Page 110 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

110 SEAPOWER SURFACE COMBATANTS
MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
It’s perhaps not surprising that in all of the correspondence about my earlier piece there was no disagreement that the Hunter-class frigates are going to be inadequately armed, with only 32 missile cells per vessel. That compares to 48 each on the Hobart-class DDGs and a whopping 96 on the Flight 2 variants of the USN’s Arleigh
forms. I don’t think there is a single answer, but there are some complementary approaches we should be looking at.
Firstly, we should reduce our vulnerability to maritime in-
Burke destroyers. If you’re going to hang around for any length of time once weap- ons start flying, having a deep magazine is important.
“THE NEXT STEP IS TO PUT MORE THOUGHT INTO UPSTREAM DEFENCES, BY INTERDICTING THE ‘KILL CHAIN’ BEFORE THE PROBLEM BECOMES AN INCOMING MACH 3 WEAPON”
If the stakes are high enough, some losses
might be judged acceptable, provided the task
group can complete its mission. But there’s
the rub. Building survivability into intrinsi-
cally vulnerable platforms is expensive and,
as the threats to surface vessels have evolved,
the cost of protecting them has risen steeply.
As well as the intrinsic cost of sophisticated
long-range weapons and sensors, they come with substantial space and weight requirements. The result has been a steady increase in unit cost—and a commensurate decline in the size of fleets. The Royal Navy has shrunk considerably, and the USN fleet is a third its size compared to the 1960s—and is much smaller than navy planners would like. Even though each ship is more capable, the ocean is a big place and they can only be in one place at a time.
fuels by electrifying as much of our economy as we can. The next step is to put more thought into upstream de- fences, by interdicting the ‘kill chain’ before the problem becomes an incoming Mach 3 weapon. The aim would be to disrupt an adversary’s C4ISR systems enough to prevent vessels from being targeted in the first place. Cyber and
EW capabilities help in this respect.
BELOW: Hunting the hunter. HMAS Anzac taken by Submarine Warfare Officer's Course students through the periscope from HMAS Rankin
terdiction. We’ll fewer occasions ing stockpiles of
still need to contest the sea at times, but the on which that is required, the better. Hav- strategic materials, such as refined fuel and decent warstocks of munitions, in country would mean we wouldn’t be so reliant on offshore resupply in the early (and poten- tially most fraught) stages of a conflict. An- alysts have long pointed to Australia’s lack of a strategic fuel reserve and dwindling re- finery capacity as national vulnerabilities. The current government has taken some useful steps, but the ‘solution’ includes holdings the width of the Pacific Ocean away in the US, which does little to reduce maritime risk. It would be even better—for many reasons—to reduce our use of fossil
So what’s to be done? Giving up on the ability to have sea control at times isn’t an option for a nation dependent on the sea, but we also can’t keep pumping more and more funds into a small number of increasingly expensive plat-
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