The Albanese government has acted true to form with a big announcement that sounds like a lot is going to happen in Defence, but Albanese has set it on a very long timeline…

It is almost as though Labor wants the announcement to win elections and to avoid having to pay anything for it.

This behaviour is much like the last round of big announcements except the only action was to decide not to buy any tanks. The reason given was that we are an island, so why do we need tanks unless we are fighting somewhere else? Not only that, our Generals never deploy them. I’d say that is an argument for replacing the Generals rather than dumping tanks, but that is a different argument for another day.

Monash believed that infantry should advance under the protection of the maximum mechanical force. This is the theory of combined arms that all arms – air, artillery, and armour – would combine with infantry to secure the victory. He proved its superiority during the first world war and the Germans took notes and used it themselves in what later became known as Blitzkrieg.

Our politicians abandoned this type of warfare as a way to keep more money for their favourite vote-buying schemes.

Should war come to Australia – and it might – our crippled army would face a determined and well-resourced enemy. Why come to Australia? It is because all wars depend upon supply and supplying a war means steel. Steel means iron ore and coal. No one is going to invade Canberra, but getting hold of our coal and iron ore reserves would be very attractive.

The government has returned to the topic of ships because supply means ships. Being an island, we are going to need ships to bring us almost everything because we have no manufacturing capacity remaining.

Should a war occur, no one is going to donate or sell ships of any type at any price, not even our friends. They will all be thinking about their own needs. Consider what it was like getting vaccines when Covid struck. Nations decided that they owned vaccines that we had already bought and paid for because their political leadership was desperate. If you think that was a geopolitical panic attack, imagine how much greater the panic will be when people are dying for real.

The aim to build ships in Australia is a good one, but it must be backed up with the demand that they be at least as well made as those made in other places and they must be cheaper. Price is very important because wars have to be paid for. Featherbedding some preferred workers because they vote in preferred electorates is a sure way to lose a war. The nation that runs out of money first loses. This means being efficient in manufacturing is vital. The defence complex, at times, resembles an oversized bureaucracy and lacks the dynamism of enterprise. This is a huge problem to correct but it must be corrected.

A major part of the new plan is to build a General Purpose Frigate. Readers will know my preference to just buy more Hobart Class AWDs. Navantia offered to build us more of those for $2 billion each. They are behind the times on stealth but have 48 Vertical Launch System cells and 200 crew. This is a major factor. The US is buying more Arleigh Burke Destroyers for USD 2.2 billion so about AUD 2.8 billion. The Burke class has 96 VLS cells and a crew of 280. The Hobart class has an advantage of being easier to crew for a smaller country like Australia. These numbers give us something of a baseline. The Burke class is expected to last for some decades yet. The Americans can’t see the point in replacing it as the costs are unlikely to give them any great improvement. I can imagine them updating it to reduce the radar signature.

Brawling in a diplomatic manner in the South China Sea goes back to about 2008. This is when we got our 10-year warning that a war was coming. In 2010, China became the world’s biggest energy consumer. At the time, 80 per cent of China’s oil came via the South China Sea. The motivation to dominate that water ws obvious enough, as is the CCP’s current effort to make deals with Malaysia. They want unrestricted passage between China and the Persian Gulf. It is essential for them to being able to operate at any level above Stone Age. The perceived wisdom today is that having a large number of smaller ships is better than having a smaller number of large ships. Into this space is the proposal for a General Purpose Frigate.

The nominees for this are the ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems’ Meko A-200 frigate, the Mogami 30FFM Japanese multi-mission stealth frigate, the South Korean Daegu class FFX Batch II and III, or Navantia’s ALFA3000 re-badged at the Tasman Class Corvette. The Meko A-200 has been around for a while and originally looked like an old-style warship all block shapes and exposed with hard angles everywhere. This has been updated so it has a cleaner less reflective shape to reduce radar return. Price is said to be 2 billion Euros. It has 32 VLS cells and 16 Exocet anti-ship missiles. Crew is 120. The South Korean FFX carries 16 VLS cells and 8 anti ship missiles fired from two quad launchers. It too has a crew of 120. Navantia’s Tasman Class too has 16 VLS cells and 2 quad launchers making it equal with the South Korean ship. The crew is a little smaller at 90. Japan’s 30FFM is a proven ship much like the German and Korean options but is going from block 2 to block 3 configuration at present. It has 32 VLS cells and block 2 had one quad anti-ship missile launcher armament wise placing it behind the Meko A-200 but better than the other two ships. Crew is 120 and Mitsubishi has been building them for AUD 900 million. It is a half-priced ship compared to others.

Which ship to choose? My own belief is that we are in that desperate pre-war state where everything must be done with urgency. Delays, fumbling, and messing around cannot be accepted. Being fast is essential which means clearing bureaucracy out of the way and never fearing the falls is what must be done. As far as submarines went, my belief when Attack was sent back to France and Aukus announced was that we had to build more Collins boats to fill the gap between our old boats and the nukes arriving. This is a similar situation, the question between the Hobart AWD that we have, the German Meko and Japanese 30FFM is who can start cutting steel first?

My own sense of urgency is to do a lot rapidly and not let the uniformed bureaucracy stall the decision-making process. It is far better to make a bad decision than no decision. Should we end up making ships too fast and cheap that we can’t buy them all that is a better problem to have than not having warships when a war arrives.