What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)
- Thread starter TerraN_EmpirE
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It's already been coming down over successive LRIP builds. This is not only a continuation of that trend...it has been the plan from the beginning.
Yes, aircraft do cost more with mission creep, etc. But once the design and capabilities are nailed down, and after the most expensive aircraft are produced in the initial prototypes and initial builds, you then reach a stage where build costs can be reduced significantly.
With large production batches, the economies of scale allow them to be produced cheaper, which is what is about to happen with the F-35...and which is the way it was planned.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
This is funny. If they win the case (with no standing defense), then they will go to China to negotiate, and if they lose, they expect China to come to them and negotiate?? What?
Blackstone
Brigadier
Penguin's nuclear submarine too!
solarz
Brigadier
Further proof that these guys are operating under delusional assumptions.
MwRYum
Major
Most likely because of pampering from Washington DC, from Tokyo to Taipei to Manila they all gone more than a bit light-headed, though the symptom more akin to somking some hard weed...
Blackstone
Brigadier
Well lookie here, Australia has decided to drop its resistance to East Timor's UNCLOS arbitration efforts from 2002. I guess lecturing China to do as it says and not as it do didn't work after all. East Timor owes China a debt of gratitude.
The shift in Labor's position in regard to Australia's long running maritime border dispute with East Timor will likely appeal to diplomatic conventions and notions of equity but, of greater significance, the new policy is also consistent with promoting Australia's long-term geopolitical interests.
Deputy Labor leader and shadow foreign minister, Tanya Plibersek, last week that Labor had dropped its longstanding refusal to allow independent adjudication, according to established principles of international law, in the long-running dispute.
The over-arching principle that Australian leaders of all political stripes have used to describe Australia's Asia-Pacific policy is maintaining a 'rules-based order'. , and (under two prime ministers) have all employed this turn of phrase. In Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's , he reminded his audience that 'the US-anchored rules-based order has delivered the greatest run of peace and prosperity this planet has ever known.' Its preservation is therefore 'a consistent and absolutely central objective'.
Positioning itself as defender of a rules-based order has allowed Australia to criticise the US and China, as the two largest maritime powers in the region, wherever their actions depart from predetermined legal constraints. Australia has consistently admonished the US for failing to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as a valuable tool in the face of growing maritime tensions. In his Washington address, Turnbull asserted that: 'Non-ratification diminishes American leadership where it is most needed.'
Likewise, Australia's concern about growing Chinese dominance in the South China Sea as a breach of territorial rules mandated by UNCLOS, while it has supported arbitration to determine disputed island claims according to established principles of international law. In essence, Australia demands that these powerful states set aside parochial interests and instead adopt a longer time horizon that recognises national interests in constructing a robust legal order.
In this context Australia's continued obstruction of East Timorese maritime claims is revealed as both incoherent and self-defeating.
The international legal system doesn't sit under a government capable of enforcing the law, but rather requires reciprocity between countries. in 2014 when the ICJ ruled it must cease spying on East Timor, but that same month by ordering Japan to cease whaling in the Southern Ocean. This draws fresh attention to Turnbull's Washington statement that 'to enjoy the rewards of a rules-based order and the stability that it delivers, we must also share the responsibilities that come with it'.
East Timor inherited its maritime boundary from a 1972 agreement between Indonesia and Australia that, because its continental shelf jutted far into the Timor Sea, it had territorial rights to nearly the entire area. from the custom under international law of drawing equidistant maritime lines. Crucially, two months before East Timor gained independence in 2002, from the jurisdiction of both the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea for 'any dispute concerning or relating to the delimitation of maritime zones'.
It is certainly legal for any country to establish reservations on ICJ or ITLOS jurisdiction, but Australia has itself set the objective of strengthening regional rules and architecture. That includes not only the UNCLOS regime, but also the Trans-Pacific Partnership and key multilateral economic forums. Demanding US and Chinese fidelity to a rules-based order rings hollow when Australia refuses to grant the same toward one of its least powerful neighbours. , advancing order requires that Australia 'urge all parties to abide by both the terms and the spirit' of international law.
and Australian resistance to fully embracing UNCLOS is motivated by various concerns that include access to mineral resources in the continental shelf. Australian policy is specifically designed to prevent East Timor claiming rights through legal mechanisms, thereby leaving the matter to be determined by the distribution of political power. Yet the Australian case represents an even more naked power grab than the Americans. While US presidents have largely supported ratification, but been , Australian policy reflects calculated political judgements.
By accepting arbitration or waiving reservations to adjudication, Australia potentially reduces its slice of an estimated $40-$100 billion in Timor Gap resources. Yet there are much more consequential stakes attached to upholding a rules-based order in the region as a whole. In the South China Sea alone, 60% of Australia's exports and over $5 trillion in annual global trade depend on China's respect for freedom of navigation rules. Australians should heed the words of President Eisenhower that 'it is better to lose a point now and then in an international tribunal, and gain a world in which everyone lives at peace under a rule of law.'
Plibersek explicitly recognised the underlying strategic calculation in concluding that upholding international law 'is in the interests of the system itself that has delivered so much for Australia.' There is no illusion that the international legal system is capable of displacing the realities of geopolitics. The Asia-Pacific strategic environment will be shaped by the Sino-US power contest for the foreseeable future. But persistent recognition that rules are capable of bringing order to that contest will require bipartisan commitment to investing real political capital in the international legal order.
HSBC has decided not to move its headquarter from London to HK. It has got concessions from the UK government but the developments in HK will also have been concidered.
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