Page 38 - Australian Defence Magazine July-August 2022

38 INFRASTRUCTURE DEFENCE BASES
JULY-AUGUST 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
HARDENING THE DEFENCES
In May 2021, China’s Global Times newspaper
published an op-ed from the editor-in-chief that suggested China ‘make a plan to impose retaliatory punishment’ should Canberra ‘militarily interfere’ in a conflict over Taiwan.
EWEN LEVICK | MELBOURNE
“THE plan should include long-range strikes on the military fa- cilities and relevant key facilities on Australian soil if it really sends its troops to China’s offshore areas and combats against the PLA,” the editorial said. “China has a strong production capability, including producing additional long-range missiles with conventional warheads that target military objectives in
Australia when the situation becomes highly tense.”
As China’s military capabilities have grown, including its long-range missile arsenal, so too has Australia’s need to harden military infrastructure – particularly intelligence and communication facilities such as those at North West Cape, and northern airfields such as RAAF Tindal (which is undergoing a $1.7 billion redevelopment). This has been well understood in government. Yet China’s recent forays into the Pacific in search of military basing options may alter the threat environ- ment for the Defence estate, particu- larly in northern Australia. Whilst the government has sought to acquire offensive strike options through the acquisition of nuclear-powered sub- marines, it must also now respond to the possibility of a non-aligned power establishing those same options for itself in the South Pacific – which, historically, has been the penultimate mission of Australian foreign and defence
policy, short only of protecting the continent itself.
AIR BASES
An Australian F-35 may be difficult to detect while it’s in the sky, but at some point it must return to one of only a few available airfields. Those are much easier to find – hence the old adage that the easiest time to defeat an air force is when it’s still on the ground.
The early days of the war in Ukraine are a lesson in the importance of hardening airfields against long-range mis- sile strikes. The resilience of Ukrainian air defences – par-
“CHINA’S RECENT FORAYS INTO THE PACIFIC IN SEARCH OF MILITARY BASING OPTIONS MAY ALTER THE THREAT ENVIRONMENT FOR THE DEFENCE ESTATE, PARTICULARLY IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA”
ticularly through Raytheon’s Stinger man-portable air de- fence systems and Russian-made S-300s – meant Russia relied heavily on cruise missiles to hit Ukrainian airfields in a failed attempt to achieve air superiority.
While Ukrainian airfields were hit, jets were often left in- tact, and enough runway was left for the Ukrainian Air Force to take-off and land (with some reports that Ukrainian pilots were also taking off from highways). Consequently, Russia has been unable to establish air superiority over Ukraine with obvious repercussions on the effectiveness of ground and sea operations.
An older lesson comes from World War 2: following US defeats in the Philippines and Indonesia, Australian air- fields proved crucial to the genesis of offensive operations to re-establish air parity near the Solomon Islands, allowing contested aerial resupply of allied forward defences in Papua New Guinea.