By Jennifer Parker*
Maritime trade is Australia’s lifeline – in times of peace, crisis or conflict. Without ships bringing in the fuel, fertiliser, ammunition, and other critical supplies that keep our economy running and our defence viable, Australia would quickly run out. Yet Sam Roggeveen, arguing in The Interpreter, “Why Japan’s Mogami frigates can’t protect Australia’s trade”, joins a long line of advocates for a continental defence approach, underplaying the importance of protecting maritime trade. This view seeks to wish away Australia’s vulnerabilities rather than confront them. To adopt such a view would be a costly strategic error. (From: The Interpreter, The Lowy Institute.)
Roggeveen makes three key claims: first, that the newly announced plan to acquire Mogami frigates from Japan would leave Australia with ships unacceptably vulnerable against a highly capable adversary; second, that trade routes themselves are too long to protect; and third, that the effort is not worth it.
Theorists have often argued that surface combatants such as frigates and destroyers are increasingly vulnerable to the proliferation of missiles and now uncrewed capabilities, including aerial vehicles and surface vessels. Most have never operated a warship combat system or fired a missile.
While vessels operating closer to the coast are indeed exposed to a greater range of threats, lessons from recent naval warfare quickly debunk notions that frigates are now unacceptably vulnerable against a capable adversary. In both the Russia-Ukraine war in the Black Sea and the challenge of Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, ships with well-prepared, well-trained crews, effective radars, modern combat systems and layered defences remain highly effective. Notably, despite firing hundreds of missiles and UAVs at US and European warships, the Houthis have yet to achieve a hit on a warship. This is why a wide range of nations, including China, continue to invest heavily in them.
In seeking to dismiss the challenge of protecting Australia’s maritime lifelines, Roggeveen overlooks the fundamentals of maritime trade protection. While he doubts the upgraded Mogami’s ability to safeguard Australia’s trade, he ignores that protection comes from a system of capabilities: ships, submarines, satellites, and processes such as naval control of shipping, evasive routing, and alliances. Australia’s new frigates are a key part of that system, capable of providing close protection when required, but this is often unnecessary when broader sea control, that freedom of maritime manoeuvre, is maintained.
The term sea lines of communication often creates the false impression that maritime trade routes are like fixed highways on land. No such permanence exists – routes are fluid, not fixed. In peacetime, merchant shipping follows the most direct routes to save time and fuel. But as the Houthi attacks on merchant vessels have shown, ships will take longer, less direct routes to avoid threats and costly war-risk insurance. Protecting Australia’s maritime supply is less about defending a single route than safeguarding the ships themselves. Protection need not be absolute along the entire route; it must be applied where and when the ship is at risk.
Roggeveen argues that Australia’s enormous landmass and dispersed major ports make blockading trade “a massively costly enterprise for an adversary”. Yet an adversary would not need to stop access to every port. Targeting key shipments across the Pacific and Indian oceans would quickly deter ships from trading with Australia. That task becomes far easier if Australia abandons maritime protection altogether, as Roggeveen’s continental strategy proposes.
Protecting maritime trade is about identifying which elements will be essential in a conflict or crisis, then reducing dependencies and implementing robust port protection measures.
It is not all 29,000 ships that visit Australia each year or every port that needs protecting, but a much smaller, vital subset. It is the critical seaborne supply, the essential goods without which the nation could not sustain a war. It is the portion of maritime trade that finances the war effort and enables the nation to fight, and potentially win, the conflict. And it is the critical seaborne supply for partners and allies, such as Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, of energy, food, and other essentials.
Roggeveen’s answer is to stockpile goods and accelerate the renewable energy transition. Both are worthwhile objectives, but neither removes the need for seaborne supply. As I have noted elsewhere, the first step in any effective maritime strategy is strategic resilience, reducing the volume of goods that must be protected. But Australia is not, and will not become, self-sufficient to the point where it can eliminate reliance on sea supply. Stockpiling critical goods is valuable in reducing what needs to cross the ocean, but it only buys time. Without the ability to replenish stockpiles in a contested environment, Australia’s capacity to resist in a major crisis or conflict would be strictly limited.
So, protecting maritime trade is about identifying which elements will be essential in a conflict or crisis, then reducing dependencies and implementing robust port protection measures. This should be complemented by maritime trade routing plans to avoid threats, diversification of trading partners to minimise exposure to high threat areas, and a theatre-wide approach combining sensors and capabilities to achieve sea control at the time and place required. If necessary, and only as a last resort, a convoy system with escorts, similar to that employed for coastal and some Indian Ocean shipping in the Second World War, could be reintroduced.
Protecting critical elements of maritime trade is not optional for Australia, it is a matter of national survival.
*Jennifer Parker is an expert associate at the National Security College, Australian National University, an adjunct fellow at the University of New South Wales and Nancy Bentley Associate Fellow in Indo-Pacific Maritime Affairs at the Council on Geostrategy. Jennifer has over 20 years experience in the Australian Department of Defence working in a broad range of operational and capability areas.
