Bradley Perrett | What to do with the surface navy? There are no easy answers

"Well, a tier 1 warship can be sunk with some difficulty," I said. "A tier 2 warship can be sunk without difficulty."

That's part of the problem that the government must balance over the next five months as it assesses a report that's been due in September on the future of our fleet of surface warships.

For there is no such thing as a cheap and survivable warship when the regional superpower, China, has assembled an awesome array of sensors, bombers, missiles and submarines for sinking vessels that come within thousands of kilometres of its coasts.

In the review's concept, tier 1 warships are destroyers, whose prime mission is fleet defense against missile attack, and frigates, which in US, British and Australian terms are either general-purpose or mainly anti-submarine ships.

Even destroyers and frigates are enormously challenged by that Chinese anti-ship reconnaissance-strike complex, which has been designed to stop the US Navy from intervening in an attempt by Beijing to conquer Taiwan.

The tier 2 ships would be corvettes, which traditionally have been like general-purpose frigates but smaller, weaker and slower. And cheaper, of course.

Our current fleet plan and the construction program to support it are a mess. They usually are.

Unable to sort out the plan in its six months of deliberations, the review called for another, navy-focused report by September. This week Defence Minister Richard Marles said the government would announce resulting decisions in the first two months of 2024.

This is all taking far too long, but it must be acknowledged that there are no easy answers. This column has at times urged definite action in relation to the air force, army and the navy's submarine arm. But for the surface fleet, nothing looks like a clearly desirable way forward.

A major reason for that is uncertainly about the functions of Australian surface warships in any war with China and how much we'd need them.

Some warships would have to escort merchant ships bringing supplies that couldn't come by air. Assuming convoys were routed far south in the Indian and Pacific oceans, escorting them would be a mainly anti-submarine job - at least until Chinese technical development forced the escorts also to deal with far-flying anti-ship ballistic missiles.

The forthcoming Hunter class frigates, which are getting a powerful missile-defence capability added to their excellent anti-submarine design, might in fact be ideal for that convoy mission - except that they will carry too few defensive missiles. Still, corvettes might accompany them with extra missiles and anti-submarine helicopters, inexpensively beefing up the escort force.

As for defending the continent, the danger of anti-ship missile attacks to our north is probably already too great for destroyers and frigates to operate there in a war with China - though the navy may not have recognised that fact yet. Corvettes, with little ability to defend themselves or survive hits, would be even more doubtful assets in such a location.

Surface ships might be needed for operations against hostile bases in the Pacific, assuming that any such bases existed and were not within dense coverage of the fearsome anti-ship capability radiating from the Chinese coast. Again, corvettes might be added to the force.

And the US Navy would probably call for our help as its destroyers, frigates and aircraft carriers struggled with Chinese bombers, missiles and submarines in the Western Pacific. Our contribution could not be great, however, and even the US Navy might discover that it simply had to back away from the fight.

With such uncertain scenarios in mind, the government needs, above all, to decide what to do with the Hunter program.

The nine planned ships of the class will be outrageously expensive at a total of $45 billion, including inflation, and they're running behind schedule, with the first now due for delivery in mid-2032. The ships they'll replace, Anzac-class general-purpose frigates, have been nicely upgraded in the past few years but were not designed for the long lives they'll have to achieve while waiting for the Hunters to arrive.

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The Hunter program's troubles obviously stem mainly from the addition of the missile-defense system, an elaborate assembly of equipment that would normally be seen only on a destroyer. Also, their basic British design, called Type 26, had not been stabilised for production at its home shipyard in Glasgow before we began changing it and preparing to build it in Adelaide.

But the Type 26 design was almost certainly chosen in 2018 for a particular strong reason. No one will say so, but it's probably the world's quietest warship and therefore exceptionally hard for submarines to detect.

We have three newish destroyers of the Hobart class with a strong missile-defence system, though they, too, do not carry enough interceptors. That's mainly because their design was chosen in 2006, in happy days when the Chinese threat was barely perceived in Canberra.

The designer, the Spanish company Navantia, offered last year to complete three more destroyers of an improved version for us even before the first Hunter would enter service. But that would mean starting another program when we may be close to sorting out the Hunters' problems. Nonetheless, the government is no doubt considering taking the Navantia offer, since it would get more interceptor rounds to sea fairly quickly.

Building simple little corvettes may do so even more quickly. The prospect of receiving several such ships in the 2020s would indeed be a major advantage in ordering them.

But then we'd have to be careful about how we used them.