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Medium Sized Navies and Sea Basing: Brave as Lions and Cunning as Foxes
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Cost Effectiveness
With most medium navies, there is a clear trade-off between strategic requirement
and affordability. Whether developing an organic sea base capability or ensuring
procurement of platforms that are interoperable with coalition sea base operations, cost
matters. The complexity of sea basing development will be determined by budgetary
constraints. Like most medium navies, the RAN would be faced with the problem of
funding a relevant and versatile concept within available resources. Accordingly,
medium navies view experience with the USN’s concept as a means ‘to influence rather
than dominate [our] equipment programs in the future’. 26 Medium navies are limited
to developing modest sea base capabilities comprising few, but effective, platforms
with supporting joint offensive capabilities, and would have to adapt other approved
projects to suit the concept in the future. Again, a future Royal Australian Air Force
(RAAF) STOVL JSF could potentially provide combat power to augment and sustain
US-led sea-based operations. 27
The other cost medium powers need to consider is that of ‘strategic cost’. Medium
powers aligned with aspects of US foreign policy — such as Australia, Canada and Japan’s
support for the International War on Terror (Operation ENDURING FREEDOM) — have
been subjected to a degree of political antagonism and access barriers in the conduct of
military operations. Such strategic cost, through restricted access to conduct operations
offshore, may prove to be an increasing trend that medium navies, as well as the USN,
need to contend with in the future. Such fallout from aligning with US foreign policy
may trickle down to become an issue with regards to regional diplomacy. Medium
powers may be forced to adopt sea basing to achieve greater operational freedom when
addressing regional hot spots. Conversely, the basing of forces at sea can support
and enhance diplomatic effectiveness through a reduced footprint ashore, mitigating
cultural sensitivities and force protection issues.
Is sea basing just another term for doing what medium and large navies currently do
well? At the end of the day, medium navies must consider a cost-effective analysis
against current capability satisfying their strategic intent and that of significant time
and investment in additional capability to develop and sustain sea basing operations.
Parity with the US is clearly not viable nor relevant, however, development of niche
capabilities to bolster current force structure and provide interoperability with US
operations may prove a worthwhile investment.
The Case for Australian Sea Basing
The international security environment has undergone a transformational change. Since
the Australian Government released the Defence Update 2003, increasing tensions
between the US, China, North Korea and Japan; 28 global terrorism; and ADF operations
in the Solomon Islands, Bougainville, Banda Aceh, Afghanistan and Iraq all have the