The Concatenate

Indian Express has an interesting article joining an avalanche of concerned coverage about the regional tooling up of blue water navies.

What was news to me and of some interest was the new Japanese aircraft carrier Hyuga. As the Japanese have a constitutional restraint on building aircraft carrers they’ve cunningly called it a “Helicopter Destroyer”.

With a flat top and a 20,000 tonne displacement they’re not fooling anyone.

Apparently the Japanese have plans to build four of these beasts.

It’s a good thing the economy’s heading south or we here in Australia would have no hope of finding crews for all the ships we want to build to join in the fun.

So what happens when a small poor country discovers it can sell its soldiers for UN peace keeping?

Well first off it finds that it can afford to make its army much bigger than it could possibly afford otherwise.

Given a choice between subsistence farming, cleaning up after foreign tourists, or a glove trotting career in uniform one can see why the better and brighter in a small, poor country might gravitate to the army.

When you’ve got a proud warrior tradition in the indigenous peoples and a arriviste merchant class (in this case Indians imported by the British) the tensions between civilian government and the military are doomed to eventually spill over.

The tragedy is that if the UN hadn’t solved its manpower problems, essentially by turning Fiji into a mercenary nation, then the tourism interests in the country would have had the power to knock heads together at least for their own good.

But there are two reasonably quick ways to fix this.

1. Firstly Fiji needs to be forever banned from contributing to peace keeping operations. The military will eventually shrink to something of a more suitable size. And all foreign military exchanges need to be contingent on the maintenance of the rule of law.

2. They need to be kicked out of all international sporting competition. I’ll miss watching Fijians play rugby, but it seems to be the only way to get through to upper classes.

The Liberals seem to have realised that Australia hates boat people and there’s precious approval ratings in kicking them around in the media.

Why is this?

Basically we get refugees in Australia in three ways:

1. They fly in on a tourist visa and lie about their reasons for entering the country.

2. They sit on their backsides in a refugee camp until their number comes up and they get assigned a random country for which they have no affinity at all.

3. They decide that Australia is the country for them, travel half the world and brave a perilous ocean crossing to get here. On arrival they honestly declare that they are refugees seeking asylum.

And yet for some reason it’s that third group, in many ways the most admirable of all, whom we vilify and cage?

Sometimes this isn’t a very pleasant country at all.

The New Matilda has a good piece on developments today in the telco world.

Basically the Government has announced it is going to set up a new, majority government owned, company to build a national optical fibre information network.

A new Telstra, only with newer infrastructure funded by the taxpayer.

I like the idea of the open infrastructure.

But I’m glad I don’t own shares in the old Telstra.

The normally excellent War Nerd has really jumped the shark in his latest missive. This happens often to him whenever he heads to sea.

I don’t know if it’s the Russian perspective of his employers at The Exile, or just that he’s spent too much time reading statistics in Jane’s and not enough time talking to real people who actually fight wars.

But rather than ad-hominem attacks let’s have a look at his argument, that a scare document put out by the US Naval Institute to pull in some more funds, is proof of the demise of maritime power.

In this case it’s the Dong Feng 21 ballistic missile, a bug bear much beloved of the same doom mongers who thought the submarine, and then the bomber, would spell the end of maritime power. Heck shore based gunnery had the same cachet once.

I’m sure the Dong Feng 21 is super. If it’s fuelled up ready to go and the crew is ready when a carrier battle group is found, and if the battle group is still at the same coordinates when it gets there.

Because the nerd is in high dudgeon he doesn’t mind that he then goes on to raise the ghost of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Nevermind that the absence of an aircraft carrier was what saw them on the bottom of the sea. A carrier that was planned to accompany them but which ran aground in the West Indies. The broader failure of Imperial foreign policy which saw us trying to simultaneously fight the German, French, Italian, and Japanese navies is not an argument against maritime power. The failure of all the world to finish us off is more a testament to it.

Yes it may be true that there’s “no defence” against ballistic missiles. But they have to hit their target. Ships moving at over 60kmph, and performing random zig zags, need not fear anything with a 12 minute flight time, even assuming that the missile is fired the second the ship’s (then) position is known.

The nerd goes on to make more uninformed comments about matters naval. Hanging his hat on the sinking of the INS Eilat in 1967 as proof of the useful end of large surface combatants.

He’s being really selective here. Learning their lesson, just six years later at sea in the Yom Kippur War the Israelis completely negated the zoomy soviet missiles through a new found enthusiasm for Electronic Warfare (EW).

Over 52 missiles targeted Israeli ships and none found their target. That doesn’t include the number of times the Arab navies should have been able to target missiles but their screens were full of white snow.

Here’s where the nerd falls down, and very badly. Every Western surface unit is covered in antennae and modules not one of which have their purpose published for small boys, and newspaper pundits, to argue loudly about.

So he might know all the published statistics of the Harpoon missile, but what none of us in civilian land know is whether it will be able to lock on its target and hold the lock through flight. I’d hazard a guess that against top notch EW it won’t.

A visceral hatred of handsome naval aviators also colours the piece, but it’s worth noting that the future of the aircraft carrier is flying swarms of un-manned planes off its decks. The fly boy is dead, but the carrier will live on.

In fact the future looks bright for large surface units. Between acting as a UAV launchpad, and being the only mobile platform for large lasers and railguns needing megawatt power supplies, the future seems to be full of big ships.

But what about the nukes? Well if the big toys are coming out we can assume there won’t be many satellites left in the sky.

And if we’re talking survivability, would you prefer to invest in ships steaming at 30 knots (1 knot = 1.852 kmph) in an unknown direction? Or fixed air fields and slow moving land units?

A failure to regulate banks and insurance companies might see a collapse of American power. The death of the aircraft carrier will not.