The Australian Defence Force is a disaster at present… It is somewhat of a paper tiger with a proud and glorious history, incapable of posing a threat to our potential enemies even though we live in the most high-risk strategic environment of the last 70 years.

The Albanese Defence Review claimed to increase our defence capability, but always in the out years beyond the forward estimates where it plans to build ships and buy nuclear submarines. The only current action it took was to cancel the Army’s tank order, harming the Army’s armoured capability. The government line was effectively: What on earth would we need tanks for? We don’t really need an army that much either… The next war is going to be a naval war so we must save our resources for the navy. The kibosh was put on that one a few weeks ago when Albanese could not find a warship to send to the Red Sea. The simple rule of threes warns of the risk.

The rule of threes is something the Navy uses to plan for the number of ships that it requires. You can have one ship at sea, one will be in port resupplying, and the last will be in dry dock undergoing refit. For each ship at sea you must have three total. Australia has three Hobart Class Air Warfare Destroyers, so far that means we should have one available but if anything goes wrong suddenly there is no ship at all for things like fighting wars. Being an island dependent on trade and commerce from places all over the world, the need for a powerful Navy should be obvious. The argument is that we can look after our little patch and not worry about nasty things in the Middle East as it is too far away to hurt us. This is fallacious. Our dependence on foreign goods means it is vital to our interests to sort out a small band of terrorists in boats causing trouble. People who query this have no doubt forgotten the toilet paper panic of these past few years.

The Red Sea leads to the Suez Canal and insurance rates are skyrocketing. Maersk decided to pause that route due to the risk from the Houthi terrorists. Maersk has 15.3 per cent of the world’s container shipping fleet. It ships 12 million containers per year. The Suez represents 12 per cent of global trade and 30 per cent of global container traffic. We should know how vital the Suez is to world trade as we have seen recently what happens when it is blocked. In 2021 container ship Ever Given blocked the canal and in the six days that were lost industry costs were 54 billion USD. This type of slow strangulation is going to be on your weekly budget very quickly. Consider the amount of goods from Europe that you will now have to pay more for as well as the oil that is going to cost more. It will either be due to increased insurance for using the Suez Canal or the costs of an additional eight days it takes a ship to come via the Cape of Good Hope. The Pax Americana’s value to the modern world and all of us enjoying a modern lifestyle should be more than obvious. America making the seas safe for trade meant that anyone could trade. It meant that no one had to have essential materials like iron, coal, and oil. You could buy anything. This meant countries could specialise and become wealthy even if they lacked the good fortune to have resources. Everyone got richer as a result due to competition across the planet. The only issue is this wealth is a fragile thing. The Houthis have proved once again that an asymmetric foe can have great impact on much larger and seemingly invincible foes.

Asymmetric warfare is all about mismatched foes. The Ukrainians gave a wonderful demonstration of this in the Black Sea. Build a boat that looks like a high gunwale launch, fill it with explosives and a radio-operated remote control. Then drive it into the side of a warship or a bridge and blow the whole lot up. Cheap, nasty, and effective. The really clever thing about this is that warships are designed to fight over the horizon. They have no problems dumping a shell onto a tin can 14 km away and blowing it to pieces but if you are within a kilometre or so you are under the guns and cannot be shot. There are anti-missile defences that might be effective like Phalanx but our Australian ships are not equipped with them. Our ships do not have a heavy (I hate to call them sniper) rifle on board. The logic is that rifles in 50BMG are inhumane and in breach of the Hague Convention. The cartridge is so powerful that an individual shot with it largely becomes pink mist. Some Admiral should read the sticker on the package. He will find it says Anti Materiel. It is used for inflicting damage on enemy materiel. For example, if a ship is tied up at a wharf and the enemy approaches with armoured personnel carriers, trucks, and soldiers they can be engaged while still a couple of kilometres from the ship. Trucks and APCs can suffer mobility kills so that they are immobilised delaying the enemy’s advance and allowing the ship to be protected. This same rifle is more than capable against raiding boats but someone has decided that is inhumane. I would like to know what part of war is humane. Denying our men and women the weapons and capability to properly protect themselves seems the more egregious inhumanity to me.

The CCP has been on a war footing for a long time now. As long ago as 2010 they were showing off the industrialisation and build-up of capability to be capable of fighting a war. What is required to fight a war is becoming more commonly acknowledged. The war in Ukraine has gone much longer than expected. Russia has used the time it had to dig in and build obstacles to prevent any advance. This then turned into a war of attrition which was fine until the West discovered it could supply the war out of stockpiles for time but it lacked capacity to resupply its stockpiles to required levels. War is a thing that uses everything, far more than tanks and jets and missiles. More than artillery and rifles and ammunition it burns through fuel and food and trucks and tyres and every type of industrial output. The perfect world we enjoyed these past decades allowed industry and manufacturing to be offshored, the war in Ukraine should be teaching us that industry must be onshore if we are going to survive the first month let alone one year.

It is uncertain why the Australian government decided to shut down manufacturing. There are only three places that wealth comes from: mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. They take limited inputs and produce a greater output. Everything else is a service that would not exist without the wealth created elsewhere. I have wondered if it is because there is money in muck. Manufacturing is hard work and involves dealing with a fair bit of dirt and muck, but it is a place where hard work can get you ahead, or at least it could until government regulated so severely that it became almost impossible. Perhaps it was to get rid of factories from the cities so there would be more places that were nice to look at… I really don’t know, but everything that there is, was either grown or dug up out of the ground. Many things had to be processed or manufactured so that they became useful, yet the war on enterprise attempts to kneecap any effort to process or manufacture anything.

Consider steel. Steel is vital to everything that we do in the world. To get steel you must first have iron, but what is dug up from the ground is iron oxide. To make steel this all goes into a furnace with a lot of coal, the carbon in the coal meets the oxygen with the iron and makes CO2 leaving usable metal. But we don’t like this because of global warming, but it is politically viable to ship all the iron ore and coal off to China so they can do it there. I believe China is on the same planet as Australia, but perhaps Chinese CO2 is good compared to ours…? Australia is considering being in a war situation and not having steel capacity. The big thing with a war is you either have it or you don’t. There is no time to start designing new weapons such as upgrades to ships or planes. Buying new ones is going to be difficult too. In a war, everyone looks after themselves first and foremost. Getting stuff from other places for Australia is going to be very difficult, which is why we need a large and capable Navy. While the argument is made that we should just source ships built somewhere else more cheaply it is much too important in war to be able to resupply yourself from your own capability. No one else will do it wartime, they will all be more concerned with surviving themselves.

This brings us to today. Aukus is going to supply submarines but it might be 20 years before we get any. BAE is building the Hunter class FFG, a really expensive frigate and they will get to us in about the same time frame and all we know about these is telling us that they won’t be much use. BAE has shown a derivative on the same hull which shows much more promise would be rated as a destroyer, and has many missile launch cells. This is important because naval battles at present are all about who can fire the most missiles. If given the power, I’d buy at least 10 of the Hobart Class AWD that Navantia has offered at 2 billion dollars. This is much less than the 4.5 billion that BAE wants for the undesigned frigate and we have them in the water. Navy knows all about how to use them and how to man them. You might think I am on a panic buying spree but if it takes two years to build a ship they will be going for 20 years and the older Hobarts will be reaching retirement by then and we need ships now. My assumption is that we will see a war with the CCP this decade because there are just too many bombs piling up and sooner or later someone will blink and pull the trigger on something and it won’t be possible to stop the battle from going to the industrial scale.

When that happens we should be asking where our industrial capability will be. The CCP has the world’s industrial capability, but must import almost all its coal and iron. It imports 80 per cent of its energy and its fertiliser needs. A major part of this comes through the Straits of Malacca, a bare few miles wide. The Nine Dash Line makes a lot of strategic sense when you think of those things. The CCP is attempting to protect its supply lines for when the war starts. Extended wars are all about supply. The CCP would find supply very difficult in wartime, it would be tested by a lack of raw materials and also its domestic poor quality standards. Many of the microchipped weapon systems that deliver nigh-impossible capability could no longer be made. This might be true in the West as well. Microchips are made with machines made in Holland using US technology and design on wafers made in Japan by chip Fabs in Taiwan. Attack Taiwan and this supply line suffers horrible damage. The West has raw materials but lacks manufacturing scale. The side that suffers least in this imagined conflict will be the one that is most able to reconfigure its supply lines.

Australia’s supply lines are the ship that came from somewhere else. That means buying ships and convincing young people that serving at sea is the best thing to do. Right now we are putting our youth in schools in the care of people who would rather die than say a single good word about Australia or the West. They have it beaten into them that they must go to university while trades are sneered at. A lot of people are much better suited to being in a trade and will be able to enjoy good and prosperous lives taking that path. Were a war to happen, we would need a vast number of skilled tradesmen to bring all the new recruits through so that the war can be supplied. There is a huge shortage of these at present. For Australia to reconfigure in time of war they will be vital to a successful result. There will be many others required at various levels but men on tools are vital.

At present, we have chosen to cripple ourselves mostly by an obsession with ‘renewables’. They aren’t even renewable. They only return 70 per cent of the energy used to make them, they cannot renew themselves. This subsidised electricity is massively expensive as well as being unreliable. The power we need is all day every day and it has to be where it is needed not half a continent away. Having industrial capability is all about having electricity. Cheap electricity. Those who wish to destroy industry are doing a good job of it with expensive power and massive regulation. When war comes from outside their war on Australia from within means that we are not even on the starting line.