Originally Posted by
etudiant
Recognizing that Australia's military have responsibility for an enormous area, do any of the proposed systems make sense?
A single digit number of nuclear subs or a double digit number of B-21s will soak up all funds available, leaving at most the dregs for territorial defense or anything else.
It seems a mismatch, so any explanation would be appreciated.
My understanding is that the military planners believe that the best use of the available defence funds is to plan to strike the enemy before they land anywhere along our vast coastline &, if they do manage to establish a beachhead, then it would be important to disrupt their supply lines. For many years, the ADF was relying on submarines and Harpoon carrying air assets to provide this capability. Now that Harpoon is near the end of its service life, more capable missiles such as LRASM & NSM/JSM are planned to become the means to deny access via maritime approaches. A potential enemy would be aware of this structure and would do their best to protect their supporting sea lines of communication thus, having stand-off weapons and/or stealth capability is necessary. The F-35 would perform this role well (within its range) but B-21's would be effective at much greater ranges with larger payloads so it would be a much stronger deterent.
The land side of the ADF may not be getting as big a slice of the defence budget but, what they are getting is a high quality & highly mobile capability. With relatively small numbers in our Army, they have to be able to respond quickly to counter any threat using the RAN's amphibious capability and RAAF transport aircraft. There has been significant improvement in these areas in the last 15 years.
I look at the ADF as an integrated force and it is performing much better now than it did 30-40 years ago when there was significant inter-service rivalry.