“For the first time in our history, we could fight a battle – by ourselves – a great distance from our shores. Without America. And without spending an additional dollar,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
All the commentary about AUKUS is predicated on some kind of conflict with China over Taiwan. That is foolishness personified.
But there is another factor that is even more bewildering. Both sides of the argument appear to have forgotten the existence of the RAAF.
Three nuclear-powered American submarines, some built in Britain, to be delivered somewhere in the 2050s at some unknown, eye-watering cost is an exercise that only an unbalanced prime minister, who needed five additional secret ministries, would have contemplated. And only agreed to by another PM determined not to be “wedged” as being soft on defence; and with a deputy hopelessly infatuated with America.
As it happens, I was commissioned by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) a couple of years ago to investigate the procurement of the RAAF’s major weaponry – the Hornets, the Super Hornets and the Growlers. My report was completed in five months but is yet to be published for reasons that are unclear to me.
However, what follows is taken from public sources open to anyone with a computer. My essential conclusions are these:
- We have never been better able to defend Australia from the air in our entire existence.
- We could mount an attack on Chinese forces in a Taiwan battlespace that would not only deliver a powerful setback to the “enemy”, it would disable their weapons’ electronics in the process.
What more could a nuclear-powered submarine do?
We did not reach this excellent RAAF situation easily. There were plenty of political and bureaucratic squabbles along the way. But our RAAF’s fighting power now consists of:
- 24 Super Hornets
- 72 of the latest F-35s, the spearhead of the force, with 28 more to come.
- 11 Growlers, based on a Super Hornet digital architecture, but with a purpose-built, penetrating force level attack warfare system. This allows it to go to a forward area of the air fight and from there to disable the enemy’s weaponry in the battlespace. The Growler is a magnitude different from its deadly F-35 fighters. It doesn’t just protect itself and its accompanying aircraft, it controls the electronic warfare over the entire battlefield, including naval adversaries.
- 6 Boeing Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft.
- A full complement of support aircraft to refuel the attack force going and coming.
For the first time in our history, we could fight a battle – by ourselves – a great distance from our shores. We could give any attacker using conventional forces upgraded from World War II a very painful black eye.
Without America. And without spending an additional dollar.
China is our biggest trading partner. Without her, our economy doesn’t bear thinking about. So we are not going to provoke her as long as an Albanese-Wong government is running the show. Should the baton pass to Richard Marles or Andrew Hastie that’s another matter.
America provokes China (and vice versa) because both want to be top dog. Since the advent of Trump, there’s not much of a choice between them. Maybe Xi Jinping lusts for Taiwan; we’ll see. Maybe he knows how to swallow a golf ball.
If we do decide to free up those untold millions (billions) that leads naturally to the next question: what more could we do with them?
Well, as the big bubble of the postwar boomers moves to their eternal rest, we could begin to repay the young people of today who have copped the housing shortage we never knew, the productivity we’ve denied them and the notion that work is confined to some other place than home.
That’s if there’s anything left over from the horrors of the climate change that we bequeathed to them.
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