From today's SMH 'Column 8', humour with a disturbingly serious message in its content.
"Australia gets Spain to build our new Armada," notes Harald Ehrlich, of shipyards unknown, “and our own Nelson is there to help with the launch. Let’s hope he is not quite as successful at sinking the fleet as his English namesake.”
Earlier in this thread, the Army’s unwillingness to put their overly expensive new helicopters into high risk situations had been discussed. (Somebody commented that it would be "politically unacceptable for the ADF to lose a helicopter".)
On a far larger scale, one might ask whether the Navy will ever be willing to place such a large asset –
the classic ‘all your eggs in one basket’ – as one of their new aircraft carriers/cruisers (call them what you will) into any situation where it might be at risk of being sunk.
In peacetime, for disaster relief or civil aid, once one of the new carriers gets there, (wherever ‘there’ might be), having such a large platform with state of the art comms., helicopters, landing craft and everything else on board will surely be a fantastic asset. But you don’t need to be Von Clausewitz or Sun Tsu to see that if we ever find ourselves in an even mildly shooting war, Australia would have to be extremely careful in risking all those eggs to one incoming missile, torpedo, mine, bomb or even suicide speedboat.
Just as with the helicopters, surely to God we’d have been better off with a large number of smaller, cheaper craft that could both spread the wealth and led to a less profound effect upon the whole national defence should just one of them be lost? (I'm reminded of the Argentineans keeping their lone carrier squarely in port for the whole duration of the Flaklands conflict because of the threat presented by one lone RN submarine.)
Along similar lines, do we have the fleet support vessels (and the manpower) to provide adequate protection for just one of these (in Australian terms) behemoths?