Australia to Get Nuclear Submarines

[Stuart Galbraith]

The idea the European countries could remain disinterested in a conflict between China and other Pacific states is very interesting. Does nobody remember the chaos just one single ship we get in the Suez canal created? What about the disruption to trade around the Pacific rim a regional war would cause?

Besides, it strikes me the wisest course is to deter war. And the more people who sit on their hands refusing involvement, the more likely it's going to be.

[lucklucky]

To stifle China there would be need of all hands on deck.

The first thing they do is breaking that chance. Wonderful...

[Stuart Galbraith]

Thing to remember is, when you have no other options left, it focuses the mind wonderfully. And they do have no options left, they have seen to that. if they screw this up it may even damage their access to 5 eyes.

The French might have been willing to put up with unions playing games, but the British and the Yanks wont.

 

[seahawk]

27 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

The idea the European countries could remain disinterested in a conflict between China and other Pacific states is very interesting. Does nobody remember the chaos just one single ship we get in the Suez canal created? What about the disruption to trade around the Pacific rim a regional war would cause?

Besides, it strikes me the wisest course is to deter war. And the more people who sit on their hands refusing involvement, the more likely it's going to be.

The wise move is to reduce the dependency of your own economy on Chinese products. It makes a lot more sense to pay for chip factories or steel factories within the EU, instead of paying for warships to protect factories in Asia.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Even if you can reduce your dependency on China, which I doubt, you aren't going to reduce your dependency on Japanese electronics or Australian Iron ore.

 

[Simon Tan]

Not possible. West is dominated by worthless managers.

[seahawk]

32 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Even if you can reduce your dependency on China, which I doubt, you aren't going to reduce your dependency on Japanese electronics or Australian Iron ore.

 

Sure, you can build electronics in the EU and you can import raw materials from different sources. In fact the EU does not import a meaningful amount of iron ore from Australia.

https://trendeconomy.com/data/h2/EuropeanUnion/2601

[Stuart Galbraith]

30 minutes ago, seahawk said:

Sure, you can build electronics in the EU and you can import raw materials from different sources. In fact the EU does not import a meaningful amount of iron ore from Australia.

https://trendeconomy.com/data/h2/EuropeanUnion/2601

You can make electronics in Europe, at greater cost, poorer quality and lower reliablity, at least in the near term. And this would be a demand that would suddenly open up overnight.

No, because Europe by and large is content to import shitloads of steel. Where do they import it from? At least 22 percent from the Pacific rim, 7 percent from China alone.

https://legacy.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/imports-eu.pdf#:~:text=The European Union was collectively the world’s largest, 11.5 million metric tons in YTD 2018.

Where does China import its iron ore from? Australia. 😄

https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/exports-of-iron-ore-concentrates

1 hour ago, Simon Tan said:

Not possible. West is dominated by worthless managers.

Read 'The Silent Deep' on the big hole the Astute program was in. I seem to recall it was Electroboat that came in to help out, and it ended up one of the worlds best Nuclear Attack Submarines.

Yes, its a difficult thing booting up a yard to build nuclear boats when they havent done it before. But considering the state Britains shipyards were in during the 1960's, and the success the injection of American tech made to Barrow in Furness, its nothing that hasnt happened before.

The only niggle is, that tight deadline. I feel that is going to slip.

[seahawk]

If they choice is to make European industries more competitive or build armed forces capable of fighting in the Pacific, I think option A makes a lot more sense. And what did I say in my previous post. If you keep steel production in Europe, you do depend a lot less on China. 

Edited September 18, 2021 by seahawk

[Stuart Galbraith]

Yes, but you are talking about competitive industries, you are talking about protectionism. And that's hardly convincing with a quarter of European steel coming from the Pacific.

You won't do anything about that, because you cant. Any attempt to undercut it is just going to cost exports in other things like cars. Can you see Germany putting up with that? It just isn't going to happen.

 

 

In other news, France suddenly offers nuclear and Carrier technology to South Korea. 

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

And this is very naughty of me but... Well...

 

[lucklucky]

A story planted to placate the French or something substantive?

[BansheeOne]

I don't know the guy, but it reads like he's promoting his own pet ideas, and himself. 

This seems to be a summary of the view from France. 

Quote

OPINION: France’s Australian submarine row shows that Macron was right about NATO

John Lichfield

18 September 2021
17:55 CEST

The Franco-American-Australian submarine war seems to have surfaced from nowhere. To understand what is going on, you have to answer three pub-quiz questions, writes John Lichfield.

First, which country is immediately west of Australia? Second, which country is immediately east of Australia? Thirdly, which country sprawls most widely over the globe?

The answer to all of these questions is the same: France.

The nasty row which has broken out between Paris, Washington, Canberra and (to an extent) London, is about more than a €60bn French contract to build 12 submarines for the Australian navy.

It is about France as a Pacific and Indian ocean nation; it is about France’s desire to play an important role in Indian-Pacific affairs, containing China without antagonising China; it is about America’s willingness to treat allies as allies, not vassals; it is about honesty and openness in international affairs.

[...] 

But why is France so furious?  Arms deals are a murky business. The bigger they are, the murkier they become. One friendly nation beating another to a huge arms deal is hardly new.

Let’s return to our pub quiz question. Australia’s nearest significant neighbour directly to the west is the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. To the east it is the archipelago of New Caledonia. These islands are constitutionally and legally not French colonies: they are as much part of France as Corsica or Calais.

The torpedoed submarine deal was commercially important to France but also politically important as the cornerstone of a new Pacific and Indian Ocean security partnership with Australia agreed in 2016 and re-asserted this year. That, in turn, was crucial to France’s hopes of building an Indo-Pacific strategy which would make it the most important European player in the region.

[...] 

The suspicion in the Elysée Palace is that AUKUS is a deliberate and well-planned hit on French ambitions in the Pacific (which precede Macron but have been emphasised since he came to power) Hence the extreme, though symbolic, measure taken by Macron to withdraw ambassadors from allied countries (and the first time ever from the US).

Macron finds himself in a strange place – both vindicated by what has happened and humiliated by it. He has been saying for almost four years that Nato is “brain dead” and Europe can no longer rely on the United States to defend, or even consider, European interests.

He wanted to strengthen France’s role in the Pacific partly because he feared that Washington – whichever President might be in power – would stumble into a confrontational approach to China. He wanted Europe to have its own voice in western-Chinese relations.

Arguably, he over-reached himself. The US has now, in effect, slapped him down.

There is nothing much he can do about it. Germany is preoccupied by its election. Most other European countries are reluctant to face the consequences of quarrelling with Uncle Sam. None of them have islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.

All the same, the AUKUS affair, coming so soon after the debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, proves that Macron is right. Nato is brain dead. Washington doesn’t have allies, only junior partners.  Britain has willingly accepted that role. It is time that for the European Union to consider how (to coin a phrase) it can take back control of its own security and prosperity.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20210918/opinion-frances-australian-submarine-row-shows-that-macron-was-right-about-nato/

[lucklucky]

It is more than that,

France is irked by  Germany  choosing US patrol aircraft instead of the deal they had with France

Switzerland choosing US F-35 over Rafale

Poland choosing M1 and Patriot missiles over their SAM's

They are also irked/jealous of Italy selling FREMM's specially 2 to Egypt and supposedly all over world while they cancelled FREMM production and went with FDI which is lighter and was supposed to be cheaper but it is not. They have some deal of self criticism on this but some of the media do not.

So they were already seeing their world getting very small.

 

But the manner this giant contract "of the century" of 12 submarines was cancelled is at another level, it is not just choosing A over B  in a "competition". it changing the rules of the game.  Another complete different ballpark. This is how alliances are broken.

It is stupidity of highest level from Biden  Administration and Australia - i am still not sure the British footprint on this.

Edited September 19, 2021 by lucklucky

[Simon Tan]

I blame Trump.

[DB]

On 9/16/2021 at 5:05 PM, Ssnake said:

If there was neither capability nor capacity to build locally, then why the insistence on technology transfer?

What good is a stiff contract if you foist a non-nuclear power plant concept on a boad designed for a nuclear reactor?

The trouble of the French program was utterly predictable. TKMS knew even before Naval entered the tender that they could never deliver it, sort of some unexpected miracle happening. But apparently everybody closed their eyes to the reality (despite India as a warning example) and went to sign the contract anyway. It was completely bonkers right from the start.

Surely the point of technology transfer is to exactly fill the gap you just identified.

There's not a lot of point in pretending that you're transferring anything if the capability already exists.

[Nobu]

On 9/17/2021 at 7:19 PM, Angrybk said:

Take a step back and this whole thing seems kinda bizarre, at least from a countering-China standpoint? USN is giant and has tons of very good SSNs. The other likely partners in an anti-China war have large navies with great ships. Australia needs big modern long-range air force. 

They want to play Red Storm Rising, but have to pay others to buy the game for them.

The question that comes to mind is why the heck are Australia and Australians unable to build their own submarines in 2021?

 

[Simon Tan]

The USN has a fleet of aging SSNs being replaced by economy models.

[KV7]

On 9/17/2021 at 1:23 PM, JasonJ said:

The whole reason for all this talk is China. Who here is China's neighbor? Who here stands most to lose if Taiwan falls under the rule of the CCP.

A CCP controlled Taiwan poses no problems for Japan, except perhaps for the face of some nationalists politicians.

The only grand strategy for Japan that makes sense is to be the Germany of the east, i.e. a specialised supplier of high technology products in the China dominated East Asian market.

[Nobu]

Taiwan and Taiwanese are already in bed with the CCP. Have been for decades now, as the bilateral trade numbers indicate. That new Chinese navy was bought and paid for by trade revenue generated by... billions in economic intercourse between the two, year on year. All negotiated, between the two, in perfect Mandarin Chinese.

In other words, fuck Taiwan and Taiwanese.

Chinese killing other Chinese at the expense of China is not something to be feared like the end of days. They've been doing it for millennia, and Japan has been just fine.

 

22 minutes ago, Simon Tan said:

The USN has a fleet of aging SSNs being replaced by economy models.

Those economy models appear to be pretty deadly. I can't particularly blame Australia and Australians for coveting them.

 

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

In other news, France suddenly offers nuclear and Carrier technology to South Korea. 

Jesus.

[JasonJ]

38 minutes ago, KV7 said:

A CCP controlled Taiwan poses no problems for a Kow-towed Japan, except perhaps for the face of some nationalists politicians.

The only grand strategy for Japan that makes sense is to be the Germany of the east, i.e. a specialised supplier of high technology products in the China dominated East Asian market.

Added correction to the top.

As for the second, CCP will have Japan eternally at the bottom of the rung. Power leverage suppression would be greater. Japan-was-the bad-guy will be the lop-sided narrative for 1,000 years more. 

[Nobu]

Bowing to Taiwan and Taiwanese interests instead, while they negotiate billion-dollar deals with China in perfect Mandarin Chinese? No thanks.

Fuck them both.

[Dawes]

War with China? Wal-Mart would never allow it.

[Simon Tan]

I remember the days of Fuck Japon. 

[Nobu]

To paraphrase Sam Fuller, the goal in war, economic or otherwise, is to survive.

Edited September 19, 2021 by Nobu