{"id":19433,"date":"2015-04-01T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T19:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19433"},"modified":"2015-04-02T18:52:35","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T07:52:35","slug":"a-high-low-future-surface-fleet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/a-high-low-future-surface-fleet\/","title":{"rendered":"A high-low future surface fleet?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a><\/figure>\n

(Or how I learned to stop worrying about naval power and to love the corvette.)<\/p>\n

Naval capability decisions start with maritime strategy. So I think we should get one. That\u2019s deliberately provocative, but I struggle for a pithy answer to the fundamental question \u2018what\u2019s the Navy for\u2019? It\u2019s easy to respond with abstractions such as \u2018protecting sea lines of communication\u2019 or \u2018securing Australia\u2019s trade\u2019, but I think both of those are problematic.<\/p>\n

In fact, \u2018what’s the Navy for?\u2019 isn’t an easy question for most countries. Paul Kennedy\u2019s book The rise and fall of British naval mastery<\/a><\/em> describes a time when Britannia really did rule the waves, and British maritime strategy was easy to formulate and enunciate: the Royal Navy will overmatch the combat power of any two other nations combined. When you\u2019re the supreme world power, it’s really that easy. Over time, as Britain\u2019s circumstances changed, the strategy was modified to \u2018the RN will overmatch the combat power of France and Germany combined\u2019. Now the days of British maritime domination are well behind us, and British maritime strategy is much less ambitious, and much harder to describe in a sentence.<\/p>\n

Perhaps paradoxically, it\u2019s harder to explain the role of small forces than large ones. The USN is today\u2019s pre-eminent maritime power, and its mission statement<\/a> is correspondingly straightforward:<\/p>\n

The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can argue about the ability of a numerically declining force<\/a> to do those things<\/a> without qualification, but the intent’s pretty clear and the aspiration remains realistic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s harder for us middle powers. We’ve no aspiration to global power, but want to do our bit for the international order. We want to be combat ready. We want our armed forces able to fight and win and we want to deter aggression\u2014but not \u2018against all comers\u2019. So we find ourselves formulating strategy in more nuanced ways.<\/p>\n

For a long time after WWII, we didn\u2019t have much to worry about. We had to do some lifting in Korea and Vietnam, but only in a support role. Then President Nixon made things even easier by giving us what Mark Thomson calls<\/a> a \u2018get out of jail free\u2019 card in the Guam doctrine. Defence of Australia was the result, which wasn\u2019t too challenging given the capability of regional forces. We came up with a local version of Britain\u2019s earlier global strategy by overmatching Southeast Asian forces. We maintained a \u2018capability edge\u2019 over the neighbours and didn\u2019t have to think or spend too much\u2014a dozen surface combatants and half a dozen submarines were fine.<\/p>\n

But that was then, this is now. I’ve come to suspect that the American rebalance to the Asia Pacific has quietly unwritten the Guam doctrine. There\u2019s an implicit\u2014and sometimes explicit\u2014expectation from Washington that allies and partners out here ought to do more. So we need to start thinking explicitly about the implications of the alliance for force structuring.<\/p>\n

That impacts the capability requirements of the future fleet; going upmarket means going up the unit cost curve as well. If we want to be able take part in warfighting at a distance in hotly contested spaces, we\u2019ll need ships large enough to have high endurance and carry all of the defensive systems that make them survivable in that space and enough offensive weapon systems to make them worth having in a fight.<\/p>\n

At the same time we\u2019ll still need capability to do constabulary work, and to be able to put together a task group if we need to \u2018do a Timor\u2019 again. The US isn\u2019t as invested in our local region as us and we can’t count on other security partners such as Japan. New Zealand is willing, but the force structure is weak. So we need to be able to go alone in our own backyard, all within the available budget.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s starting to sound to me like a \u2018two tier Navy\u2019 which that has serious combat power to provide in an alliance framework, while operating a lighter force closer to home. I have a mission statement for it:<\/p>\n

The mission of the Royal Australian Navy is to raise, train and sustain combat-ready naval forces capable of helping our allies to win wars, deter aggression and maintain freedom of the seas, while maintaining the independent capability to locally maintain order and support other ADF force elements.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bones of that force are already in the defence capability plan; the upmarket Future Frigate and Submarine projects and the Offshore Patrol Vessels in SEA 1180. If we\u2019re smart, that’ll produce exactly the Navy I\u2019ve described. But I think that there\u2019s a significant risk that the top end requirements will cost so much that the OPVs will end up \u2018taking one for the team\u2019, leaving us short at the lower end.<\/p>\n

This is an abridged version of a talk given at ASPI’s Future Surface Fleet Conference 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Or how I learned to stop worrying about naval power and to love the corvette.) Naval capability decisions start with maritime strategy. So I think we should get one. That\u2019s deliberately provocative, but I struggle …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":19434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1157,130,70,304,664,289],"class_list":["post-19433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policy-guns-and-money","tag-future-surface-fleet","tag-naval-capabilities","tag-naval-strategy","tag-royal-australian-navy","tag-sea-power","tag-us-navy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA high-low future surface fleet? | 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\/a-high-low-future-surface-fleet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A high-low future surface fleet? | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Or how I learned to stop worrying about naval power and to love the corvette.) 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