An Inadequate Navy? A Common Affliction.
down downunder
Does this ring a bell, my Anglospheric navalists?
…our navy remains unfit to deliver the maritime defence strategy the government proposes.
It is older, has less firepower, is less reliable and has fewer ships available than a generation ago.
…
Bad policy derived from management fads unsuited to military governance led to flawed strategic and capability decisions. They were made late and acquired inadequate ships offering poor value for money through projects managed by people without necessary expertise.
…the defence force and its acquisition processes are not appropriate for their purpose.
The US Navy suffering a hangover from the Age of Transformationalism and imperial police actions in Central and Southwest Asia?
No.
The Royal Navy (yes, there is only one Royal Navy) picking its belly button wondering if it is mal-investing what few shillings it managed to find under the couch?
No.
If it isn’t the UK or US, then it must be … the AU in AUKUS then?
Correct.
Read the full article by RADM Rowan Moffitt, RAN (Ret.) to see the significant challenges one of our most important allies in the Pacific is struggling with.
No Pacific nation - or their allies - has the luxury of another generation or two of systemic underperformance. We all need to bring our A-game.
We need to recognize what brought prior failure - call it out in the open for all to see - and as such help prevent the same mistakes from happening again.
There is a Great Pacific War brewing west of the International Date Line. If we start acting like it, it may never come.
Continue to fail at our mission, and come it surely will - and we will lose.
Australian here. Our ENTIRE defense policy, for the last three decades, can be summed up as “Hold on until the Americans save us.”
We send our special forces, and occasionally our regular battalions, to fight in any coalition that the US is leading. Behind all the hype and propaganda about “The Alliance”, we basically trade the blood of our special forces in exchange for the protection of the United States Navy.
To the short sighted idiots in government, that’s a sweet deal. They can spend less on defense, and more on... anything else!
I once made the mistake of reading the Final Budget Outcome, which records what the government actually spent and where. My blood boiled for about three days after, when I discovered that “Indirect Personal Benefits” made up the majority of the government’s cost of operating... and was at least twice the entire defense budget.
Couple of things. Personally have 44 years in U.S. DoD, which leaves a lot of solidly burned neural pathways and memories of "the way we were". Reality check: we simply aren't "that" anymore. That's across the board / all services. We are a lot smaller, a lot of older / outdated equipment that needs to be retired, and personnel in quantity (see recruitment) and quality (see fitness standards, pronouns, mental health issues, etc).
That applies to our allies (who I spent the last ten years of my GS time working with) and in many cases is much worse. For example, the UK navy had 18 surface combatants at one time in the recent past. Sweden had basically lost track of mountains of their reservists combat equipment, and is now frantically trying to rebuild what everyone remembers as a pretty potent force but will take years to replenish.
Bottom line: Forget what you remember about what we used to be, take a good, hard look at where we are today and will be in the very near future. Because that's what you will be going to war with in the Pacific in the next couple of days / months / (hopefully) years. We need a lot of willingness to change, plus a lot of time and money to avoid huge trouble in the very near future.