ASPI’s Dr Marcus Hellyer, a frequent speaker at ADM’s annual Congress, has published a report on how to get more ‘bang for the buck’ from the RAN’s Arafura class offshore patrol vessels (OPVs).
The central problem Hellyer aims at is the Naval Shipbuilding Program, which won’t deliver new missile-equipped vessels for at least ten years and only replaces current vessels on a one-for-one basis until 2040.
This raises a number of subsequent issues. The first, according to Hellyer, is that the mainstays of the shipbuilding program (Sea 1000 Attack class submarine and Sea 5000 Hunter class frigates) remain in the design phase and are not appropriate for stimulus spending. In addition, they cannot be accelerated with more money because the bottleneck is in skilled workers, rather than funds.
The second is that current platforms will need to remain operational for longer than intended to bridge the gap to those new capabilities. Third, cash flow issues prohibit program acceleration; fourth, the Navy’s force structure cannot protect sea lines of communication; fifth, the acquisition program overlooks the benefits of unmanned systems; sixth, anti-ship weapons demand a distributed lethality approach; seventh, big ships are too expensive; eight, autonomous systems are weighed down by a chicken-and-egg development cycle; and finally, Defence’s overwhelming focus on designing the perfect future force is a straightjacket on agility.
“Defence should be striving to deliver more war-fighting capability sooner,” Dr Hellyer argues. “It can, whilst also delivering an economic stimulus to Australian defence industry.”
According to Dr Hellyer, Defence can achieve this goal by acquiring more OPVs in a greater number of variants in order to perform across a range of operational contingencies. The current build program, he argues, should be expanded from 12 to 18 whilst avoiding the urge to make each new vessel capable of multiple functions.
Interestingly, Dr Hellyer envisions this expanded OPV fleet as creating a swarm in tandem with other surface vessels and joint force assets, including land-based fires and special forces. “These adaptively reconfigured swarms would employ enabling technologies such as a common control system that would allow a human operator to command multiple autonomous systems of different kinds, as well as state-of-the-art AI-enabled spectrum management to ensure that increasing amounts of sensor data could be shared and command and control of both manned and unmanned platforms could be preserved,” Dr Hellyer argues.
He makes the case for this possibility by highlighting the strengths of the OPVs. They are, he says, real warships, with Saab’s Situational Awareness System, L3Harris’ Integrated Electronic System, and physical space available for a range of different systems. If the ships were fitted with CEA Technologies’ CEAFAR active electronically scanned array radar, and if variants were constructed to include long-range anti-ship missiles, or a towed sonar array, or air defence missiles, then the RAN would operate a distributed and lethal fleet.
The report then argues that the build schedule could be accelerated at Civmec’s facility in Henderson, WA with room for a possible second production line elsewhere. The estimated cost of the redesigned program would be $5-5.5 billion, a $1.5 billion increase on current sums.
“It’s impossible to predict the future, which is why we need hedging strategies, particularly if those strategies, like the one being proposed here, have utility across a wide range of potential futures,” Hellyer concludes.