James Goldrick’s recent post for The Strategist shows that many classes of submarine remain in service for a period of 30–40 years. By this calculation alone, the Collins Class won’t need to retire until the …
Australia’s seventh Defence White Paper was announced as we approach the 40th anniversary of the first Defence White Paper, tabled in Parliament in November 1976. A 40th anniversary is an appropriate time to reflect on …
Fifty years ago this month Robert Menzies retired from Parliament, after a record-breaking 16 years as Prime Minister (in addition to an earlier term of just over two years in 1939–41) and having won seven …
Part of my summer reading has been British naval historian Geoffrey Till’s excellent 2014 book Understanding victory: naval operations from Trafalgar to the Falklands. At first glance it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone …
Political controversy, design issues and a logistics foul up, including a failure to allocate the resources to sustain the capability—there are some strikingly familiar themes in the acquisition of Australia’s first submarines, two 700-tonne E-class …