{"id":18307,"date":"2015-02-12T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T19:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=18307"},"modified":"2015-02-12T14:33:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T03:33:02","slug":"the-surface-fleet-the-question-of-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-surface-fleet-the-question-of-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"The surface fleet: the question of numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>Late last month, Ben Schreer introduced ASPI\u2019s upcoming international conference on Australia\u2019s Future Surface Fleet<\/em><\/a>. In doing so, he observed that many factors\u2014strategic, operational, international and industrial\u2014will shape decisions about the Navy\u2019s future surface fleet. He could also have added politics to the mix\u2014as the recent extraordinary machinations surrounding the role of ASC in the submarine program clearly demonstrate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fact of life that domestic politics will play a role in shaping the backbone of the surface fleet through the future frigate program<\/a>. Not just by making it highly likely that the vessels will be built in Australia<\/a>, but possibly also by expanding the size of the program to facilitate the \u2018continuous build\u2019 of vessels (with a fleet of only 11 surface combatants, a continuous-build program would result in either a wastefully truncated life-of-type<\/a> or an inefficiently slow rate of production).<\/p>\n

A fleet of 20 surface combatants would plausibly support a continuous-build program; one vessel could be built every 18 months and retained for 30 years. But do we really need 20 surface combatants? For that matter, do we need 12 submarines? It\u2019s one of the classic questions of defence planning; how much is enough?<\/p>\n

Ask Defence about planned fleet sizes and you\u2019ll be told that periodic Force Structure Reviews<\/a> use sophisticated analytic techniques to determine vessel numbers based upon their utility in specified scenarios (which are, naturally, classified). Sounds reasonable, but where do the scenarios come from? They\u2019re derived from an overarching classified document called the Defence Planning Guide which is updated annually and approved by government. An outline of Defence\u2019s labyrinthine internal planning processes can be found here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Importantly, while the scenarios are almost certainly informed by the latest intelligence analysis, they\u2019re not independently produced \u2018intelligence products\u2019 as such. Rather, they\u2019re policy constructs generated via Defence\u2019s internal risk-assessment process. That means Defence\u2019s planners live in a closed loop where they ultimately set their own goalposts. If you control the scenarios, and the scenario testing is deterministic, you control the outcome in terms of platform numbers. There\u2019s even a pertinent term-of-art within the military for getting the answer you want via analysis, it\u2019s called \u2018situating the appreciation\u2019.<\/p>\n

In case I\u2019m not being clear, I contend that there\u2019s precious little real analysis underpinning the size of the ADF\u2014apart from the balancing of complementary parts of the force that rely upon each other to be effective. I expect, for example, that we sensibly plan on having enough support vessels to sustain the deployment of the remainder of the surface fleet. But as to the size of the surface fleet, it\u2019s more an artefact of replacing what we\u2019ve got and living within financial constraints\u2014or taking advantage of extra money when it becomes available\u2014than objective strategic analysis.<\/p>\n

As critical as what I\u2019ve said might sound, I don\u2019t have a better proposal. In principle, we could take the formulation of scenarios out of the hands of the policy wonks and give it to the Defence Intelligence Organisation to produce free of policy influence. But that would be as flawed as the present arrangement; the implicit assignment of priorities to prospective contingencies is inherently a policy rather than intelligence function. If I were to suggest any changes to the present regime, it\u2019d be to save some money by simplifying the bureaucratic busy-work that does little more than the old magician\u2019s trick of telling us the number we first thought of.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no way around the underlying problem. The scale of the ADF is arbitrary because we don\u2019t have a concrete threat to plan against in terms of our stated core goal of \u2018defending Australia\u2019. With nobody on the horizon to play the role of invader, we can\u2019t scale ourselves against the task. There are worse problems to have.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are a range of credible but lesser contingencies that we have to worry about; deployments to the Middle East for example, or support to US maritime forces in the Pacific. But in each case, we\u2019re inevitably going to be but a small part of a larger effort where our military impact is not decisive. The sorts of contributions we\u2019ve made to recent coalition missions, and those we\u2019re likely to make in the future, aren\u2019t large enough to provide a scale for the ADF.<\/p>\n

So where does that leave us when it comes to the size of the future surface fleet? My conclusion is this: while we need to ensure harmony between the complementary elements of the force, it\u2019s an illusion to think that the numbers of platforms we have today, or might be planning for tomorrow, are sacred.<\/p>\n

Mark Thomson<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is senior analyst for defence economics\u00a0at ASPI. Image courtesy of Flickr user Korry Benneth<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last month, Ben Schreer introduced ASPI\u2019s upcoming international conference on Australia\u2019s Future Surface Fleet. In doing so, he observed that many factors\u2014strategic, operational, international and industrial\u2014will shape decisions about the Navy\u2019s future surface fleet. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":18308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[44,309,279,170,280],"class_list":["post-18307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policy-guns-and-money","tag-australian-defence-force","tag-fleet-size","tag-force-structure","tag-intelligence","tag-planning"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe surface fleet: the question of numbers | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-surface-fleet-the-question-of-numbers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The surface fleet: the question of numbers | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Late last month, Ben Schreer introduced ASPI\u2019s upcoming international conference on Australia\u2019s Future Surface Fleet. 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