How to Defend Australia by Hugh White

Author:Hugh White [White, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Comparative Politics
ISBN: 9781760640996
Google: idpZwgEACAAJ
Publisher: La Trobe University Press
Published: 2019-07-02T01:07:26.479000+00:00

Interoperability

Few ideas drive so much spending with so little thought as interoperability. Interoperability refers to designing our forces so they can operate alongside other countries’ forces, especially our closest allies’. It’s a feature that comes in varying degrees. At the simplest level it might mean no more than the ability to coordinate separate campaigns against a common enemy through the exchange of liaison officers. But it becomes important to the design of our forces when we aim to enhance their ability to fight together at the operational and tactical levels. The more closely we want to integrate at these levels, the more important it becomes for communications, logistics, equipment and doctrine to be compatible. The highest level of interoperability is required when two forces want to fight as one at the tactical level, especially in air and naval operations, where much of the battle is fought through sensor and weapons systems that must be able to link to one another. That’s the kind of interoperability needed if, for example, Australian ships are to operate as fully integrated parts of a US Navy taskforce, or if our fighters are to fly on combat missions with US Air Force planes. The aim then is for the two forces’ platforms, sensors and weapons to interact together on the same network. Taken to its logical conclusion, this approach sees Australian forces as merely an extension of US forces, but paid for and crewed by Australia – rather as, in its first decades, the fledgling RAN was seen by some simply as an extension of the British Royal Navy, but funded and mostly crewed by Australians. Over the past decade or two, Australian governments have increasingly been thinking this way.

Full tactical interoperability at this level has big implications for our decisions about capabilities. American forces are not going to follow our lead, so we must follow theirs to ensure that we are both operating the same systems. We need to buy American systems, and continually upgrade them to maintain compatibility. This has influenced many decisions over the past twenty years, including the choice of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for the air force, the Aegis combat system for the navy’s new major warships, and the combat system from the US Navy’s Virginia-class submarine to replace the old system in the Collins boats and for our new submarines.

There can be advantages to buying US weapons and systems – we can be more confident, for example, that our capabilities will work well and will keep working into the future. But it can also distort our priorities. US equipment and systems are not always the best or most cost-effective for us. The Virginia-class combat system, for example, was almost certainly not the most cost-effective for our submarines. We would have been better off with a German system, but the Howard government decided to buy the US system to maximise interoperability. So we need to be clear about whether the strategic value we get from high levels of interoperability

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