Page 56 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2019

PACIFIC
HYPERSONICS
“The RAN has neither sunk nor lost a vessel in battle since WWII. That is the edge of living memory.”
costly and almost certain to end in failure. The second is already happening.
Hypersonics won’t kill the warship. Friction already has.
The enemy has voted
Warships died when nuclear deterrence forced revisionist states like China to achieve their foreign policy goals short of open war with a peer competitor. Hence why the US Navy has only sunk one ma- jor surface combatant in the last seven
decades. The RAN has neither sunk nor lost a vessel in battle since WWII. That is the edge of living memory.
This is not to say that ves- sels sunk or lost is a measure of warships’ value. As many readers will point out, war- ships remain useful for trans- porting military and humani-
tarian supplies, conducting anti-piracy patrols, border protection operations and sanctions enforcement, engaging in naval diplomacy, and from time to time, ship-to-shore bombardments against non-peer adversaries.
It is to say that in the context of craft- ing a force posture to guard against a nuclear-armed peer competitor like Chi- na, warships are already dead. They are a right of boom tool confronting a left of boom problem.
As Professor Davies argues: “Large and slow multi-billion-dollar platforms constrained to a two-dimensional sur- face have little future. In fact, I think we passed that point decades ago but nobody noticed because there hasn’t been a large- scale maritime conflict between near-peers since 1945.”
Left of boom friction – conflict fought below a threshold of violence that calls for the use of hypersonic missiles and war- ships – has already redrawn the strategic map of Asia. China has used a maritime militia of fishermen and oil rigs backed by lightly armed cutters to seize reefs and islands throughout the South China Sea, which it has subsequently fortified with precision missiles to erode US naval pri- macy in the Western Pacific.
Beijing has also used media operations to influence foreign news coverage of these occupations, used ‘lawfare’ to challenge in- ternational legal norms and jurisdictions, sent scientific research ships to conduct re- connaissance of seabed lines of communi- cation, applied targeted economic pressure to force other states to withdraw military forces, and deterred military intervention with diplomatic and cyber threats. It is now expanding these methods to the South Pa- cific. What help were our warships?
Some might argue that warships remain valuable in other ways. How else can a navy conduct anti-submarine warfare, protect sea lines of communication or en- force distant blockades?
But these tasks are not the exclusive domain of large warships. As Professor Davies notes, China’s ‘civilian’ maritime militia is already capable of keeping US submarines out of the Taiwan Strait. It is easy to imagine this ‘fishing fleet’ using data gathered from an extensive seabed sensor network and autonomous under- sea gliders to detect and track subma- rines, which could then be targeted by unmarked and unmanned platforms. The same militia could also enforce a left of boom blockade similar to the one Russia is currently enforcing in the Sea of Azov against Ukraine.
In any case, warships are already un- able to protect our sea lines of commu- nication from Chinese ‘research ves- sels’, which are mapping seabed internet cables and deploying robots that could tap or sever them in a conflict. They have also been demonstrably unable to stop China seizing reefs and islands by left of boom means to then expand its precision
56 | October 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au