Sam Roggeveen

I mean, Senator James Patterson, the opposition defence spokesman, asked a really pointed question here.

If this is indeed simpler, then why didn't we do this from the beginning?

Yeah.

Clearly something else has changed and the most obvious...

explanation here is that the United States is not meeting its own production targets.

So the objective for some time now has been for the US to move from building roughly 1.2 Virginia class submarines a year to 2.3 submarines per year.

And they're really struggling to get up to that number.

And so when production is tight and when the Americans are struggling to fill their own order book, their commitments to Australia,

then naturally you would expect that they want the newest and the best submarines for themselves.

And they will leave the secondhand submarines, the slightly less capable models, to Australia.

Well, I do agree there should be a plan B. The important thing is not to think about submarines as such, but to think about the capabilities that they provide.

So what is it that submarines do?

What is it we want them to do for Australia?

Well, one thing that submarines are really good at is sinking ships and sinking other submarines.

But there are other ways to do that.

So Australia can buy a whole suite of different capabilities that would compensate in the event that we did have a submarine gap.

So I think Australia should be thinking along those lines, thinking about more aircraft that can fire anti-ship missiles and

There are surface ships that can also act as anti-ship platforms.

We're at the forefront of undersea drone technology that has a part to play.

All of these factors can come together to create a network of systems for Australia that give us really good capabilities to sink ships and to sink other submarines if we need to.