My previous post on the future submarines talked about having a Plan B in case the project runs into insurmountable problems. In his response, Jon Stanford seconded the need for an insurance policy. So on …
I welcomed Andrew Davies’s critique of the Insight Economics report on the future submarine (PDF), of which I was the principal author. Davies substantially agrees with our findings about the major risks associated with the …
I was interested to see a new approach to submarine procurement pitched by Hugh White and Michael Keating last week. They got quite a bit of media coverage, as tends to be the case for …
The 2016 Defence White Paper, the Naval Shipbuilding Plan, and associated statements by political figures such as Prime Minister Turnbull and Defence Industry Minister Pyne have all advocated the need for enhanced anti-submarine warfare (ASW) …
For Australia to operate a fleet of nuclear submarines would require great resources and incur a huge expense, says United States Pacific Fleet commander Scott Swift. Any country pursuing nuclear-powered vessels, ships, aircraft carriers or …
James Mugg’s recent piece made a convincing case that the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability of surface combatants is more about the aircraft they embark than about systems on the ships themselves. In this post I …
Arguing the case for nuclear-powered submarines, Tony Abbott laments that, under plans to acquire French-designed conventional submarines, the RAN will take delivery of a class that: will have less power, less range, less speed and …
At the Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Ltd (MDL) yard in Mumbai, ‘Venki’ Venkatesan is considered something of a tyrant. He’s the quality control manager and a key part of the team overseeing every tiny stage in …
Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is an arcane science (and perhaps its practitioners prefer it that way), but it’s an incredibly important part of naval warfare. It’s also notoriously difficult—like trying to find the needle in a …
Keeping the country safe is the first duty of government and should be the constant concern of those with responsibility for our well-being. But I worry that a decade or so hence, maybe sooner, Australia …
Today I’m coming back to a subject long dear to me—the cost of the Future Submarine program. Long term followers of the subject might recall ASPI’s 2009 paper How to buy a submarine (PDF), which …
Japan’s population is set to decline 31%, to 88 million people, by 2065—and that’s good news. Not because a smaller population is necessarily good—although that case can be made—but because the projected drop is an …