Sam Roggeveen
speaker
193 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Sam Roggeveen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it was a great message to Australia that China's military capabilities are expanding at a rapid rate.
In fact,
I think we've not seen anything like it since the Second World War in terms of the pace and scale of its modernisation.
I've talked already about the expansion of its nuclear capabilities, but more important for Australia are the expansion of its long-range conventional, that is to say, non-nuclear capabilities, particularly China's Navy.
It's not...
The overwhelming priority for China, Taiwan, is still very much the highest priority.
But China has clearly been putting efforts into developing more capabilities to sail ships, submarines, fly aircraft, drones, fire missiles over extremely long ranges, long enough that they can threaten Australia.
Look, I think it is within Australia's capabilities to continue to deter Chinese power.
Once again, this is not China's top priority.
Its top priority is its contest with the United States.
And secondly, because we're so far away, it is very difficult for China to project a lot of power in Australia's direction.
So we have this massive advantage of not only distance, but the fact that a huge ocean, huge bodies of water stand between us and China.
And in military terms, that offers us a great advantage.
There's a good example of this happening right now in the Ukraine war, where even though the war is...
very much at a stalemate.
The naval war in the Black Sea is being overwhelmingly won by Ukraine over Russia, even though Russia has far more ships, is on paper a much bigger force.
Modern combat conditions are such that Ukraine has been able to hold its own because it has really good missiles and it has really good drones.
So a country that basically doesn't have a navy
is able to hold at bay the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.
That's a good example of where smart, plucky, smaller nations can hold really quite big powers at bay if they design their navies in the right way.
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