Never Fear, the Danes Will Protect Us

The Danes want to sell us warships.  Not quite sure where Denmark is?  Its that little thumblike thing sticking out of the middle top of Germany.  The spruiker for the Danish shipbuilder interested in selling us grey killy things actually referenced lego in his public relations spiel, possibly because this is the only thing any of us know about Denmark.

We are apparently going to need some new warships to complement the shiny new AWD destroyers that we might be getting if we can figure out how to make them.  A number of well known international shipbuilding firms have put up their hand and now the Danes have tossed their hat into the ring as well.  From what I can determine the Danish offering will be a variant of vessels currently in service in their navy (possibly with less of an emphasis on icebreaking).  The Danish ships are by all accounts quite capable, multi option units at a reasonable price.  So you know we won't be buying them.

Defence procurement in Australia follows a traditional pattern.  A need is identified, specifications are produced, a budget is prepared, submissions are sought, a winner is selected and everything goes to hell.  At least this is what it might look like to an objective outsider.  Or an objective insider for that matter.  Fortunately there aren't many of them.

It is easy to mock our defence procurement process (very, very easy) but most of those who do so do it without really understanding the purpose of Australia's defence forces and its associated defence industries.  Australia has a defence force largely because you can't really have a country our size and not have one.  It is helpful to have something painted grey (or some guys in green) that we can attach to the vastly more impressive armed forces of someone whose favour we're trying to curry.  Our armed forces are more than capable of fulfilling that role.

Let's face it, if there was a genuine, full scale military threat to Australia our sole strategy would be to run up the flag and yelp for the Americans (unless they were the threat in which case we would run down the flag and yelp for mercy).  Since the Americans have enough problems of their own it would be helpful to point out how many times we had tacked bits of our military onto theirs when they needed some visible (if not terribly significant) international support for what they were doing.  Hence the Australian armed forces.

Being able, eventually, to build semicredible warships and such is frequently touted as being of strategic importance.  This is rubbish or rather, it isn't rubbish but its also impossible.  The ability to produce warships by ourselves in an emergency (or given the speed and cost of shipbuilding in Australia possibly a better term would be "the ability to produce a warship") would indeed be very useful.  Unfortunately all of the bits that put the "war" into warship are designed and to a great extent produced elsewhere.  To say nothing of reloads should we waste all of our stockpile of shells and missiles shooting them at enemies.

Fortunately our defence industry has another purpose.  It is largely there to provide jobs for voters who would otherwise, presumably, not have them.  Think of it as a heavily armed work for the dole scheme.  In that context it really doesn't matter if the grotesquely over budget and hideously botched warship slides straight down the slipway and sinks like a stone.  Indeed if the vessel in question was a submarine it would probably be claimed that the thing was performing to specifications.  As long as one or two wallowing hulks painted grey manage to tag along behind the American fleet and our soldiers can equip themselves from local gun shops our defence forces are fine.

So where does that leave the Danes?  It leaves them sitting on top of reasonably capable deep water combatants that they haven't got a hope in hell of selling to the Australian Navy.  Possibly they might have more luck if they built a factory for producing grey painted lego blocks somewhere in Adelaide.