Ukraine fate shows Australia must refashion defence. By Greg Sheridan.
Moscow can choose war because it can bear its own casualties and Ukraine doesn’t have offensive weapons. Regarding Russia, Ukraine lacks strategic strike. The calculus in Moscow would have been different if Kyiv had possessed 10,000 missiles that could hit any part of Russia, including the Kremlin.
This conflict demonstrates clearly that we live in the age of missiles. Western nations wickedly refused to supply Ukraine with relevant weaponry in advance. Ukraine’s heroic military and people are wildly overmatched, yet they have inflicted substantial losses on Russian forces through portable, cheap, shoulder-launched missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. …
Australia urgently needs to update its defense posture:
Yet here we are, the world’s 13th biggest economy and the 13th biggest defence spender. Yet not one of our services — navy, air force or army — has any strategic strike. Every one of our major defence programs is in disarray or scheduled to deliver capability so far into the future that it’s in the realm of science fiction ….
At the same time, our strategic fuel reserve is kept in the US, meaning we would not have access to it in an emergency. There are almost no Australian-flagged cargo vessels, so nothing a government could press into service in a crisis.
Though Scott Morrison and other leaders constantly tell us the strategic environment has worsened, we are less well defended than 20 years ago, or 40 years ago. Once we had strategic strike through our F111 fighter-bombers. Once we had numerous oil refineries and plenty of fuel. Once we spent much more of our gross national product on defence and had a much bigger ADF. In pre-cyber days, with less sophisticated missiles about, our location and size gave us much greater security.
The Whitlam government spent 2.4 per cent of GNP on defence. The Morrison government spends just 2.1 per cent. …
The ADF is structured to do local constabulary work — arresting illegal fishermen, preventing boatpeople arrivals, some modest regional peacekeeping — and to deploy in extremely modest niche roles with the Americans, mainly in the Middle East. …
The core task of all militaries is to close with and destroy the enemy. Without the Americans doing the fighting for us, there is no state enemy we could close with and destroy. …
When Chinese navy vessels recently “painted” an Australian P8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft with a laser, which is often preparatory to hostile action, we sent an older patrol boat to track the Chinese ship. Under no circumstances could our patrol vessels do any harm to a competent foreign navy ship. But if we had anti-ship and other missiles on our OPVs [offshore patrol vessels], we would effectively double our surface combatant fleet. That we don’t have missiles on the OPVs is the consequence of an insane internal bureaucratic battle. …
The army urgently needs to completely reconfigure itself. It should acquire thousands of long-range, land-launched missiles. Hezbollah, a terrorist guerrilla group, has 100,000 missiles and constitutes an existential threat to Israel. We acquire missiles in the dozens if we’re lucky and are a threat to nobody. …
For missiles to work strategically, you need thousands of them. Donald Trump fired 70 Tomahawks — as many as we’ll have in our whole fleet once they’re on AWDs and the Collins subs and our few Super Hornets — at a Syrian air base and it was back operating again in a day or two.
Land-based Tomahawks, with a range of 1600km or more, will be available from next year at about $2m each. You could have 2000 of them for $4bn. That would make any potential aggressor think twice before engaging Australia. The number could gradually build to several thousand. …
We need lots of lethal maritime drones, lots of smart sea mines to potentially restrict an enemy’s movement, a vastly bigger de-mining capability in case an enemy does that to us. We need unmanned underwater vehicles and pilotless planes. All these capabilities, but especially missiles, shouldn’t be marginal add-ons to our irrelevant legacy assets. They must become core.
We could do all this, with not all that much more money than we are spending now, certainly nothing like the countless billions we have flushed down the drain during Covid.
This message barely gets an audience even when there is a war on.
A reader notes:
The mess the Public Servants, top brass, and politicians have made of defence procurement is enormous. And they’ve all been paid so well to do it!
