Tag Archive for: Manus Island

Australia must take the threat to the Manus Island naval base project seriously

The Australian government must take very seriously the threat to the Manus Island joint naval base project outlined recently by a senior minister in Papua New Guinea’s government.

The fact that the man concerned—Foreign Minister Patrick Pruaitch—has since been suspended from office does not in any way lessen the urgency the Australian government must give to ensuring the signature project under its ‘Pacific step-up’ proceeds.

The redevelopment proposal was in many ways an unusual one when it was announced by the Australian and PNG governments almost two years ago. It was clearly put together in haste following credible evidence that the People’s Republic of China had its eyes on the Lombrum naval base on Manus Island.

The announcement was really a reflection of the complex relationship the then PNG prime minister, Peter O’Neill, had with Australia.

Even though PNG’s relationship with China grew stronger during his eight years in office, O’Neill skilfully maintained excellent relations with successive Australian governments from both sides of politics.

In 2013, he signed an agreement with Kevin Rudd’s Labour government to enable asylum seekers arriving off Australia by boat to be housed at a detention centre Australia rapidly constructed on Manus Island. Even though the agreement was criticised by the Coalition, within days of Tony Abbott becoming prime minister in the same year, O’Neill negotiated its continuation and expansion.

Pruaitch’s announcement last week of a review of the Manus redevelopment agreement was clearly in response to local political and social media pressure to, at the very least, seek a restructuring of the deal, if not its cancellation.

That is what the governor of Manus province, Charlie Benjamin, and some local leaders have been seeking since the project was first announced. And it’s what influential non-government organisations and social media writers have been demanding.

The suspension of Pruaitch is unrelated to his announcement of a review of the base arrangement. The PNG Ombudsman Commission has been pursuing him for serious leadership code breaches for the best part of a decade. His suspension from office became automatic once the chief justice appointed a leadership tribunal to hear the allegations against him.

But the Australian government would be unwise, even foolish, to assume that, with Pruaitch stood aside from ministerial duties for what is likely to be an extended period, pressure to review the Manus agreement will diminish.

It will not. The former minister’s robust assertion that the deal is unfair to PNG and especially the people and businesses on Manus Island is headline news. It will embolden Benjamin, other MPs and social media commentators to demand not just a review, but termination of the project.

National elections are now less than two years away in PNG, and it will be easy to make the base a campaign issue on Manus and beyond.

There’s also no doubt that the well-resourced Chinese embassy in Port Moresby, with its more than 100 staff, has been lobbying—even heavying—PNG politicians and village leaders to stop the project.

While China seems to have lost some interest in acquiring more of the PNG resources sector, its engagement in areas such as communications, defence and the future of Bougainville is as active as ever.

What the Australian government must do immediately is expedite the tender process. That two years have elapsed without a tender being granted is disappointing and, frankly, dangerous.

The tender, worth around $175 million, would likely be awarded to an Australian company, or one with both Australian and American links, given the US’s involvement in the initial agreement.

But what Australia also needs to do is maximise local content by actively seeking participation by Manus Island businesses and contractors in a genuine and meaningful way.

That shouldn’t be hard to do. A number of Manus companies and contractors have been engaged on work associated with the construction and operation of the island’s detention centre since 2013. It remains questionable whether that engagement has been adequate and it would be beneficial if local involvement were given high priority in the new project.

Australia has received a significant warning shot on an issue that is absolutely vital to its national interest. It needs to lift its game with urgency.

And lifting its game needs to include a significant marketing and community engagement program on Manus, and across PNG as a whole.

There remains within the PNG community—and in the national parliament—significant goodwill towards Australia, and an acknowledgement that Manus Island, and the naval base and airport, have significant links with our wartime history, and that of the United States.

Australia must never take that goodwill for granted. It is under pressure from unfriendly groups, and from the government of the PRC, in particular.

Killing off the naval base project would be a massive coup for China and an even greater setback for Australia and the US.

Time is short. PNG politics is increasingly volatile, and campaigning for the next election is already underway. The PNG economy is in dire straits. The construction of the base, and the engagement of the PNG Defence Force in its future operations, will not just serve Australia’s national interest and provide greater regional stability, but can and must benefit our closest neighbour as well.

It really is step-up time.

The Royal Australian Navy needs a support ship, not a fixed base at Manus Island

Commentary on equipping the Australian Defence Force tends to focus on high-end combat capabilities such as frigates, fighter aircraft and armoured vehicles. Much less is written about the assets and infrastructure that support those capabilities. When the supporting infrastructure is mentioned, it’s often from the point of view of parochial interests, such as the ongoing debate about whether the full-cycle dockings of Collins-class submarines should be conducted in South Australia or Western Australia.

In 2018, the US and Australian governments announced that that they would work with Papua New Guinea to redevelop the naval base on Manus Island to support Royal Australian Navy, US Navy and PNG Defence Force operations. However, little has emerged since then on what is being contemplated.

Manus Island has an excellent natural harbour and is strategically well located to provide forward support for RAN ships operating in the western Pacific, including the South China Sea. As a forward operating base, its weaknesses are that fixed infrastructure on Manus would be more vulnerable than fixed infrastructure at home bases and that access could be withheld if PNG assessed it was in its national interest to avoid being drawn into a conflict.

Both these weaknesses could be mitigated if all or most of the support the base provides was aboard a ship and mobile, rather than on land and fixed. A purpose-designed ship could provide fuel, storage and treatment for oily and brown-water discharge, stores and provisions, munitions, workshops and medical facilities. Ships and submarines would berth alongside such a vessel.

In the event of a direct threat to Manus Island, the ship could be relocated to other protected waters in PNG. If the PNG government no longer welcomed RAN ships, the support ship could relocate to another Pacific nation or to north Queensland, Broome or Darwin.

A large fleet support ship wouldn’t necessarily be expensive to buy or to run. It could be built to commercial standards and operated by a core civilian crew, similar to current navy support ships Sycamore, Besant and Stoker. RAN personnel and contractors could be embarked as ‘special personnel’, not crew, on a fly-in, fly-out basis. As a government-owned commercial vessel, it would fall outside the naval shipbuilding plan and could be built offshore like the new Australian Antarctic supply and research vessel, RSV Nuyina, which, despite being delayed, is nearing completion in Romania.

While such a ship could support destroyers, frigates and small vessels, it could be designed primarily to support the Attack-class submarines.

A support ship could enable these conventionally powered submarines to conduct back-to-back patrols without returning to home bases. It would have specialised berthing facilities, battery-charging capabilities, battery and mast workshops, an air supply for submarine escape systems, and the ability to embark and support Australia’s submarine rescue system.

Considering that Australia is in the process of doubling the size of its submarine force from six to 12 boats, it seems likely that, eventually, submarines will be based on both the east and west coasts. In October 2018, Marcus Hellyer published an ASPI paper titled Thinking through submarine transition. In it he said that:

the most important measure to grow the uniformed workforce will be to establish an east coast submarine base to provide access to Australia’s largest population centres. Without this, it’s very difficult to see how the Navy could ever crew the future submarine fleet, rendering the massive investment in the vessels nugatory. There are no clear, stand-out options for an east coast base, and all viable locations are currently occupied.

The 12 Attack-class submarines are but the first cycle of a rolling acquisition program for submarines, and a future government might decide on nuclear power for the next cycle. Nuclear-powered vessels are currently not authorised to enter Sydney Harbour.

A submarine support ship could be located in Sydney at least until the long-term composition and disposition of the submarine force is clear. Once the future is clearer, the support ship could be relocated elsewhere on the east coast or deployed to Manus Island.

A submarine support ship would perform its role in port or anchored in sheltered waters, so performance at sea wouldn’t drive its design characteristics. Because it would rarely be at sea, the ship would be less vulnerable to attack than fixed infrastructure since it could be relocated from an emerging threat location to a lower risk operating position.

In The Strategist last year, federal Labor MP Luke Gosling wrote that ‘Darwin should be a forward operating base for Australia’s submarines’. But Darwin isn’t suitable for that role because it is too far from deep water. Although large submarines can operate in water as shallow as 40 metres, that’s only after they have submerged and their trim has been balanced. When a submarine has refuelled, or replenished its stores or weapons, a theoretical trim is calculated and applied in port. For their initial dive after leaving port, large submarines require a minimum depth of about 100 metres to allow for variation between estimated and actual trim.

The distance from Darwin to water 100 metres deep is approximately 250 nautical miles. A submarine departing Darwin would need to transit on the surface for more than 24 hours before diving, which would leave it vulnerable to attack by mines, torpedoes, missiles or aircraft.

Darwin and Broome are roughly equidistant from the South China Sea. Broome might be suitable as a forward base as it’s about 84 nautical miles from water 100 metres deep, but the West Australian town has limited port facilities and, like Manus Island, would require a support ship.

What war will we need Manus for?

The recent announcements about Australian and US investment in a base at Lombrum on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea has elicited positive, yet guarded, support. Putting aside the real value to PNG of being able to deploy patrol boats there to police its territorial waters, the acceptance of the strategic value to Australia and the opportunity costs of building a major facility suited to military operations in a conflict in the Asia–Pacific seem largely unexamined.

Some strong claims have been made about the strategic value of Lombrum that draw on the experience of World War II. It’s claimed that ‘Manus is a fine strategic ­location that dominates this part of the Pacific’ and ‘is in a key position for controlling access to Australia through the archipelagic arc to our north and northeast’. It could be an ‘advanced base for the defence of New Guinea and Australia’. Its strategic role might be to present China ‘with a more complicated operating environment that it must take into account to protect its own forces’.

A more modest and realistic position was put by Sam Bateman, who observed that the ‘most vital role of the joint base will be to provide fuel for ships transiting through the area or operating out of the base’. The real strategic value of the base on Lombrum is ‘its forward position’ from which it will be possible ‘to monitor and control air and sea activities’ in the approaches to Australia and the Southwest Pacific.

Sensibly Bateman, with a sailor’s respect for maps and geography, cautions against ‘overambitious assessments linking the island’s strategic value to the situation in the South China Sea, or even to policing the Sulu and Celebes seas’. He judges that ‘Lombrum is too far from these areas to have any worthwhile effect’.

There are two outstanding issues that require clarification. Is there a strategic justification for the investment? The experience of a Pacific War fought over seven decades ago with very different military equipment against a different opponent and for different objectives doesn’t recommend itself as a useful guide for current policies. Also, is the role envisioned for Lombrum by the government a high priority?

In the strategic basis documents written between 1946 and 1976, Manus is mentioned 10 times, all of which are in 1946 and 1947, and the Admiralty Islands are mentioned twice, in 1953 and 1956. The references are primarily in the context of an invasion of Southeast Asia and Indonesia by communist forces, and a possible invasion of Australia. Those documents were drafted in the early days of the Cold War.

Whatever strategic importance Manus Island held during and just following World War II, it had greatly diminished by the outbreak of the Vietnam War. Manus has not featured in any Australian defence white paper since 1976. It would seem that something substantial must have just taken place in the strategic environment to cause its sudden elevation. That’s not evident, though.

The US Department of Defence’s 2018 annual report to Congress on China’s military and security developments shows no step function in Chinese military development. The PLA continues a ‘comprehensive restructure’ in order to become ‘a force capable of conducting complex joint operations’—and in particular to fight ‘short-duration, high-intensity regional conflicts at greater distances from the Chinese mainland’. This is no surprise.

Analysing China’s military strategy, the Pentagon reported that ‘China expects significant elements of a modern conflict to occur at sea’. However, the Pacific region was not believed to be an area of ‘strategic importance’ in China’s military planning. While China’s behaviour is depicted as often being coercive, there’s no suggestion in the report of China harbouring aggressive intent.

Undoubtedly China is already a great power in economic and military terms and is still growing and modernising its military. But the indications are that it aspires to military capabilities appropriate to its status and interests, and to be able fight and win in areas proximate to its coastline if necessary.

The costs of transforming Lombrum into a strategic asset has apparently not been quantified—understandably, given the complexity. As Bateman pointed out, there would be significant costs in re-establishing the base to cater for modern warships, including refuelling infrastructure, new wharves, and accommodation for Australian personnel.

If, as Peter Jennings has noted, it was planned to make Lombrum a forward operating base in a major regional conflict, the airfield would have to be upgraded to enable it to take fighters for force protection and surveillance aircraft. The RAAF would then need revetments and significant additional infrastructure to support operations and personnel.

Before the worth of that investment can be known, there must be some concept of the war in which it would come into play. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s a conflict in the South China Sea or the East Asian littoral. Vessels from Manus would need to traverse the narrow choke points surrounding the Sulu Sea or circumvent the Philippines. An adversary like China, if it believed Lombrum posed a threat, would be capable of interdicting vessels by submarine or attacking the base with air- or submarine-launched cruise missiles outside the joint strike fighter’s combat range.

In the war that the alarmists see coming against China, re-establishing the base at Lombrum would appear to be a very low priority. Distant from the theatre of operations and susceptible to being nullified or destroyed, it seems a waste of money to go far beyond the already planned $5 million upgrade to support PNG’s Guardian-class patrol boats.

Air power critical for Manus expansion plan

Only a few weeks ago, it looked as though the extent of Australia’s ambitions for Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum Naval Base, HMPNGS Tarangau, was a $5 million contribution to upgrade the wharf facility. Let’s be clear: it’s a small and rather run-down facility. The PNG Defence Force’s Maritime Element is assessed by the International Institute for Strategic Studies to comprise around 200 personnel. Of the four Pacific patrol boats that Australia gifted to PNG 30 years ago, one has just returned to Australia for ‘environmentally responsible disposal’ and none of the others get to sea very often. They will soon start to be replaced with new Guardian-class patrol boats manufactured by Austal in Western Australia.

Such is the sharpening of strategic competition in the Asia–Pacific that a revival of PNG’s maritime infrastructure and vessels is being rapidly overtaken by, first, an initiative for a joint PNG–Australian naval facility, and now, a PNG–Australia–US endeavour. US Vice President Mike Pence surprised his audience at APEC in Port Moresby last Friday:

And today, it’s my privilege to announce that the United States will partner with Papua New Guinea and Australia on their joint initiative at Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island. (Applause.) We will work with these nations to protect sovereignty and maritime rights of the Pacific Islands as well.

That’s rather a long way from fisheries surveillance and the other routine policing tasks that have been run out of Lombrum for years.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been at pains to emphasise that this is a PNG-led initiative, but it’s obvious to all that Australia’s and America’s new-found interest in, and urgency for, defence cooperation with PNG is driven by the need to counter China’s rapid influence-building in the Pacific. This is a positive development and suggests that Australia is prepared to invest heavily in sustaining a believable leadership position for itself in the region. It also shows that, at least at the level of the vice president, America is prepared to invest more in Asia–Pacific security. Compare Pence’s visit to Port Moresby—where he showed that he’s capable of giving tough-minded but gracious speeches and holding substantive meetings that deliver outcomes—with President Donald Trump’s last disastrous, friendless and feckless visit to Paris.

While the symbolism of a PNG–Australia–US joint security effort out of the Lombrum Naval Base is welcome—if only because it means that the Chinese navy isn’t there—we should ask what the strategic possibilities are, today and in the future, for this Manus Island base. Seventy years ago, Manus and its fine harbour served a vital strategic purpose in helping position US forces for the attack on Imperial Japanese forces in the Philippines. But that’s history. What is the strategic utility of Manus today?

First, Manus could act as a useful staging point for maritime operations designed to curb so-called Islamic State and other Islamist jihadist fighters in their apparently easy movement between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. That could make a valuable contribution to policing an area that’s emerging as a kind of ungoverned maritime zone attractive to foreign fighters.

Second, there would be genuine positive value in strengthening PNG’s capacity to police its own northern approaches and to better protect the country from illegal drug, people and money flows.

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the bigger strategic picture remains coalition building to push back against China’s rising diplomatic and military influence in the region. Since China began reclaiming land and building major military air and post infrastructure in the South China Sea in 2014, Beijing has essentially had an uncontested run to secure military dominance of the region.

The best way to limit or complicate Beijing’s consolidation of the South China Sea as a PLA-controlled lake is to present it with a more complicated operating environment that it must take into account to protect its own forces.

As the PLA increases its force-projection capabilities with submarines, accurate ballistic and air-breathing missiles, and increasingly capable combat aircraft, the US and its allies need more options to diversify and disperse their own combat platforms. More ports means more options for allied forces to conduct wider operations.

In effect, the Lombrum approach is simply applying to China what the PLA has done for itself in the South China Sea—it increases reach, creates more operational choices and complicates an adversary’s planning.

Like Beijing’s South China Sea strategy, the Lombrum base needs to also have the protection of air cover. The reality of modern warfare is that surface ships need the comfort of friendly air power to survive. Conversely, as we see in the South China Sea, the presence of potentially hostile air power seriously complicates military operations.

This makes Manus Island’s Momote Airport a potentially critical part of the strategic equation. The original airfield was constructed by Japanese forces and expanded by the Americans in 1944 after the island was retaken. At 1,870 metres long, the existing runway can handle Boeing 737–sized commercial aircraft, including for night landings.

For maximum military value, the runway would need to be upgraded to support operations by large and heavy military aircraft. Turning Momote Airport into a dual-use military and civilian facility (or indeed locating a new military-grade runway nearer to Lombrum) would start to make Manus a strategic game-changer as far north and west as the South China Sea.

In 2016, PNG and a company, China Harbour Engineering Company Limited, agreed on a K100 million (A$41 million) redevelopment of the airport. That’s a pattern involving Chinese business we see all through the Pacific—because Beijing gets air power.

Watch for developments at Momote Airport if you’re interested in assessing whether the announcements at APEC go beyond strategic symbolism.