An Australian maritime strategy : resourcing the Royal Australian Navy

Title page

Contents

Acknowledgements 2

Introduction 7

Recommendations 10

The significance of Australia's maritime geography 12

Australia is reliant on seaborne supply routes 12

The scale of and challenges posed by our maritime geography 13

Choke-points and the interruption of seaborne trade 14

Maritime strategy: the basics 16

Australia's maritime strategy 18

2023 DSR: implicit maritime strategy 19

Maritime resilience: Australia's defence-in-depth maritime strategy 21

Maritime tasks 23

Australia needs a 'balanced' fleet 26

How did Australia get here? 28

The surface combatant 30

Recommended expansion of the major surface-combatant fleet 34

Workforce: structural change 35

Smaller versus larger surface combatants 35

Concluding observations 38

Appendix: 2023 DSR: implicit maritime strategy 39

Notes 41

Acronyms and abbreviations 44

Table 1. RAN units metrics comparison 33

Figure 1. Australian submarine cables 13

Figure 2. Australia's EEZ 14

Figure 3. Shipping routes 14

Figure 4. Southeast Asian choke-points 15

Figure 5. The Indo-Pacific 20

Figure 6. The span of maritime tasks 23

Figure 7. Warships from the Chinese and Russian navies afer the Joint Sea 2022 exercise in the East China Sea on 27 December 2022 30