I know it’s probably been discussed before, but what do people make of those aircraft carrier whatnots?

Back on topic: though it’s not as strongly armed, the Spanish F100 has a draft half that of the Arleigh Burke class. Makes sense for coastal patrolling, humanitarian assistance and inshore joint operations, as well as long-range adventurism off crowded shallow shorelines.

I simply am not convinced by a lot of the arguments about air power that are put around the web nowadays. Unlike an airplane, a vessel such as this gives you 24/7 sensor operations in your theatre of interest. (How you decide what particular theatre is of interest is where the politics starts naturally).

Any other suggestions?

Here’s a list…

I’ll take Customs.

For my money, there is at least a good half dozen regulars here at LP that would make a far, far superior defence minister.

I am so going to buy some Sukhois.

He said the vessels would be equipped with the most capable air combat system in the world.

Yes, they always are at pressos. Later it’s the most capable in the Southern Hemisphere.

Then further down:

It’s believed the Australian Navy favoured a larger, US-designed destroyer which could be more readily updated with changing technology, has a longer range, and carries more missiles and an extra helicopter. But the Spanish design is cheaper.

Okay then. But then:

Chief of the Navy Vice-Admiral Russ Shalders said he “absolutely” supported the government’s decision to purchase the Spanish warships instead of the US-designed vessels.

He, he, he.

And here is Brendan, blaming the ALP for the Collins:

No Australian would forget, that when in government, the Labor Party gave us the Collins class submarines with all of the problems that were not anticipated.

As distinct from the problems that were anticipated with the purchase of the Kaman Seasprite LINK , the Super Hornets, the JSF, the Abrahams tank, combat clothing procurement, sidearms (Browning Hi Power 9mm), or, indeed, lack of any decision whatsoever regarding tactical short take off and land transport aircraft to replace the Caribou.

Why was Nelson chosen to head Defence anyway? Because he is a natural mushroom (kept in the dark and fed on bullshit) type, beloved by defence bureaucrats and brass? There is some evidence already that Nelson is incapable of acting without supervision; he has shown neither affinity for the subject matter nor ability to brief himself so he is at least on top of his portfolio - as various interviews on the telly have demonstrated: he’d been trashed by Oakes, O’Brien and Tony Jones. I would have thought Environment and Heritage, Health and or Ageing, or Education, Science and Training would be more appropriate.

Perhaps the Rodent thought Nelson could be kept under strict military control, with “barrack room discipline” as SAtP would say.

For my money, there is at least a good half dozen regulars here at LP that would make a far, far superior defence minister.

Cabinet’s national security committee last night selected Navantia’s F100 class ship as the AWD, ahead of a much larger and more costly paper design offered by US firm Gibbs and Cox.

Anyway, the interesting point for this discussion is that the F100 has space for 48 vertically-launched missiles rather than the 64 the Arleigh Burke would have provided. Cabinet’s gone with cheap and deliverable rather than ballistically useful. Hooray!

a see-saw of technological advances

That’s a very good way of putting it, MarkL—and it’s exactly why I’m very wary of investing too heavily in ABM. We’ve got to inhabit the same see-saw as the Chinese and the Indians, who’re likely to be able to spend a lot more on see-sawing than us in the next decade or two.
Razor, I’d be interested to know why you thought Dibb’s denial strategy was so bad, especially in the context of post-Cold War demilitarisation, which everybody was doing—and your opinion on his latest article:

The concern, however, is that the strategic justification for these ships in the army’s eyes is to create a mini version of the US Marines, subordinate to US war-fighting doctrine.

The full story of Project Bumblebee (the ‘Four T’s’ project name) has not yet been written. I suspect a lot of it is still classified.

There is a partial outline in Norman Friedman’s books ‘The Postwar Naval Revolution’ and ‘US Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History’ . It is a very complex tale, and is highly confusing after McNamara took over as Defence Secretary and began ‘rearranging’ investments. The Typhon missile was cancelled but the systems side (electronically scanned radar and fire control system, the radar already called AEGIS) was kept alive, merged with TALOS as ’super-TALOS’, then with TERRIER… it gets confusing. At the end, they called the radar system AEGIS, made it solid state and much smaller, with lower power demands, and merged all the missiles into one, as STANDARD (which evolved from TARTAR), and moved into the concept of making the missile standard and altering the booster requirements. So TERRIER systems fired a STANDARD missile on a big booster and TARTAR systems fired the missile (originally) with no booster. TALOS got dropped as so few ships had it, but not before USS Chicago shot down 2 NVAF MiG-19 over land at 98nm range.

MarkL
Canberra

Remember also what AEGIS is and where it came from. It has its roots in the massed kamikaze attacks off Okinawa in 1945 (saturation cruise missile attacks in todays milspeak), then arose from the famous “Four T’s” project of the late 40s early 50s (Tartar, Terrier, Talos and Typhon), then when Typhon was made to work in 1967 they said ‘a 60,000 ton ship firing 12 ton missiles out to 250nm?’ Gulp, miniaturise it and make it a hell of a lot cheaper, sunshine. The system was designed to handle massive aerial attack densities in open water. It is not perfect, of course, and near a coast you can get a lot of radar nulls to hide in and launch attacks which give the ship very little warning time. Counter and reaction, it’s an interesting game: when you play it for real, the losers die.

Classic case is USS Cole. Top-flight air defence systems are useless when turned off in harbour and when the threat is a suicide boat.

AEGIS does many air defence things very, very well. But there’s a whole range of things it does not do at all, of course.

I’ve seen Barent’s Sea 1989 simulated by the USN, and that was quite terrifying. Literally half of NATO’s naval power was destroyed in 3 days (10 carriers in, 5 out). On the flip side, the entire Soviet Northern fleet, 90% of Soviet naval aviation and 80% of their submarine force was destroyed, and every military facility on the Kola was turned into rubble. Thank God we won the Cold War and that sort of thing never happened. THAT is what it was designed for. Now it’s being adapted to other things.

MarkL
Canberra

How do the results of the 2002 Millenium Challenge square with this? If the Aegis is as effective as this how were the red forces able to get enough through the defensive to sink so many ships?

Does anyone honestly believe that techonologies that overwhelm or use random adjustments in the flight paths won’t be developed to overcome anti missile technology? I am as sure as hell, that the Russians busily dreaming up such technologies at this very moment.

As has been discussed, this is all part of a see-saw of technological advances that has been going on since someone picked up a rock to throw at someone else.

A random flight path adjustment would probably be effective at defeating an AEGIS-based system. However, it would also not actually BE a weapon, as it would guarantee missing the target (well, you actually could not have a target…), because random movement might hit it, or might hit the launcher, but is much more likely to hit some other random point.

Not much use to such a weapon unless you don’t like fish much.

SS-N-22 has something like this though, as it manoeuvres as it closes the target in a series of very shallow swerves. It cannot manoeuvre too much, at Mach 2-5 (IIRC) that is not possible. AEGIS can kill this beastie. The specialist AEGIS-killer is (IIRC) SS-N-26: used to be called Novatar-A. In it, the warhead jettisons the missile fuselage and changes the attack pattern from 300m altitude, mach 0.8 to a supersonic, manoeuvring, constantly-accelerating sea-skimmer. Nasty little rascal, those Russians have some bright ideas. IIRC this thing is in Indian and Chinese service.

MarkL
Canberra

Those evil Russians, how dare they try and make money out of military technology… only the mighty Americans have the right to do that!

This is a massive waste of taxpayers money, just to prop up the MIC.

Hmm. Let’s discount, for a moment, the scenario of naval conflict with China, near China, without American support.

Yes, this was intended as a thought aid only. I do not believe there are any realistic scenarios of this occurring. Even for us to be involved WITH the USA, something outlandish would have had to occur, like an unprovoked Communist attack on democratic Taiwan. I can’t see that happening any time soon!

But Indonesia is a different matter. If you’re really going within sight of land of Indonesia, what if they put anti-shipping missiles on the backs of trucks? No strike aircraft required.

They don’t have any, the comment was predicated on existing force levels. The existence of such shore batteries would change things, you’d want to deny them targeting information based on anything as simple as visual observation. Ships at sea out of sight of land are very hard to find. The ocean is an awfully big place.

The issue with ‘truck-mounted systems’ is that most of them are short range missiles like Penguin, and you still have a targeting problem. larger missiles can certainly be made mobile for coast defence purposes, but again, getting the targeting data for them is quite difficult unless you spend a lot of money.

It is the same issue faced by the Jeune Ecole in the 1890s. ‘Cheap weapons’ only work well when there is one whale of a lot of them. SO by the time you have enough of them you have spent as much as (or more than) the other guy with his ‘expensive’ weapons, and yours cost more to run, age faster, cannot be upgraded and cannot do most of the things his can do. This is why despite the sinking of the Eilat, the small missile boat has all but vanished from the world’s naval inventories and does not ‘rule the waves’.

MarkL
canberra

Answering this depends on the force ratio’s, how good they are, how much training they have done and a host of factors. Put it this way, assuming hostile CH and ID governments (certainly not the case, and hopefully never to be the case). Nope, I’d not want to get closer than 1000nm to China. But I’d be happy (with all 3 AWD present) to transit right thru the Indonesian archipelago within sight of land the whole way. Without the AWD, You’d not want to get anywhere near China and would stay 800nm clear of Indonesia too.

Hmm. Let’s discount, for a moment, the scenario of naval conflict with China, near China, without American support.

But Indonesia is a different matter. If you’re really going within sight of land of Indonesia, what if they put anti-shipping missiles on the backs of trucks? No strike aircraft required.

MarkL: just to clarify, all that works only if you’re part of a carrier battle group, right?

Originally, yes, that’s what it was designed for. As time went on and things like CEC developed, (and systems got cheaper), you could use AEGIS to replace the traditional medium-power AAW ship’s mechanically scanned 3D air search radar with a much more effective electronically scanned one, replaces its mechanical-load launcher with a more reliable one needing less manpower etc. This made the other guy’s job a lot harder, he now needed more and better acft with much more sophisticated missiles, and the very substantial logistics, training and maintenance demands they brought along. So we see the PLAAF going from 4000 acft to 1000, and them really, really struggling with keeping their new kit in action.

If you’re the RAN, and you’re operating independently of the US (just make that assumption for the moment), don’t have carriers with fighters on them to deal with incoming strike aircraft carrying anti-shipping missiles, you don’t have an “outer air screen� without the RAAF.

Correct

Given that, if the air warfare destroyers were providing air defence with range of land-based maritime strike aircraft, they’d be able to keep on firing cruise missiles at the AWD with impunity. If nothing else, sooner or later, the AWD runs out of anti-missile missiles.

Well, that is possible, but it also means that regional airforces drop out of the game completely, ceding aerospace dominance for us, OR they look at the budget and say ‘air defence comes first, so we abandon long range strike’, or they are forced to buy a very small number of logistically fragile units (they have a hard time keeping up with the training and maintenance demands of their kit) and a small number of missiles. Make no mistake, WITHOUT AWD, every regional air force with a handful of FLANKERS and decent ASM can kill us stone motherless dead. WITH AWD, the Chinese can, and the Indians probably can, and Singapore probably can… and that’s about it, and ONLY within acft range of their territory.

People usually underestimate by a huge factor just how much it costs to maintain a SQN of modern strike acft and missiles. Call it 12 acft and 60 ASM, you are already into the billions (plural deliberate). Without AWD, you just bought aerospace dominance. With it, you can contest it, but to guarantee it you are going to need another 24-36 acft and perhaps 300 more missiles.

And if the RAN in the scenario above still has access to US information, well, I’d still call that even at best.

Ergo, the AWD can’t be risked anywhere where there a) might be hostile aircraft, and b) there isn’t any friendly air cover.

Answering this depends on the force ratio’s, how good they are, how much training they have done and a host of factors. Put it this way, assuming hostile CH and ID governments (certainly not the case, and hopefully never to be the case). Nope, I’d not want to get closer than 1000nm to China. But I’d be happy (with all 3 AWD present) to transit right thru the Indonesian archipelago within sight of land the whole way. Without the AWD, You’d not want to get anywhere near China and would stay 800nm clear of Indonesia too.

Now it gets interesting! If we then get the Navantia LHD, and get half a SQN of F-35 STOVL as part of the RAAF buy, we just made everybody else’s lives an order of magnitude harder.

MarkL
Canberra

If you’re the RAN, and you’re operating independently of the US (just make that assumption for the moment), don’t have carriers with fighters on them to deal with incoming strike aircraft carrying anti-shipping missiles, you don’t have an “outer air screen” without the RAAF.
Given that, if the air warfare destroyers were providing air defence with range of land-based maritime strike aircraft, they’d be able to keep on firing cruise missiles at the AWD with impunity. If nothing else, sooner or later, the AWD runs out of anti-missile missiles.

Ergo, the AWD can’t be risked anywhere where there a) might be hostile aircraft, and b) there isn’t any friendly air cover.