- The Strategist - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au -
Talking to the chiefs: Tim Barrett (part 1)
Posted By Brendan Nicholson on July 22, 2017 @ 06:00
Shipbuilding is a combination of many things. It has tentacles which spread well beyond a dockyard in South Australia or Perth. It’s not just the workers in the dockyard. It’s the design and production capability for all of the sub-components, the education process to deliver those with the capacity to design and build in-country, the industry process and the financial process within governments—federal and state—and the research capabilities to develop what’s needed.
I felt the need to put a narrative out there that hopefully defines some of those things which need to be considered that go beyond a political issue or an industry issue. I’m trying to have people look at a 30-year horizon because the task of continuous build does not happen overnight and it doesn’t even happen within a political cycle.
It’s important to settle people’s minds on what it might look like. I felt that the navy over the last couple of years had been concentrating more on what’s happened in the past, or in being reactive to issues which have arisen, and there was a need to promote why it was happening and what was likely to happen in the future.
This is me as Chief of Navy telling our sailors and officers why I think the navy is what it is and trying to set a theme for everyone within navy to work towards a common outcome and to understand why.
There’s been a lot of debate, particularly through the defence white paper process, and reports by the RAND Corporation and others, and some pretty poor experiences in terms of the air warfare destroyers, where initial high costs of establishment and high production costs caused you to think, is it really worth it?
I’m going to have to teach my people to think about how we deliver a warfighting effect based on those new priorities. Currently we build ships that might be sustained for 35 years, knowing that halfway through we are going to have to spend an extraordinary amount of money on a refit or a life extension. How we manage our combat systems is driven by that thought process.
We are already considering everything from the drumbeat of when they are to be delivered to our ability to update the ships and refresh the combat systems. If you have that capacity with the continuous build and an industry that is able to do that, then you are able to make far better decisions on replacements of individual hulls and the combat system. You can make design decisions now about whether you’ll be operating that ship for 20 years or 30 years.
We’ll have an industrial capacity to experiment, to consider different options. We might be building a larger number of smaller vessels, which might flow from how the United States is looking at certain things at the moment.
If you don’t even have the industry to do that, then it makes those sorts of elements very expensive and very difficult to imagine how you might do it.
Article printed from The Strategist: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au
URL to article: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/talking-chiefs-tim-barrett-chief-navy/