to have been developed to reduce costs of ownership and improve availability. Instead, the pressures of design and production approval deadlines relegated requirements for sustainment; in service, maintenance and support of the class has become an expensive challenge.

Some 30 years ago, major air forces decided that they could not continue with aircraft that required over 100 personnel maintenance hours for every hour flown. Most combat aircraft from the F-16 onwards have been designed with reduced costs of ownership as a key acquisition objective. This design philosophy has not yet reached the world of submarines but, for a Navy bedeviled with fleet maintenance problems, a future submarine designed from the outset to minimise cost of ownership and increase availability should be very attractive.

Decisions on such acquisition objectives are some way downstream from the other requirements to meet strategic policy. Yet, unavoidably, the engineering complexity of designing a submarine to meet all naval requirements does not allow for a neat streaming of decision-making, especially when the processes of strategic policy seem to be incomplete and the future submarine project is already years behind schedule.

So, how to derive numbers in such an imperfect world? Under the old 'rule of three', six Oberon submarines provided a long-term average of two available for operations. Data on Collins availability has been withheld for some years, so the best that can be offered from observation is a guess that average Collins availability over the last decade has been between two and three boats.

Then, if your strategic policy indicates advantages from increasing submarine warfare capability, a doubling in your fleet size provides increased capacity with insurance against submarine sustainability remaining frustrating and expensive.

Annoyingly impure as this real-world approach may be, it may carry something of its own internal corrective. In practice, it will be impossible for the RAN to absorb 12 new submarines in a continuous flow. The acquisition process will have to be staged over several batches. In the process, real metrics on the operational effectiveness and availability of the future submarines will be assembled. That data will give a clearer idea of how many submarines Australia really needs.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Defence Images.

In relation to the strike fighter, it is quite imprudent for Australia to scramble for early deliveries of the JSF, which is obviously still deficient in critical respects. The early models of every new US combat aircraft have historically been put into production hastily with still incomplete systems development. They later require costly upgrades or are relegated to National Guard squadrons as soon as 'debugged' aircraft come off the line. Until well-tested aircraft become available, our core needs can be maintained by the Super Hornet and/or upgraded regular F/A-18 Hornets such as seem to satisfy Canada's needs.

As a passing comment on the recent Shanahan/White exchange on strike fighter numbers, the figure of about 100 dates back far further than Hugh White's story. There were 100 Mirage fighters (pictured) ordered in the early 1960s. Shanahan's plea for a 'more rigorous examination of capability requirements' in Australia's strategic environment, with no credible threat, needs more than rigour — we could not do better than to return to a freshened-up 'core force' approach which accepts that any decision made now might need to be revisited at some later stage.

As for the submarines, if there was ever any basis for doubling the current submarine force numbers, it is likely to have been more related to at least moderating the grotesque unit cost of rebirthing the South Australian facility since the expensively developed skills of building the last six submarines will have drained to nothing before a new order appears. 

The size of the Collins class submarine was driven by a quite puffed-up value of operations as far from Australia as the Soviet Union's north Asian naval bases, to the detriment of their ability to operate in the mostly shallow waters of the Indonesian archipelago and the South China Sea. Existing and prospective submarines more suited to the regional  environment can be delivered by existing manufacturers at much less than half the cost and risk of the kind of submarine currently envisaged, and the numbers could be topped up if needed.

Finally, Jim Molan's proposition that Australia should rely on the Chief of Defence Force (CDF) as the 'institutional expert' takes us again into fantasy land, as does the notion that a 'generic operational concept' will solve everything. Decisions of the enormity of those so frequently confronted in the defence field and in our essentially benign strategic environment involve considerations far beyond today's military head, and to plan on the basis of a generic operational concept would be madness.

In more than a decade in Defence, I never found a top military officer who could rise above the experience and loyalties of a single-service lifetime or a perception that Australia's expenditure on defence was never enough. In our stable defence environment, national governments should always look for broadly-based advise on the huge expenditures involved in maintaining an appropriate defence force.

I am not suggesting that an analysis group such as was established in the 1970s could be created rapidly, even by a strong minister and a supporting CDF and departmental secretary. Its staff, both civilian and military, cannot be found from any specific pool. The past machinery was dismantled by the rightly nick-named 'Bomber' Beazley in the name of removing tension in Defence.

It takes courage for any Defence minister to question or, worse, set aside the advice of his military chiefs. The present minister can attest to that in far more modest issues relating to the hallowed 'chain of command'. But the cost to the nation of a contented military hierarchy in a peacetime democracy is high.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

No more than the former Great Powers of Europe can we expect these powers individually to play a large military role in strategic developments directly affecting Australia’s security in the foreseeable future.

And so it has proved. In the post-Vietnam era, Australia has been able to assume that we would not find ourselves fighting an Asian major power either alone or in support of the US. As long as that remained true we did not need large numbers of air and naval platforms. We needed only a core force to maintain the capacity to expand the capability if circumstances changed.

The question today is whether the judgment made in 1976 is still true. I do not think it is, for reasons I have rehearsed elsewhere. The post-Vietnam era of uncontested US primacy is over. Australia can no longer assume that major strategic shifts, taking decades to unfold, would have to occur before we might face the need to fight a major Asian power either with the US or, much more problematically, without.

That is because the major strategic shifts have already taken place. We are already in a more contested Asia, with clear and growing risk of major power conflict in which our interests would be closely engaged. In other words, we are now in the situation the core force concept was designed to prepare us for. This is why I argue that, if we are serious about exercising independent strategic weight, we need many more than six or even 12 submarines, and many more than 100 frontline aircraft.   

(PS: can I just say that Danielle Romanes' riposte to my aid post makes a very fair point. Thank you!)

Photo by Flickr user roger.karlsson.

 
Their ASPI report, 'Mind the Gap', centres on an 'inevitable' capability gap in the 2020s when Australia could find itself with no subs at all. A capability gap of that dimension gives any government a yawning credibility gap. So whatever the official policy might state about building 12 boats in South Australia, Canberra is looking at all sorts of ways to fill that gap. Davies and Thomson run through the options: 

• Extend the life of the Collins class.
• Buy off-the-shelf, thus sending to the bottom the grand aspirations of the White Paper but delivering smaller, 'relatively modern and reliable', boats.
• Buy nuclear attack submarines from the US.

Just to demonstrate how complicated this argument is, compare the ASPI report with the Kokoda Paper that Brice Pacey produced in January. Looking at the same set of facts, Pacey decides that the only option is to go the full White Paper route and build a son-of-Collins in order to get the 'unique combination of range, endurance and stealth' Australia requires, because: 

• No commercial off-the-shelf conventional submarine comes close to meeting Australia's needs.
• Nuclear subs would add an extra 30-40% to the costs, even if Australia had a nuclear industry and the supporting infrastructure.

A cabinet that sees long-term planning as something that might happen beyond next year's election does not want to grapple with any of this. But the capability gap so clearly identified by Davies and Thomson will start to deliver political pain. Muddling through with the Collins class is bad enough; having no subs at all hits at credibility.

The pain is forcing a rethink of one of the basic divides of Australian defence procurement – we buy planes off-the-shelf but want to build our own ships, even if submarines 'pose an extraordinarily complex task'  that stretches 'at the margins of Australia's present scientific and technological capacity.' This judgment about how submarines are a pressure test for Australian capabilities was offered in 2009 by a rare breed of politician – one with an engineering background. Read Greg Combet's submarine speech from his short period as Defence Material Minister to see a fine discussion of the strategic argument, the industrial and design challenges, the construction headaches and the sustainment issues that Australia knows so well from both the Oberon and the Collins experiences. 

Perhaps Combet could give Cabinet a quick tutorial, and point out to his colleagues that the terms of the argument are still what they were back in '09, but time is passing. And a decision not to make a decision does, indeed, amount to a choice.

Photo by Flickr user MATEUS_27:24&25.

Nonetheless, the 1987 approach did not remove a weakness of the Core Force concept. There was little stimulus to concentrate on the boring bits of military capability. Australia's intervention in East Timor in 2009 illuminated an almost complete blindness in force structure processes of the logistics requirements for supporting a force in the field. This became a dominant issue as Australia entered a decade of sustained military intervention overseas. As that decade proceeded, capability planning fragmented, with 'operational deficiencies' and ad hoc political decision-making eroding the Dibb-like process laid out in the 2000 White Paper.

Today, the utility of the Dibb approach is diminishing. His methodology of analysing regional military capabilities was useful because Australia could respond with a military force structure of significant advantage. Now this advantage is diminished and the trend is worsening with increased Asian prosperity.

The 2009 White Paper responded by wishing a level of performance that would outstrip anything available to Asian nations. Alas, this is increasingly revealed as a fiction. The F-35 fighter suffers delays and cost increases, the submarine project is something like a decade behind schedule and funding is insufficient to maintain the momentum of the 2009 White Paper's recommendations.

I agree with Hugh that we're into a fundamentally different strategic era. The situation is analogous to that of the early 1970s and Australia needs a new strategic concept to plan for its armed forces to meet the emerging strategic challenges. This doesn't mean I agree with Hugh that some sort of trigger point has been reached that demands we focus on acquiring more platforms (planes and submarines). This is because the numbers of such physical equipment is no longer the determinant of military success.

On the night of 19-20 March, a gross of cruise missiles and a leisurely early morning fly-over by three B-2 stealth bombers largely destroyed Libya's ability to detect threats, command its own forces and direct its weapons. NATO forces then conducted an unimpeded bombing campaign that, within a week or so, destroyed Libya's conventional military forces and reduced them to insurgents within their own country. The warning for all is that you must be fully competent in the digital facets of warfare or risk being reduced to third-world status at the beginning of any military conflict.

China is certainly aware of this development. It is, for instance, building its own global positioning satellite network to prevent the US hampering the People's Liberation Army by recoding the existing system's signals. And it has for some time conducted a sustained cyber intrusion campaign against Western government and commercial computer networks.

So, the numbers of fighters that Australia might buy are less critical issues than the capacity of its aerial early warning fleet or the conversion of Super Hornet fighters to electronic warfare aircraft. A little project to be decided in 18 months or so, to provide the Collins fleet with a networked warfare capability, will be as important as the number of future submarines Australia might buy, for this will largely determine how the Navy uses its new fleet and what it can expect to achieve with it.

I doubt Australia will end up buying 100 F 35 fighters and I suspect it will be close to the middle of the century before the RAN operates a 12-submarine fleet. With their glacial pace, both projects are likely to be overtaken by the momentum of the digital and social worlds. A chunk of the fighter role probably will be diverted to combat drones, as is already the planned for the RAAF's new maritime surveillance capability. The Navy, of late able to provide crews for only about three submarines, will find it difficult to quadruple the effort.

The new concept we need to guide the development of Australia's military capabilities must change from those we've used in the past. It must grapple with the pace of digital and societal change and provide security in an era where Australia may not be able to expect significant technological advantage over its neighbours. Having more of one sort of platform or another may be nice but it won't be the issue that determines Australia's future military competence.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

To my mind, and in spite of China's efforts to modernise its military forces, it is premature to announce the end of the preponderance of US maritime strength in Asia Pacific (and elsewhere). Will this predominance last forever? That's impossible to say, and it is possible to come up with versions of the future in which other countries will one day have such a command of defence technology and joint-force doctrine as to be able to eclipse the formidable capabilities that the US already possesses (and which it will continue to enhance well into the future).

But such a time is a long way off (decades, probably) and might never arrive. 

There is, in addition, the issue of policy choices for Australia, and how these might affect decisions on the size and shape of the ADF. But even here, experience tells us that it is necessary to have a sense of priorities: some national interests are more important than others, even within the region of which we are part. The North Pacific, with its potential flash-points, remains a considerable distance from Australia, and even the South China Sea, with its competing claims for sovereignty, can hardly be said to be proximate to Australia (though I would agree that there are some potential policy dilemmas for Australia here).

And a major assault on Australia? The challenges of major attack on Australia would be formidable, and much as was argued in earlier decades: the equipment, doctrine and skills required for contested amphibious assaults are specialist, expensive and difficult and time-consuming to attain, and Australia would defend itself with tenacity (a kind of Gallipoli in reverse). So time is of the essence here too.

I am conscious of having skated over many of the arguments (I've not mentioned economic influence and trade), but in summary, Australia's strategic circumstances are changing, and in thinking about their consequences we need to steer a course between complacency and alarm. But Armageddon is not just round the next corner. 

I would contend that, rather than having been overtaken by the future they were designed to prepare us for, the ideas of the core force, expansion base and warning time have come back into their own. They are now as important as ever. 

We do not need to panic about strategic deterioration but we do need to get a better grasp on the timescales that would apply to such deterioration. What would the indicators be? How and when might the Defence Force best be expanded? What could it mean for the size and shape of the core force, including any potential enlargement over the shorter term and consequences for Australia's industrial base? 

We might then be able to move beyond the seemingly half-baked arguments for doubling the number of submarines but not changing much else. The time for the core force is now!

Photo by Flickr user Aristocrats-hat.

In other words, having a bit of almost everything resulted over time in a number of costly, sometimes undeployable capital items and other misdirections. We certainly didn't get much bang for our bucks. Essentially, our defence force structure has been geared to mesh in with elements of the US's. Where the recent US deployments in Darwin might lead perhaps nobody yet knows.

Are we to repeat this approach now that the unrewarding Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns — essentially political deployments — are pretty much behind us? The most relevant deployment in the past period was that to East Timor, yet when it came to action we lacked much of the logistical capacity needed, while a lot of other military matériel lay around.

Given that invasion is an unlikely contingency, and given that the technology of warfare has undergone several revolutions since the 1970s, we need to refocus and adopt a force structure that gives advantage to area-denial strategies because of the relative vulnerability of attack-mode platforms. It is doubtful that heavy surface vessels would achieve this.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not predicting this scenario is at all likely. But I do not think defence policy can simply dismiss it. The possibility that the US will no longer play its accustomed strategic role in Asia is precisely what mobilises questions about our future capability needs, so we should be very careful about assuming the status quo. The old shibboleth that intentions can change faster than capabilities is true, and it is relevant here: America's intentions can change faster than our capabilities.

Third, I think Sam's argument assumes that the only reason we need what I'm calling 'middle power capabilities' is to defend the continent. My conception of Australia's strategic objectives is much broader than that, and includes supporting the US against China, if Chinese strategic ambitions prove too aggressive to be tolerable. So even if China cannot project power as far as Australia, we would still have reasons — less compelling, perhaps, but still compelling enough — to want middle power capabilities. Indeed we might need them very soon.     

In case anyone wonders how this sits with the arguments I have made elsewhere for accommodating China's power, let me explain. I set the threshold for what is tolerable from China rather higher than many others, but I'm as convinced as anyone of the need to resist if that threshold is crossed, and while I think the risk of China doing that is relatively low, keeping it low will depend in part on the probability of an effective and united regional response to Chinese transgressions being relatively high. 

I think there is a strong argument that Australia should have forces that can contribute significantly to that. On current trends, we won't.

Photo by Flickr user Leandro A Perez.

You could point to China's submarine fleet as an exception here; it has not only modernised quite rapidly (though it's still well behind the US and Russia) but patrols are becoming more frequent. Still, you don't need a fighter fleet to find submarines; you need anti-submarine aircraft and your own submarines. For those reasons and others, I support a larger sub fleet. But fighters? I just can't see it.

As for Australia needing 'middle-power strategic weight' for reasons other than China, don't we already have that now? When you make rough comparisons with other countries in our population and GDP range (the Netherlands, Canada) you find that our military forces are of similar weight. Of course, we face a more uncertain strategic environment than those countries do. But even when you make the more important comparison, that with our regional neighbours, you find that Australia is comfortably ahead of all Southeast Asia, with the partial exception of Singapore. Why isn't that enough?