Page 106 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

106 SEAPOWER SURFACE COMBATANTS
MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
21ST CENTURY SEA CONTROL – TIME FOR NEW APPROACHES?
ANDREW DAVIES | CANBERRA
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the ASPI Strategist arguing that surface combatants have no future in modern high-end warfare – a continuation of an argument I first floated at an ASPI conference a few years ago.
MY view is they are too vulnerable to modern anti-ship sys- tems, despite an increasingly large proportion of their on- board systems devoted to self-defence. Given that vulner- ability, I think there are more reliable ways of delivering at least some of the strategic effects traditionally the remit of surface ships. We haven’t noticed the decline in efficacy of ships because there have been no peer-on-peer naval battles for many decades.
I expected to receive a bucketing over my views. After all, we are about to invest well over $100 billion on surface ves- sels and submarines, so evidently plenty of influential peo- ple are convinced that it’s worth doing. But, to my surprise, there was little pushback and I received correspondence from some now retired but very senior naval officers that
disagreed on some points but were in general concurrence with my concerns.
To be clear—and to reiterate a point I made previously for ADM in the context of armour for land forces—capability is capability, and I’m not saying the vessels we’re planning to acquire are useless. In many plausible circumstances their firepower and persistence will make valuable contributions to deterring interference with maritime activities. They should also be capable of successfully conducting warfight- ing activities against the navies of middle or lesser powers,
BELOW: A P-8A Poseidon overflies HMAS Hobart during Exercise Tasman Shield 21
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