Tag Archive for: B-21

Getting the most out of AUKUS could require Plan B-21

As the Defence Department’s deputy secretary for strategy between 2009 and 2012, I asked US counterparts on three occasions about the likelihood they would share submarine nuclear-propulsion technology.

The answer was the same each time: there was no way the US Navy or Department of Energy would hand Australia the technology. Britain had been given access in 1958 under conditions where even today the US has stringent oversight of its capability, but that was the limit of American openness.

The American judgement was that we should stick to our quiet conventional submarines, which the US military valued highly.

Two things have changed since then: first, communist China presents a near-term existential threat to the global strategic balance; and second, Joe Biden is US president. The China threat will outlast Biden, but the key question for Australia is: will AUKUS survive a change of president?

Without Biden’s intervention, America’s nuclear-propulsion bosses would not have changed their minds about Australian access.

On Monday, The Australian reported the views of Randy Schriver, a respected assistant secretary of defence in the Trump administration, that there were ‘many potential obstacles on both sides’, including pushback from the US Navy. Success requires ‘sustained commitment from the senior political leaders in both capitals, otherwise the chances of Australia deploying its own nuclear submarine will drop below 50 per cent’.

Schriver backs AUKUS but says that, even with Biden’s personal support, a successful transfer of propulsion technology is a 50–50 proposition.

I want AUKUS to succeed, just as I wanted the French-designed Attack-class submarines to be a triumph. Australia needs a defence force with excellent technology, able to deter a well-armed enemy, and submarines can play that role.

Australia needs to persuade the US that we are serious about taking on nuclear propulsion, that we will spend the money, recruit the people, design the safety systems, build the ports, and train and exercise the navy to be outstanding nuclear custodians. On the AUKUS timeframe announced last September, we have until February 2023 to develop ‘an optimal pathway to deliver this capability’. Thirteen months to go.

By February 2023 Australia could have a different government, one more doubtful about nuclear propulsion. Boris Johnson’s attempt to hang on to the UK prime ministership, optimistically titled ‘Operation Save Big Dog’, may have sunk well before 2023.

Biden could face a Republican-controlled Congress after the November 2022 midterm elections, constraining his ability to make bold executive decisions.

Just like the Attack-class submarine project, it may emerge that the technology on offer is ultimately not going to deliver what Australia needs. Or it may be unaffordable or too far into the future to matter, or, as the US Navy worries, beyond what our navy of 16,000 people can handle.

It took half a decade for our government to conclude that it needed a Plan B to escape from the Attack-class project. Does anyone seriously think we should approach AUKUS as though nothing could go wrong?

Even if AUKUS delivers success in other technology areas like cooperation on hypersonic missiles, nuclear propulsion is a risky centrepiece for the grouping. A failure of AUKUS is something we cannot allow to happen because it would strengthen Beijing’s claim that American decline in the region is inevitable.

To keep AUKUS strong, and for our own security, we need a Plan B if nuclear propulsion fails. Given our geography, Australia needs military equipment with range and hitting power. Nuclear-powered submarines provide unlimited range but with constrained firepower—it’s a long way back to port once the limited stock of torpedoes has been fired.

Extended-range strike aircraft give more flexibility and the capacity for faster missile replenishment. Australia should look at options to join with the US in acquiring the long-range B-21 stealth bomber. The aircraft’s development is complete. Five aircraft are in construction in California; initial flights have already happened, with more planned in the next few months.

No one piece of equipment changes the strategic balance, but long-range stealthy strike aircraft would complicate Beijing’s offensive plans, creating a barrier to military adventurism. Raising the barrier to military conflict is what is needed in the next few years.

ASPI’s Marcus Hellyer points out that the B-21 will use two F-35 engines but have three or four times the unrefuelled range. The US Air Force plans for a unit price under $1 billion, which is an astonishing amount of money until you compare it with the $45 billion we plan to spend on future frigates, $89 billion on submarines and $30 billion on armoured vehicles.

Australia operated the F-111 long-range strike bomber until December 2010, so this is a type of machinery we have mastered in the past. AUKUS gives us an opportunity to see if we can buy into a game-changing technology, with production starting soon, delivering a long-range stealth weapon that will reinforce deterrence in Asia.

The Royal Australian Air Force could be operating this aircraft within half a decade, making it relevant to the current strategic situation.

An investment now will spend money that can’t be spent on submarine construction at least for a decade and overcome a lack of hitting power in the Australian Defence Force.

Strike capability will make the ADF a much more difficult opponent and thereby strengthen deterrence. That means keeping the region at peace.

The case against the B-21 bomber is that it isn’t in Defence’s current plan and won’t be built in Adelaide. This points to weaknesses in how we acquire military technology: our processes are too slow and too focused on incrementally adding to the existing design of the ADF. We need more creativity.

Left to its own devices, it would take Defence years to decide that a stealthy strike bomber might be worth buying. At Christmas, The Australian reported that a review of Defence innovation planned ‘major reforms’ to ‘get new projects to contract stage’, cutting ‘as much as 12 months from the current four years’.

Four years is longer than the time between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the end of the war in the Pacific. Defence is talking the language of a strategic crisis but hasn’t yet worked out how to break out of a peacetime acquisition mindset.

AUKUS provides the best platform we have to think again about the design of the defence force. This will only happen with ministerial push. There is literally no time to lose.

Buying military hardware from the US: wish list or shopping list?

A few years ago, an American friend of mine cocked an eye at me sceptically when I raised the issue of Australia’s air force buying F-22 Raptors from the United States. ‘It won’t happen,’ he said flatly. ‘The F-22 incorporates a lot of US-only technology. Re-engineering it so that we could export the aircraft would cost a lot of money, and the export customers would have to pay for that.’

The implication was clear: export customers would have to pay a lot more for an inferior product. Besides, an Australian purchase would require the approval of the US Congress and that body has shown no sign whatsoever of wanting to lift the prohibition on exports of the F-22.

My American friend knows what he’s talking about—he was chief designer on another, now-iconic US Air Force stealth aircraft.

The US has never exported a stealthy aircraft, except for the F-35, which I’ll discuss later; stealth technology is an American ‘secret sauce’ and they guard it jealously.

So where does that leave Australians who want to buy a squadron or two of the Americans’ new B-21 Raider stealth bomber? And what about advocates of buying or leasing a flotilla of US Navy nuclear-powered submarines?

If the B-21 is ever exportable, how much of its formidable capability would we actually be allowed to get? And would we be able to maintain the aircraft and its stealthy coatings in-country, and measure its stealth performance periodically? If we can’t do that, then they’re no longer a sovereign, strategic Australian asset: their stealth performance, which is a vital part of their total capability, would be controlled entirely by another government. That’s if we can even get our hands on them.

What about nuclear-powered submarines? Yes, they’d be nice: no range limitations, unlimited submerged endurance, plenty of speed and power. They’d match our operational requirements quite well, I reckon.

But we don’t have a nuclear industry in this country. In fact, there’s a law against having one. So we can’t maintain a nuclear power plant ourselves and can’t even train navy and civilian nuclear engineers. If we had a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, we’d be relying on another country to do all that for us. Those boats would no longer be a sovereign, strategic Australian asset. Whoever supplied and maintained them, and trained our people, could impose whatever conditions on their use they liked, and we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Don’t laugh—it’s happened to us before.

Besides, nuclear-powered submarines are another American ‘secret sauce’: what makes anybody think the Yanks will simply build a fleet of Virginia-class submarines for us, just because we ask them nicely? Nuclear-powered submarines are a sovereign, strategic US asset. There’s no way the Americans (or anyone else) would ever share the intimate secrets of their submarine fleet with anybody. And would they agree to export a detuned nuclear boat to a country that lacks the scientific and engineering knowledge and regulatory muscle to operate a nuclear submarine safely? That’s another flat ‘no’.

What about buying a bunch of US Navy Arleigh Burke–class Aegis destroyers instead of the Hunter-class frigates we’re building in Adelaide—that would be cheaper, surely? After all, the Americans are planning to build more than 80 of them.

Maybe not, actually. For one thing, the Arleigh Burkes have a crew of 320, compared with about 160 on the Hunter-class; we have enough trouble manning the ships and submarines we’ve already got and we can’t reduce fleet numbers just because the ships have bigger crews. For another, the US Navy has already announced that it’s about to start replacing these ships with the so-called DDG(X). And we have most of what’s in the Arleigh Burke–class anyway with our own Hobart-class air warfare destroyers (or DDGs, as the navy calls them), which have a crew of 186. If we simply want lots of hulls in the water, we could build more of these; the better we become at doing so, the cheaper they get. But they’re based on a design that’s nearly 30 years old (the Arleigh Burke design is nearly 40 years old) and aren’t the quiet anti-submarine warfare ship the navy wants—hence the Hunter-class.

What about the F-35? It’s a stealthy fighter that’s being exported to 14 countries. But if you look closely, the F-35 assembly line in Fort Worth, Texas, includes a signature measurement facility. This is supposed to measure and validate the stealth signature of each aircraft and ensure it conforms with the customer’s requirements. However, the only people who get to see all of those stealth performance figures are the Americans. Not only do they know how stealthy every F-35 aircraft ever built actually is, but I am willing to bet none of the export models are as stealthy as the ones the US builds for itself.

So, let’s take stock, shall we? The US Congress won’t allow the export of the F-22. It may not allow the export of the B-21, either, and even if we do get some B-21s what are we getting for our money and can we maintain their stealth signature? No government in its right mind will simply build a batch of nuclear submarines for us just because we ask them. And Australian law doesn’t allow us to have a nuclear industry, anyway.

We can’t have a sovereign, strategic operational capability if we depend on another country to maintain our submarines and the stealth coatings on our bombers. Sovereign capability matters—just ask the government.

Where does that leave us? About where we are right now, in my view. So, if we’re going to talk about future capabilities, let’s not indulge in wish lists. Let’s have a sensible conversation about what’s actually doable. Let’s get real.

Australia and the Goldilocks bomber

In my previous post, I examined whether the B-21 bomber being developed by the US Air Force could be a viable long-range strike option for Australia. It would provide our air force with immense capability. Of course, there’s the issue of whether the US would sell it. Recent comments by US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross are about as anodyne as they come, but the US’s and Australia’s interests overlap fundamentally in our acquiring it.

Yet that capability comes at immense cost. Without the government providing tens of billions of additional cash concentrated in the second half of the 2020s, the B-21 would blow the Defence Department’s investment plan apart. It could probably only be done by cancelling at least one of Defence’s current megaprojects.

We can debate whether the B-21 is a better capability or a more manageable risk proposition for Australia than the Hunter-class frigate or Attack-class submarine—and my vote wouldn’t automatically go to the maritime capabilities—but that ship has already sailed. The B-21 option sits for now in the unaffordable column. However, we shouldn’t consign it forever to the inconceivable column.

But let’s take a step back. While there are good reasons to consider a long-range strike capability, does it need to be at the level provided by the B-21? As part of the US nuclear triad, the B-21 is designed to be extremely stealthy and survivable so that it can penetrate the world’s densest air-defence networks. It’s also designed to carry massive amounts of ordnance so that the USAF can obliterate an adversary’s power-projection capabilities (for example, Chinese ports, airfields and missile facilities near Taiwan).

That’s not necessarily what Australia needs to do. In fact, bombing a nuclear-armed power’s homeland is asking for trouble. And I’m certainly not advocating getting a bomber as a Trojan horse for an Australian nuclear capability. Rather, we would be seeking to complicate an adversary’s operational planning by letting them know that wherever they operated within a 3,000- to 4,000-kilometre radius of Australia, they would be exposed to attack. And importantly we could do it anywhere, anytime, again and again—something that submarines can’t do.

To do that, we don’t necessarily need the capability provided by the B-21. Long range would be essential, but maybe not the 5,000+ kilometres of the B-21. Greater payload than the F-35 is a must, but it doesn’t have to be the 100 or so JDAMs the B-21 will carry. A high degree of stealth would be necessary, but not the level required to get in and out of Beijing or Moscow. Remember Norman Augustine’s XVth law: ‘The last 10% of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.’

So what we are looking for is the Goldilocks bomber—something with longer range and greater payload than the F-35, but without the eye-watering cost of the B-21. Something like a 21st-century version of the F-111, perhaps. (It’s possible that we may not need an aircraft to deliver the necessary effects; missiles might do the job and this series will get to that in due course.)

The trouble is, Goldilocks anythings can be hard to find. One of the problems with Defence’s acquisition processes has been trying to develop solutions tailored to be just right, rather than good enough. But is there even a good enough?

There certainly isn’t a direct analogy of the F-111. And the joint strike fighter program shows that developing a manned combat aircraft from scratch is massively expensive and takes a long time.

One option could be an ‘arsenal plane’—a large aircraft, possibly a converted commercial airliner or military transport like the C-17, that can carry a lot of ordnance. It’s simply a bomb truck, but for long-range stand-off munitions. The US actually has one already in the B-52, which can launch long-range stand-off weapons against defended targets and deliver mass ordnance directly on undefended ones. There’s a reason why the US is keeping the B-52 after it retires the much younger B-1 and B-2 fleets. But nobody seems to be working on converting an airliner to a bomber, and in any conflict we’d want our C-17s doing their airlift role.

There’s also a conceptual problem with the arsenal plane for our purposes. Since it isn’t stealthy, it needs to operate in tandem with an aircraft like the F-35. The fighter would operate far ahead of the arsenal plane which carried a large magazine of long-range munitions to be cued by the F-35’s sensors. So, in practice, it wouldn’t provide any greater range than the F-35, which gets us back to where we started.

That leaves a potential unmanned aircraft. The role we’re looking at is one that UAVs would be well suited to fill. Yet, strangely, efforts to develop a long-range strike UAV have been fitful and there is nothing on the market. For example, the US Navy started a program for an unmanned surveillance and strike aircraft and both Boeing and Northrop Grumman developed designs with varying degrees of stealth. But the Pentagon then decided the role of the aircraft would primarily be air-to-air refuelling.

There’s also the ‘airpower teaming system’—aka the ‘loyal wingman’—that Boeing is developing with Australia. Despite the high-profile unveiling earlier this year, details are sketchy. The aircraft appears to be moderately stealthy and has a payload bay that could potentially carry weapons, but probably not the quantity needed. The range figures that have been mentioned are substantial, but if the concept of the Boeing drone is to operate with manned aircraft, its own range is irrelevant and we will still be tied to the range of the F-35. But if Australia were to develop an unmanned strike aircraft, there are potentially some start points to build on.

Despite Defence’s relatively conservative approach to autonomous systems, it does appear to have considered the possibility of autonomous combat aircraft; the 2016 integrated investment program states that ‘replacement [of the Super Hornet] could include either a fourth operational squadron of Joint Strike Fighters or possibly a yet to be developed unmanned combat aerial vehicle’. And for once there’s substantial funding that could be used, with $6–7 billion budgeted in the second half of the 2020s to pay for it.

A long-range strike UAV would be a very different beast from a cheap, disposable tactical drone and would cost millions. However, the development timelines and costs for unmanned systems can be substantially less than for manned system, because there are no crews that have to be kept alive in the face of all threats and environmental factors.

So it might be possible for Australia to go it alone, in cooperation with a US prime contractor that has already gotten half the way there. And if you build it, other customers could come. But that would require Defence making a big bet on an uncertain pathway.

That’s not something Defence likes to do.