What is to be built?
by David Archibald
28 September 2026
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. That is, with all the normal caveats of the nation suddenly getting a grip on reality, clarity of vision, will, purpose and direction. The book provides the vision and the direction.
First of all, the moral rot in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has to be cut out like a case of gangrene. As Napoleon observed, the moral to the physical is as three is to one. In its remake of Australian society in its own image, the Federal Government is spending the equivalent of more than US$200 million in persecuting Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith. Our Prime Minister, on another matter, said that he is not engaging in a culture war — which means that he is and sees everything in terms of kulturkampf against the kulaks. Corporal Roberts-Smith served Australia with great distinction and is a noble, almost flawless inspiration for generations to come. His story will be woven into the foundational myths that sustain the Nation. Therefore he must be destroyed.
There are also the other idiocies of the DEI-obsessed, including fighting climate change. Australia has a joint plan of action on fighting climate change with the UK Ministry of Defence which has a similarly-afflicted military. Between wars militaries drift, so when the next one starts there tends to be a lot of wastage of troops while the good officers are sorted from the incompetent. Ukraine was still sorting out its high command four years into its current war and, yes, the replaced general was known as a butcher. The command of the ADF is also bloated, with a brigadier-and-above ratio to other ranks four times that of the United States Army. Despite that surfeit of talent, the ADF hires enough consultants from the likes of KPMG etc. to stand up a brigade. Such dysfunctional organisations tend to make bad decisions, and we will get to those. Command of the ADF has been captured by a self-perpetuating claque of social justice warriors. The system won’t reform by itself; it will take a decapitation event to remedy.
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.
But you do have to make the investment in that ordnance. What ordnance would that be? 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 with 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 kilometer per kilo of mass. Increment 2 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).
A one thousand kilometer range is good but the longer the standoff distance, the better. Israel originally developed its Blue Sparrow missile to provide targets to test its ballistic missile defence systems on. The warhead separates from the body of the missile and reaches an apogee of 170 km. As an offensive, air-launched system it has a range of 2,000 km. The inner wing pylons of the F-15 can carry its weight. Israel started the current Iran War by firing Blue Sparrow missiles from F-15s over Jordan. With the seeker elements of PrSM Increment 2 incorporated, a maritime version of Blue Sparrow would be effective in sinking PLAN ships.
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 of islands 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.
As everyone is now aware, the recent revolution in land warfare is the advent of first-person-view (FPV) drones. These are precision guided munitions with a price of around US$1,000 per unit, depending upon accessories. The segment was invented by the United States, with the Switchblade drone in production from 2011. Switchblade is too expensive though, at US$60,000 for a 2.5 kg weapon. The drone category has broadened to include many functions. For example, the Hornet drone produced by Perennial Autonomy flies up and down the highway between Rostov-on-Don and Crimea, autonomously searching for Russian military trucks and attacking them.
The significance for Australia is that we have neither drones nor the means to counter them. This parallels the development of active protection systems (APS) for tanks in response to the mauling that Israeli Merkava tanks received from Hezbollah antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Israel developed two APS systems in response: Trophy for tanks and the lighter Iron Fist for other vehicles. The United States failed to develop an APS system and adopted Trophy for its tanks. Neither side in the Ukraine War started the war with widespread use of APS systems and both sides suffered significant losses to ATGMs.
With the advent of FPV drones, armoured columns suffer complete losses. Russian attacks forming up 30 km behind the front line are attacked while they are still forming up. When the last vehicle is immobilised, Ukrainian drones then switch to hunting down the surviving infantry. Eventually the funds spent on drones will equate to what is spent on anti-drone systems, but what will be the cost-effective solution? It is likely to be similar to Iron Fist, having radars on the four corners of each vehicle. But instead of having fixed effectors, it will shotgun or proximity-fused rounds from a short barrel of perhaps 30 cm and an accurate range of at least 200 metres. It will be belt-fed to provide magazine depth.
Another consequence of FPV drones is that artillery is driven further back from the front line. There are a couple of ways to cost-effectively increase the range of artillery to compensate. For tube artillery, the solution is to fit sub-calibre shells with staves to convert kinetic energy to glide distance. For example, a 105 mm shell would be fitted with 25 mm-wide staves to fit a 155 mm barrel. German experiments at Peenemunde in WW2 achieved a 130 km range from a 230 mm barrel. That was well before electronics evolved to provide precision guidance. The solution for rocket artillery is to have glide wings deploy at the missile’s apogee, in the manner of the ground-launched small diameter bomb (GLSDB). The GLSDB was used in Ukraine but failed due to Russian electronic warfare. What is needed is an integrated unit built from scratch, slant-packed in 20 foot containers so that it can be fired from a flatbed truck.
With respect to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF): for all the countries which relied upon the F-35 for their protection, it has turned into an instrument of torture instead. The RAAF believed Lockheed Martin when they said that the F-35’s operating cost would US$25,000 per hour. But it turned out to be twice that.
Too expensive to fly
The RAAF’s response was to reduce flying hours per pilot to 13 hours per month, well below the minimum 20 hours needed to maintain proficiency. The fleet size has been cut back from 100 to 72. Much of this was predicted in my book from 2016 — American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare. I didn’t predict the engine problems though. The F-35 is being re-engined to provide enough power for cooling its new electronics. The new engine will be compulsory on the worldwide fleet, not optional. So bad are the horrors of the F-35 that the Pentagon has blocked public release of the Government Accountability Office annual report on the F-35 for 2026.
One thing that American Gripen predicted correctly was that the failure of the F-35 would mean that there would be a rush for the Euro-canard offerings. That has happened for the French Rafale. That production line is now booked out for eight years. The solution to the nightmare remains the same: park up the F-35s as hangar queens and build the Gripen-E in Australia.
The Gripen E now comes with an electronic warfare suite called Arexis, similar to the Spectre system of the Rafale. The Luftwaffe are equipping 35 of their Typhoon fighter aircraft with the system. Arexis-equipped aircraft may be as stealthy as the F-35 or the F-22.
The failure of the F-35 has forced the USAF to go back to buying F-15s. The current iteration is called the F-15EX. Australia should also take whatever F-15EX we can get from that production line. The USAF recently doubled their order to 267 aircraft with Israel taking another 50. It is a brutal design that is 54 years old now and it has the radar cross section of a bus. But its inner wing pylons can take a 2.04 tonne load and it is now equipped with the American equivalent of Arexis, a system called Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System (EPAWSS). An F-15EX pilot says that flying it is like entering a black hole.
The other major weapons system that Australia is relying upon is the Virginia class submarines, due to arrive from the United States under the AUKUS agreement. In return for supplying two submarines firm, with potential for a further three, the United States gets access to a base in the southern Indian Ocean, out of range of most Chinese ballistic missiles. The UK involvement is driven by the fact that the UK Government has been starving their defence sector of funds and the Royal Navy would not otherwise have enough funds to develop the successor to their Astute class submarines. The problem with having the UK as a strategic partner is that the government there despises the British people. There is serious talk of a civil war. It is unwise to rely upon a country that might be rent by civil war.
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.
All of Australia’s submarines are based at Garden Island near Perth. A problem with Garden Island is that it is only six kilometers across open water from the apartment buildings on the beach at Rockingham. Until top cover and underwater netting is put in place, all the military assets at Garden Island will be whacked by drones launched from Rockingham within hours of the war starting.
Putin published his casus belli for invading Ukraine in a missive entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians on 12th July, 2021. In hindsight it is obvious that the appearance of that document meant that a war was coming. This time the war signal is from a sin of omission. Elbridge Colby, US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, wrote the 2026 National Defense Strategy without mentioning the word Taiwan, not even once. This is bizarre in that Taiwan is China’s excuse for its war of choice, a war that could have everyone in Asia involved and a death toll higher than WW2’s. Elbridge Colby wants to go down in history as a hard-power realist in the league of Henry Kissinger and for that to happen, someone has to be betrayed. It will be the 28 million people of Taiwan. Mr Colby is trying to be invited to give a lecture at China’s PLA National Defense University, no doubt to make a hard-power realist offer. Mr Colby is doing the same thing in Europe. Putin has stated a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union, all of it. Mr Colby has scheduled a meeting of the ‘Bergen group’ of NATO in November in Poland. This excludes the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia but includes Finland further north. The Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union tried to invade Finland but had to back off.
If China attacks, Japan will come to Taiwan’s aid even if the U.S. doesn’t, because otherwise China will come up the Ryuku island chain and subjugate Japan. War over Taiwan is existential for Japan, as it is for Australia. We can join the war on the side of Taiwan and Japan, or we can be defeated and occupied later. There is anecdotal evidence that Japan is developing nuclear weapons and that Australia has played an unwitting role in that. We should be doing everything possible to support Japan and doing nothing to annoy them. With respect to the latter, the loons in charge in Canberra have told Japan to slow down the ships carrying Australian LNG on their way to Japan so that they emit less carbon dioxide on the way.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.