A year after being appointed chief of the Royal Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond admits to frustration when he’s asked why Australia needs a potent navy. (The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The Strategist.)
‘I wish that we were in a different intellectual space as a nation,’ Hammond says.
‘We’re a three-ocean island trading nation. We owe our economic prosperity to the sea. We’re custodians of the planet’s third largest exclusive economic zone. We have an annual import–export trade of about $900 billion per year that comes and goes by sea.’
