Page 4 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2023

4 EDITORIAL
APRIL 2023 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
THERE’S WORK TO BE DONE
NIGEL PITTAWAY | MELBOURNE
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WELL, we now know how Australia intends to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability to replace the Navy’s ageing Collin-class diesel boats.
Unless you’ve been off-grid for the past few weeks, you’ll know that Prime Min- ister Anthony Albanese, together with his US and UK counterparts, announced this country’s largest ever investment in defence capabilities in March. This will come at a cost to the Australian taxpayer of an estimated $368 billion – that’s 368 thousand million dollars – over the next 30 years.
In a nutshell, the AUKUS partnership will work to oversee delivery of the first of at least three, possibly five, US Virginia- class attack submarines to Australia in the 2030s. In the meantime, both the Royal Navy and the US Navy will increase the
ture across three states, but also the at- traction and retention of huge numbers of industry and defence personnel.
Each Virginia-class submarine, for ex- ample, has a crew of around 130 – about three times that of each Collins boat. It would seem therefore that just two Virgin- ia-class submarines will absorb the entire RAN submarine force of today.
While recruiting ads are already be- ing shown on television and across social media, that’s a lot of new people to be re- cruited and trained in the next decade. Of course, the US Navy will make up some of that shortfall through the temporary transfer of its own personnel and RAN submariners are already training on US submarines in the interim.
Australia’s shipbuilding industry is al- ready struggling to train skilled workers for the surface ships currently under con- struction and how these will be retained and/or transferred to the future submarine program remains to be seen.
Changing topics, you’ll find a compre- hensive run-down of the recent Avalon Airshow by ADM’s team on the ground be- ginning on page 18.
In many ways, Avalon was a huge suc- cess, with tickets sold out across all three public days. From a trade perspective there was a lot to talk about, despite the restric- tionsimposedbytheloomingDefence StrategicReview,andapentupinterestin face to face discussions post-COVID.
Looking to the immediate future, ADM’s Northern Australian Defence Summit will again be held in the Darwin Exhibition Centre on 17 May and on 23 May, the 2023 Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace (LIMA) exhibition kicks off on the resort island of Langkawi.
You can read a preview of the latter on page 36 of this issue and future editions of ADM will have comprehensive reports from both events.
In the meantime, of course, there’s still the long-awaited public release of the DSR to look forward to. ■
“IT WOULD SEEM THEREFORE THAT JUST TWO VIRGINIA-CLASS SUBMARINES WILL ABSORB THE ENTIRE RAN SUBMARINE FORCE OF TODAY”
presence of nuclear- powered submarines in Australian ports from 2026. Eventual- ly we will begin con- struction of our own submarines – built to an as-yet undeter- mined UK design – in Adelaide sometime in the 2040s.
As ADM’s Senior Correspondent Ju- lian Kerr writes in
his report on the AUKUS deal in the news pages of this issue, acquiring – and build- ing – a nuclear-powered submarine is a whole of nation undertaking. An under- taking which hopes to see the creation of around 20,000 jobs, many of them requir- ing specialised skills that do not exist in this country at the present time.
If Australia is going to make this work as planned there is much to do and a lot of things have to go to schedule. This in- cludes not just submarine construction, the growth of nuclear engineering exper- tise (something which can’t be acquired overnight) and construction of infrastruc-