{"id":18552,"date":"2015-02-23T12:36:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T01:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=18552"},"modified":"2015-02-24T06:34:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T19:34:51","slug":"sea-state-04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/sea-state-04\/","title":{"rendered":"Sea State"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>It was another big week for submarines here in Australia. Early last week the Defence Minister\u2019s office said<\/a> that the competitive evaluation process for the Collins-<\/em>class submarine replacement will involve two distinct stages\u2014a request for information, followed by a request for tender.<\/p>\n By the end of the week, wrote<\/a> Greg Sheridan in The Australian<\/em> (paywalled), there had been a full Cabinet meeting on Thursday night, following<\/p>\n \u2018two meetings earlier in the week of the National Security Committee of the cabinet. There had been sharp divisions within cabinet. Tony Abbott has long had a partiality to Australia acquiring Japanese Soryu submarines and adapting them for Australian conditions.<\/p>\n This is no longer exactly the government\u2019s position. Now there will be a formal, relatively transparent process with Germany, France and Japan invited to participate in the competitive evaluation process.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Australian Government has apparently ruled out<\/a> Swedish company Saab, much to the displeasure<\/a> of the South Australian State Government\u2014Saab had previously said<\/a> it would build the submarines in Adelaide. The Federal Government has promised<\/a> that at least 500 jobs will be created through local industry partnership with shipbuilders from Japan, Germany, or France.\u00a0According<\/a>\u00a0to the Defence Minister,<\/p>\n \u2018The Government expects that significant work will be undertaken in Australia as part of the build phase of the future submarine including, but not necessarily limited to, combat-system integration, design assurance and land-based testing.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here<\/a>\u2019s ASPI\u2019s Andrew Davies talking about submarines\u2014particularly the Japanese options\u2014midlast week.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Australian Submarine Corporation was at Senate Estimates last week. Here<\/a>\u2019s Catherine McGrath\u2019s piece on that appearance, and here\u2019s the full transcript<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two stories on the future of maritime warfare. Adm. Jonathan Greenert of the USN stated in a speech at the Australian National University that lasers \u2018are a thing of the future<\/a>\u2019, noting the significant savings on gunpowder.<\/p>\n And the Kazakh national defence company Kazakhstan Engineering announced<\/a> on its website that it\u2019ll be working alongside the French firm ECA to produce ten unmanned underwater vehicles. Whilst UUVs won\u2019t be replacing submarines any time soon, Kazakhstan plans to use them for non-combat tasks. For more on the topic, see our own Rosalyn Turner\u2019s article on the future of UUV\u2019s in Australia<\/a> here.<\/p>\n Immediately to our north, Indonesia\u2019s House of Representatives agreed<\/a> to inject an additional IDR726.3 trillion (AU$72.2m) to their newly-founded maritime security agency, Badan Keamanan Laut, following suggestions that the initial allocation was insufficient to allow the agency to perform its functions.<\/p>\n There are some new pictures<\/a> (also here<\/a>) of China\u2019s land-reclamation efforts on various reefs in the South China Sea. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, the authors note that<\/p>\n \u2018China appears to be building a network of island fortresses to help enforce control of most of the South China Sea\u2014one of the world\u2019s busiest shipping routes\u2014and potentially of the airspace above, according to experts who have studied the images.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n CSIS has this before\/after series<\/a> of Chinese construction in the South China Sea.<\/p>\n On the South China Sea, the USN said last week<\/a> that four of Washington\u2019s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) will operate out of Singapore by 2018 on rotational deployment. And Foreign Affairs<\/em> has this piece<\/a> this on the case for \u2018archipelagic defence\u2019 in the face of an increasingly assertive and aggressive China. The article argues that by creating a series of linked defences, Washington and its Pacific allies will be able to \u2018convince Beijing that it simply cannot achieve its objectives with force\u2019.<\/p>\n Harry White\u00a0<\/em>is an analyst at ASPI and Amelia Long is an intern at ASPI. Image courtesy of Flickr user\u00a0Seong-Woo Seo<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was another big week for submarines here in Australia. Early last week the Defence Minister\u2019s office said that the competitive evaluation process for the Collins-class submarine replacement will involve two distinct stages\u2014a request for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":18555,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1051,8,135,471],"class_list":["post-18552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-future-submarine-project","tag-indonesia","tag-japan","tag-south-china-sea"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n