Australian Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Lethe said:

"Ultimately, this duplicity is futile. Whether we have to choose between America and China has very little to do with us. It depends on them, on how intense their rivalry becomes, and on what they choose to demand of us."

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BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia wants to maintain its delicate balancing act between Russia and the West, its foreign minister said on Thursday, dismissing U.S. calls for it to pick a side.

This month, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Hoyt Brian Yee told Belgrade it “cannot sit on two chairs at the same time”. His remarks sparked sharp criticism in the Serbian capital.

Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, who heads the co-ruling Socialists, once led by late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, said Belgrade would maintain balance with the West, Russia and China.

“What we do not want is that someone pulls our own chair from under us ... what is important is to see what is in our own best interest,” Dacic told Reuters in an interview.

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Lethe said:

In the context of Australia's assertion that it does "not have to choose" between the US and China,

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is rather ominous:



It is easy to dismiss this as merely an impolitic mis-step by a junior official, but in fact it speaks to the reality of how the United States does business in the world. "You are either with us, or against us" was not just a short-lived mantra of the Bush administration, but a reflection of the Manichean divisions the United States has sought to impose on the world for at least the last 70 years: witness its outright hostility towards the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.

As Hugh White noted, whether Australia "has to choose" between the US and China ultimately does not depend upon us, but rather upon the US and China and the nature of their relationship. What Hugh White was too politically correct to note is that one of those two nations is far more likely than the other to demand that we make that choice.

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Bltizo said:

I have a feeling that Australia is increasingly making that decision on its own volition, as of late...

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AUSTRALIA could export a brand new submarine in 20 or 30 years, Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne says.

Mr Pyne was asked at a major submarine conference in Adelaide on Tuesday morning whether it would be possible to sell submarines overseas now that Australia is embarking on the $50 billion Future Submarines project.

He replied that we would never sell the French-designed Shortfin Barracuda — we want to keep the best submarine in the region for ourselves.

However, he said, we could develop an “export version”, in the same way the French did, to both sustain the industry here and meet the needs of other nations.

Mr Pyne has previously talked up the possibility of Australia as an arms exporter, but the focus has been on simpler warships.

However, he said today the idea of exporting submarines was “something we can explore”.

“Strategically we want to have the regionally superior submarine — that means the submarine made for the Australian Navy will be a unique product. There won’t be one like it in the world,” he said.

“We don’t want any other country in our region to have the same level of capability.”

But, he said, it might be possible to have an Australian version then an export version.

“I have a very broad vision about shipbuilding and submarine building,” he said.

“I am certain we will become a export nation for shipbuilding and if we can become an export nation for submarines, that’s something we can explore.

“I do think there are possibilities for that and I don’t think we should be limited in our thinking.”

He said the timeline for such a project would be 20 to 30 years, so it doesn’t interfere with the Future Submarines.

Mr Pyne was speaking at the 4th Submarine Institute of Australia’s Submarine, Science, Technology and Engineering Conference 2017.

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A press briefing on the Australian future submarine (FSM) program by Jean-Michel Billig, the Australian program director for Naval Group (formerly DCNS), at the PACIFIC 2017 international maritime expo a few weeks ago set some hares running. Among other things, he said that ‘The vessels may end up with conventional propellers as well as air independent propulsion, which helps to increase underwater endurance’.

That was significant because DCNS made a big deal of offering Australia pump-jet propulsion during the competitive evaluation process for the FSM. We were told that ‘The Shortfin Barracuda uses a pump-jet propulsor that combines a rotor and stator within a duct to significantly reduce the level of radiated noise [compared with propellers] and avoids cavitation’. And DCNS Australia’s CEO really played up the significance of the technology:

There’s no better example of [the benefits of a strategic Australia–France relationship] than the offer from France to transfer to Australia sovereign control and use of pump-jet propulsion technology for the Shortfin Barracuda—technology resident only in France, the UK and the USA. Technology born from the French SSBN program a generation ago. The stealth and hydrodynamic performances of pump jet propulsion are of course classified and in Australia known only to DCNS and the Australian Government.

While no hard data has made its way into the public domain, an argument began doing the rounds among submarine tragics that pump jets are too inefficient at low speeds to make sense on a conventional submarine. (See here, for example, and I’ve had a stack of correspondence along those lines.) The recent Insight Economics report (PDF) has a chart (p. 103, redrawn below) that seems to show that pump jets turn electrical power into propulsion less efficiently than propellers at low speeds, though they are superior at higher speeds.

Clcik on this link for a detailed technical discussion on the merits of the propulsion systems:

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Lethe said:

The notion that Australia is going to have a "regionally superior" anything 20-30 years from now is ... optimistic. And what does "regionally superior" mean in a strategic context, anyway? Of what significance is that fact that Australia will continue to operate better military equipment than Fiji when Chinese and Indian nuclear boats are prowling around?

The concept of Australian "regional superiority" makes sense only with respect to Indonesia. And 20 years from now, let alone 30, Indonesia's defence spending will exceed our own, possibly by a very (un)comfortable margin. Of course funds don't translate directly to superiority, but anyone who imagines that Australia will continue to enjoy anything like the disparity in technology and capabilities relative to Indonesia that it has in the past is in for a rude awakening.

Let's not even get into the absurd notion that Australia will export submarines at some point in the distant future, which has about as much chance of happening as a spontaneous revival of the domestic vehicle industry.

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Jura said:

it likely is a controversial article (dated October 28 2017), so just the link here
Australian universities are helping China's military surpass the United States

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