By Desmond Woods OAM*
Despite serious expenditure on the RAAF’s Joint Strike Fighters over the last decade, none of these highly capable aircraft are able to operate from the decks of the RAN’s Landing Helicopter Docks (LHD) HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide.
These two Juan Carlos class ‘harrier carriers’ were designed by Navantia both as VSTOL platforms for air strike and air defence, as well as capable amphibious and command and control platforms. But the ADF cannot use them in the VSTOL role because the Australian Department of Defence asked for that capability to be eliminated from their design. The VSTOL ski jump remains on board only because it is necessary for ship stability. So, locked into that short-sighted decision, made in a different era, the ADF can use these excellent ships purely as amphibious and helicopter vessels and never as full spectrum naval warfare platforms.
So the current situation is that all the RAAF’s F35s, and their highly trained aircrew, are waiting in hardened hangars on land bases waiting, presumably, to re fight the Battle for Australia in the skies over our shores! Not one of these F35s can rise from a naval deck and engage in ‘ ripple three’ flying to ensure that the air space around our ships and people is free of enemy aircraft and their hypersonic missiles.
Someone has got this business of oceanic task force operations and convoy protection all wrong – and it isn’t the Japanese ! They know from bitter experience, that if you want airpower at sea you have to take it with you and, as the article informs us, the Japanese are buying more VSTOL F35Bs so that they can do just that. How very prudent of them.
Ignoring the problem and hoping for the best – for decades
Meanwhile the Australian Government is planning to buy yet more conventional take-off and landing F35’s for the RAAF to operate from its existing continental land bases far from where the action may be in the next few years. This plan, to ignore the requirement for protecting the air around our ships at sea, is based on the decades long assumption that we will always work together at sea and our ‘great and powerful friend’ will always provide USN / USMC combat air patrol (CAP) for us around any Australian task group or convoy escort operation in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean, or at sea north of Lombok Strait in the SCS.
That assumption better still be correct, because if it isn’t, and the RAN is operating beyond the USN air umbrella. our Task Force Commander has no means, apart from a limited on-board stock of surface launched missiles, to sanitise local air space when our ships are out of range of RAAF F35s flying from Australia. Without a CAP, when the shooting starts, our warships, and the bulk carriers and tankers they are convoying would become target practice for an uncontested opponent with carrier-based strike aircraft able to launch standoff anti-ship missiles without fear of interdiction.
This lamentable failure by successive Australian governments, over four decades, to maintain fixed wing strike aircraft flying from our ships decks at sea, is a bit George Bernard Shaw’s opinion of many second marriages. He called them ‘the triumph of optimism over hard won experience! ‘ We have surely learned this lesson about the indispensability of naval based air interdiction so many times during WWII and the second half of the twentieth century. Indigenous air cover at sea is not optional if our ships are to operate in harms way near to enemy airpower – and to survive.
What needs doing now to quickly improve the situation at sea?
Firstly – give Navantia a contract to upgrade Canberra and Adelaide as a priority project so that they can both operate RAAF and or RAN Fleet Aur Arm F35Bs. The ships will also support those VSTOL aircraft belonging to our allies which drop in for a drink of fuel. Make them, at last, the fixed wing capable platforms they were always designed to be and are operated by the Spanish Navy. .
Secondly – cancel the next tranche of conventional RAAF F35s and invest that same money in F35Bs.
Thirdly – invite the RAAF to the party and ask them to get on with learning to fly their new F35Bs from Navy decks – like the RAF and the RN Fleet Air Arm have been doing together since the April to June 1982 Falklands War. Those RAN Fleet Air Arm pilots selected for conversion can also add o the numbers of F35B pilots, easing the pressure to the RAAF to crew all the new aircraft .
That was when it became obvious to the RAF that unless they could fly from the sea, not just over it, they had nothing lethal to bring to the fight. OnceAdelaide and Canberra are F35B capable they might be able to host some US Marine Corps JSFs or Japanese ones. That really would provide visible interoperability at sea. The RN hosts the USMC regularly on the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers and the Japanese are preparing to do so.
It really is ‘punching well below our weight’ nationally to persist with not acquiring this essential F35B capability. Is it reasonable to be buying our new frigates, which we know cannot survive in potentially enemy occupied air space? During high end warfare we will need our ships to be at sea, far from land based air cover, keeping sea lanes open for cargoes to pass across. That capability gap in the air currently makes our Navy less of a deterrent than it could, and should, be, because our fleet’s vulnerability to air launched long range missiles makes it realistically a coastal force only without the USN to protect it. Convoying maritime trade might be deemed by our government too risky in wartime for the RAN to operate without any long range VSTOL aircraft able to take down the enemy’s aircraft while they are still out of missile range.
Lessons learned ?
The Japanese Navy’s WWII command team learned the hard way, eighty years ago, that once carrier-based air cover is no longer available the war is over and defeat is inevitable. Their professional descendents are not relying on the USN to pick up the tab for protecting their fleet and merchant marine. They are doing what they can now to be ready in case they are tested in the North Pacific far from their home air bases by ‘things sent to try them.’
Australia should also do what we can now to prepare for the same air defence test in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the highly contested waters to our north, where we will need our ships to be. We should realise that we might have to ‘go it alone’, particularly if our powerful friend has too many other simultaneous calls on their decks and aircraft to help us to operate successfully purely in our national interest at sea. Protecting ships coming to our ports with fuel to keep our economy from falling off a cliff is our business and may not be seen as the core business of the USN by the occupants of the White House or the Pentagon.
In this new, and clearly transactional era in geopolitics, we need some fresh thinking and to drop the comfortable assumptions about who will be with up for the fight when we need to keep supplies flowing to our continent across the vast oceans that surround us. There is now an urgent requirement for the ADF to have much greater full spectrum independent capability at sea.
That would be one obvious conclusion we could be drawing from the unpreceded events of this month in Washington where all the old certainties about who will be sailing beside us through hostile seas just became far less predictable.
*Desmond Woods is a retired Royal Australian Naval Officer
