What is to be built for the Australian Navy? By David Archibald.
The premise of the book Building Australia’s Defence is that while the situation is dire and the hour is late, it is still recoverable. …
China:
China has taken upon itself to be the main vector of death and destruction during this century. Thirty years ago they realised that their peak relative strength would be in the 2020s. That window of opportunity is running out. Their problem is that the advances in electronics over the last 25 years have favoured the defence.
Another problem is that their ancestors have already conquered the easy stuff, going out from the original Han heartland in Shaanxi Province. There is frozen wasteland to the north, deserts to the west and mountain ranges to the south. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was easy by comparison, with thousands of kilometres of flat land to drive across in armoured formations. To go anywhere, China has to put its troops in metal containers — ships and aircraft — which are easily detected and tracked on the modern battlefield.
It has been said that the cost in ordnance of sinking a ship, with cruise and ballistic missiles, is about five percent of the cost of building it. It doesn’t matter that China now has the world’s largest navy by hull count, because the cost of sinking them is a small fraction of the cost of building them. Ukraine is inspirational in this regard for, even without a navy, it has driven the Russian Navy to the eastern end of the Black Sea. A recent campaign saw Ukraine destroy over 300 Russian commercial vessels using drones. …
And Australia?
The most cost-effective way to sink warships now is with air-launched ballistic missiles. Radar systems on ships have a blind spot vertically above them in a cone about six degrees wide. That is the weak spot to be exploited. The US developed the PrSM missile, with a range of 500 km, to be the successor to the ATACMS missile. It weighs one tonne, and has a 90 kg warhead. Air-launching a missile doubles its range. Another rule of thumb is that with a warhead that is 10% to 20% of the missile weight, you will get a range of one kilometre per kilo of mass. Increment two of the PrSM missile was developed to enable the US Army to sink ships at sea. It has passive guidance with an infrared, image-matching seeker, combined with radio frequency detection (the target ship’s radar is effectively a location beacon). …
Unfortunately Australia doesn’t have any aircraft that can launch a two-tonne missile. The psychotic people running the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) buried the ones that could, our F-111s, in a pit.
But civilian aircraft could be converted to that purpose and would not come in harm’s way, given the stand-off range of the missile. For sinking ships, air-launched ballistic missiles are far more cost-effective than submarines. While a submarine might take weeks to complete a mission, an aircraft could service targets in the Indian Ocean one day and targets in the Pacific the next. Every Chinese ship in the Pacific and Indian Oceans needs to be sunk, including their fishing fleet. To sink a 500 tonne fishing vessel takes a 50 kg warhead.
The countries around the South China Sea will help. The Philippines and Indonesia have acquired the Brahmos supersonic, antiship missile from India, and Malaysia is evaluating it. Indonesia is particularly important, given that it is a belt 5,200 km long across the path between China and Australia. If Indonesia doesn’t want a Chinese armada to pass, then the Chinese armada will be heavily chewed up in attempting to do so. Fortunately China and Indonesia have recently had a falling out, with China dismantling US$14 billion worth of nickel production lines in Indonesia in response to an Indonesian hike in its take. …
The Virginia class submarines are a positive development. However, the Australian Government didn’t increase the defence budget to pay for them. Instead, it took funds from some 500 other projects, in effect hollowing out the ADF and making it more fragile. For example, Australia recently acquired 75 Abrams tanks that are fitted for, but not with, the Trophy system. So they are naked against ATGMs. On the other hand they don’t have protection against drones either, so they are useless anyway.
Hold a globe so that you are looking directly at Australia, and you’ll see Australia and ocean, and not much else. Australia is the nearest significant nation to about a quarter of the world’s oceans. Yet our navy is minuscule and outdated.
As of late 2025 and 2026, Australia’s merchant fleet has shrunk to only 20 Australian-flagged ships, most of them coastal traders, a dramatic decline from over 100 ships three decades ago. There are only four ocean-going, Australian-flagged ships actually engaged substantially in international trade. The decline is attributed to the high costs — due to union rules — of operating Australian-flagged and crewed ships compared to foreign-flagged alternatives, which carry the vast majority (99%) of Australia’s seaborne trade.
We have no Australian-controlled tanker fleet capable of sustaining energy imports, no fleet of bulk carriers able to guarantee critical commodity flows and almost no Australian-flagged vessels trading internationally that could be directed toward national priorities in a crisis
Read all of David’s article, covering land and air forces, here.