Tag Archives: Australia

23 September 2021 · 7:58 pm

AUKUS

As has been well publicised, Australia, the UK and the USA have signed an agreement that will make Australia the seventh country in the world to possess nuclear powered submarines. The others are the China, France, India, Russia, the UK and the USA. Unsurprisingly, the USA has the largest fleet.

Australia will build eight hunter killer submarines [SSNs] based on either the British Astute class or the US Virginia class. These will be nuclear powered but armed with conventional torpedoes and missiles, not the intercontinental ballistic missiles carried by SSBN submarines.

Eight SSNs is a substantial force. The UK has 11 nuclear powered submarines but four are SSBNs, meaning that it has only seven comparable to the Australian ones. Australia will be the only country to operates SSNs without having any SSBNs. India has only SSBNs at sea or under construction and the other five operators all have a mix of SSNs and SSBNs.

As well as the Australian boats, British SSNs may be based in Australia as part of an alliances that is clearly aimed at containing China.

The three countries involved are all part of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, along with Canada and New Zealand. The absence of New Zealand is unsurprising since it is a nuclear free country. For an excellent analysis of the pact in general and its impact on Canada in particular, see this post from Canadian blogger Mark Collins’s blog. The link is to part 2 but it links back to part 1.

The most controversial part of the agreement is the exclusion of France, a NATO ally that possesses nuclear submarines, has substantial interests in the Pacific and had a contract to supply Australia with 12 conventionally powered submarines, which the Australians have now torn up. France has recalled its ambassadors to Canberra and Washington, but not London, which is probably intended to suggest that the British are the junior partners in the pact.

A likely reason for the French exclusion is that President Macron stated in February 2021 that the ‘EU shouldn’t gang up on China with US.’ See this report from the Politico website.

British defence commentator Julian Lindley-French argues in his Speaking Truth Unto Power blog LINK that the French are responsible for problems with the Australian submarines contract and that their intelligence services should have got wind of the pact

Another British defence blog, The Thin Pinstriped Line, written by a former UK Ministry of Defence civil servant and Reserve officer points out that the France and the UK compete across the globe for defence contracts, which involve transfers of technology and materiel as does AUKUS. There does not appear to be anything in the treaty to commit the partners to go to war together or to joint military operations.

The most likely reason why the French were not asked to join was probably an expectation that they would have declined to do so.

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15 September 2014 · 10:07 pm

The Capture of German New Guinea 15 September 1914

The Commonwealth of Australia was formed on 1 January 1901 by a Federation of the six self governing British colonies of Australia. Five of them had maintained naval forces, which were amalgamated into the Commonwealth Naval Forces on 1 March 1901. It was granted the title of Royal Australian Navy on 10 July 1911.

In August 1914 the RAN consisted of the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, the light cruisers HMAS Pioneer, Encounter, Melbourne and Sydney, the destroyers HMAS Parramatta, Warrego and Yarra and the submarines HMAS AE1 and AE2. All were modern ships built for the RAN in British yards to British designs, except for Encounter and Pioneer, old light cruisers transferred from the Royal Navy in 1912.

Warrego was built in Britain but then dismantled and the parts sent to Australia so that Australian shipyard workers could reassemble her and obtain expertise in warship construction. In August 1914 a light cruiser, HMAS Brisbane, and three destroyers, HMAS Huon, Swan and Torrens, were under construction in Australia.

Another old British cruiser, HMS Psyche, was in New Zealand waters. The battlecruiser HMS New Zealand was paid for by New Zealand taxpayers, but was part of the RN and was based in the UK in 1914.

At the outbreak of war the RAN was put under the control of the British Admiralty. Its initial missions were to capture German South Pacific colonies and to protect shipping against the German East Asia Squadron. The higher positions were held by British officers, as it would take time until Australians were ready to hold them. Rear Admiral Sir George Patey RN commanded the Australian Fleet.

The first British Empire shot of the First World War was fired by an Australian coastal defence battery. At 12:45 pm on 5 August 1914, Sergeant John Purdue of the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery fired a warning shot across the bows of SS Pfalz, a German merchant ship attempting to leave Melbourne harbour.

A significant Australian contribution to the war at sea came on 11 August when the German merchant ship SS Hobart was boarded and her code books seized, although they did not reach the Admiralty in London until October.

On 6 August the British Government sent the Australian Government the following telegram:

If your Ministers desire and feel themselves able to seize German wireless stations at Yap in Marshall Islands, Nauru, Pleasant Island and New Guinea, we should feel that this was a great and urgent Imperial service. You will, however, realise that any territory now occupied must be at the disposal of the Imperial Government for purposes of an ultimate settlement at conclusion of the war. Other Dominions are acting in similar way on the same understanding, in particular, suggestion is being made to New Zealand in regard to Samoa.[1]

Arthur Jose writes in the Official History of the RAN in WWI that many Australians were puzzled to be told to use their navy not to defeat the enemy fleet, but to capture territory, ‘exactly the purpose against which all their previous advisers had warned them.’[2]

The main threat came from the German East Asia Squadron of the armoured cruisers SMS Gneisenau and Scharnhorst and three light cruisers. The armoured cruisers were greatly inferior to HMAS Australia but superior to any other Australian warship. Their location was unknown.

An initial plan to seize German wireless stations expanded into one to take territory. This would deny the German cruisers possible bases. However, Jose suggests that this plan was devised in London, where some, expecting a short war, wanted to ‘have in hand some German territory for bargaining purposes, possibly to exchange for Belgium.’[3] On the other hand, Hew Strachan notes that ‘[b]oth Australia and New Zealand harboured their own imperialist ambitions’ and accuses Jose of ‘glossing over [the] sub-imperialist thrust’ of their actions.[4]

The RAN covered the move of a New Zealand force to Samoa, which was taken without a fight on 30 August.

It then, accompanied by the French cruiser Montcalm, escorted the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, comprising 1,000 Australian  infantry and 500 Australian and British naval reservists and commanded by Colonel William Holmes, to capture German colonies in New Guinea. Melbourne was despatched to destroy the German wireless station at Nauru.

The main force reached Rabaul on 11 September. Sydney put a 25 man naval landing party ashore at Herbertshöhe, now Kokopo, and Warrego and Yarra landed a similar force at Kabakaul They were ordered to find the wireless stations. Patey thought that there were two, one, inland from each landing point.  In fact, both were at Bita Paka. The Herbertshöhe party was therefore unable to find its objective. The Kabakaul one was fired on as it advanced.

Two companies of naval reservists and two machine gun sections were landed from HMAS Berrima, an armed transport. They encountered a force of about 150 local police commanded by German officers and were reinforced by four companies of infantry from Berrima. Progress in the Battle of Bita Paka was slow, but the Germans retreated after the destroying the radio mast. The attackers removed the rest of the radio equipment.

Australian casualties were two officers and four men killed and an officer and three men wounded. Able Seaman W. G. V. Williams became the first Australian to be killed in action during the war.

The Official British Naval History says that ‘[f]or the Germans further resistance was now hopeless, but the Governor…[was] bent on making negotiations as dilatory as possible.[5] On the morning of 14 September Encounter bombarded a German fortified position on a ridge. Australian troops advancing towards it in the afternoon were met by a flag of truce. The German governor surrendered German New Guinea on 15 September.

On 14 September AE1 disappeared on patrol off Rabaul with the loss of all 35 men on board, a mixture of RAN and RN personnel. She probably struck a reef or other submerged object and was the first RAN warship to be lost and the first British Empire submarine to be lost in the war. Her wreck has not been found but efforts to do so continue.

[1] Quoted in A. W. Jose, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, vol. ix, the Royal Australian Navy, 1914-1918, Ninth ed. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), p. 47.

[2] Ibid., p. 48.

[3] Ibid., p. 52.

[4] H. Strachan, The First World War: Vol. 1, to Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). p. 464 and footnote 44 on p. 465.

[5] J. S. Corbett, H. Newbolt, Naval Operations, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1938). vol. i, p. 285.

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26 August 2014 · 4:30 pm

Allied Capture of German Naval Code Books

In the early hours of 26 August, the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg ran aground at Odensholm lighthouse off Estonia whilst participating in a sweep against Russian patrols in the Gulf of Finland. The destroyer SMS V26 had to abandon her attempts to free Magdeburg when the Russian armoured cruiser Pallada and the protected cruiser Bogatyr appeared.

The Germans tried to scuttle Magdeburg, but were only partially successful. One of her four copies of the Signalbuch der Kasierlichen Marine (SKM), the German navy codebook, was burnt and two thrown overboard. However, the Russians recovered the latter two from the sea and the fourth from the captain’s safe. They later scrapped Magdeburg where she lay.

The Russians retained two of the codebooks for themselves and offered the third to the British, provided that a British ship collected it. This did not happen immediately, but the Admiralty received the codebook on 13 October.

Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, later wrote that Britain ‘received from our loyal allies these sea-stained priceless documents.’[1] Christopher Andrew and Robert Massie both note that the copy of the SKM in the UK National Archives [ref ADM 137/4156] is not sea-stained.[2] The Russians kept the two copies retrieved from the sea and gave the British the one from the captain’s safe.

As well as the SKM codebook, the British obtained a set of the German squared charts of the North Sea and Heligoland Bight that used to identify the location of German and enemy forces. Arthur Marder writes that Churchill and The Naval Staff of the Admiralty, a Naval Staff Monograph, both state that they were provided by the Russians. However, he goes on to say that Lieutenant W. F. Clarke RNVR, who worked in codebreaking, says in an unpublished paper called ‘Jutland’ that they were from the safe fished up by the trawler.[3]

It took some time until the British could read German naval signals sent using the SKM. Weather reports were encoded only by it, but other ones were re-ciphered. By early November, Fleet Paymaster Charles Rotter, a Naval Intelligence Department German expert, had realised that the re-ciphering was a simple substitution table. The key was changed periodically, but later ones were broken more quickly.

The SKM was the second German naval codebook obtained by the British. The SS Hobart, a German merchant ship, had been boarded by Australians off Melbourne on 11 August. They seized a copy of the Handelsverkehrsbuch (HV), which was used principally for communications between warships and merchantmen, but was also used by naval shore bases and later by U-boats and Zeppelins.

The Australians did not initially realise the importance of their prize and it then took time to send it to Britain, so the Admiralty did not receive it until late October.

The British obtained the third German naval codebook, the Verkehrsbuch (VB), when a trawler caught a lead-lined chest on 30 November. It had been thrown overboard by a German destroyer sunk on 17 October. The VB was used for cable communications with naval attachés and warships abroad and by admirals at sea.

The ability to read German codes would become very significant later in the war, but it took time for the Admiralty to get its decryption operation, known as Room 40 after its original office, working well. At first, the civilian cryptographers did not always understand naval matters and some naval staff officers looked down on them. The Admiralty was also excessively secretive with the decrypts, meaning that it did not always make the best use of the intelligence. Paul Halpern comments that ‘Room 40 would not reach its peak of efficiency and become a true intelligence centre until much later in the war.[4]

 

[1] W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, 5 vols (London: Odhams Press, 1939), v, Kindle edition, location 7846 out of 9432.

[2] C. M. Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985), p. 89; R. K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), footnote, p. 316.

[3] A. J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow; the Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919, 5 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1961-70), ii, footnote 2, p. 132. Marder says that Captain Stephen Roskill, whosse papers are now at Churchill College, Cambridge, had a copy of Clarke’s paper.

[4] P. G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (London: UCL Press, 1994), p. 37.

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21 December 2012 · 7:29 pm

The Geopolitics of Shale from Stratfor

“The Geopolitics of  Shale is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Robert D. Kaplan Chief  Geopolitical Analyst

According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of  foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian  intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing  necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn  vibrancy of nationalism in  East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be  engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this  may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies — whether communism,  fascism or humanism — matter and matter greatly.

But there is another truth: The reality of large, impersonal forces like  geography and the environment that also help to determine the future of human  events. Africa has historically been poor largely because of few  good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior to the  coast. Russia is paranoid because its  land mass is exposed to invasion with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf  sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy not because of ideas but because of large  energy deposits underground. You get the point. Intellectuals concentrate on  what they can change, but we are helpless to change much of what happens.

Enter shale, a sedimentary rock within which natural gas can be trapped.  Shale gas constitutes a new source of extractable energy for the post-industrial  world. Countries that have considerable shale deposits will be better placed in  the 21st century competition between states, and those without such deposits  will be worse off. Ideas will matter little in this regard.

Stratfor, as it happens, has studied the issue in depth. Herein is my own  analysis, influenced in part by Stratfor’s research.

So let’s look at who has shale and how that may change geopolitics. For the  future will be heavily influenced by what lies underground.

The United States, it turns out, has vast deposits of shale gas: in Texas,  Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and elsewhere. America,  regardless of many of the political choices it makes, is poised to be an energy  giant of the 21st century. In particular, the Gulf Coast, centered on Texas and  Louisiana, has embarked upon a shale gas and tight oil boom. That development  will make the Caribbean an economic focal point of the Western Hemisphere,  encouraged further by the 2014 widening of the Panama Canal. At the same time,  cooperation between Texas and adjacent Mexico will intensify, as Mexico  increasingly becomes a market for shale gas, with its own exploited shale basins  near its northern border.

This is, in part, troubling news for Russia. Russia  is currently the energy giant of Europe, exporting natural gas westward in  great quantities, providing Moscow with political leverage all over Central and  particularly Eastern Europe. However, Russia’s reserves are often in parts of  Siberia that are hard and expensive to exploit — though Russia’s extraction  technology, once old, has been considerably modernized. And Russia for the  moment may face relatively little competition in Europe. But what if in the  future the United States were able to export shale gas to Europe at a  competitive price?

The United States still has few capabilities to export shale gas to Europe.  It would have to build new liquefaction facilities to do that; in other words,  it would have to erect plants on the Gulf of Mexico that convert the gas into  liquid so that it could be transported by ship across the Atlantic, where  regasification facilities there would reconvert it back into gas. This is doable  with capital investment, expertise and favorable legislation. Countries that  build such facilities will have more energy options, to export or import,  whatever the case may be. So imagine a future in which the United States exports  liquefied shale gas to Europe, reducing the dependence that European countries  have on Russian energy. The geopolitics of Europe could shift somewhat. Natural  gas might become less of a political tool for Russia and more of a purely  economic one (though even such a not-so-subtle shift would require significant  exports of shale gas from North America to Europe).

Less dependence on Russia would allow the vision of a truly independent,  culturally vibrant Central and Eastern Europe to fully prosper — an ideal of  the region’s intellectuals for centuries, even as ideas in this case would have  little to do with it.

This might especially be relevant to Poland. For Poland may have significant  deposits of shale gas. Were Polish shale deposits to prove the largest in Europe  (a very big “if”), Poland  could become more of an energy producer in its own right, turning this flat  country with no natural defenses to the east and west — annihilated by both  Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century — into a pivot state or  midlevel power in the 21st. The United States, in turn, somewhat liberated from  Middle East oil because of its own energy sources (including natural gas finds),  could focus on building up Poland as a friendly power, even as it loses  substantial interest in Saudi Arabia. To be sure, the immense deposits of oil  and natural gas in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran will keep the Middle  East a major energy exporter for decades. But the shale gas revolution will  complicate the world’s hydrocarbon supply and allocation, so that the Middle  East may lose some of its primacy.

It turns out that Australia also has  large new natural gas deposits that, with liquefaction facilities, could  turn it into a principal energy exporter to East Asia, assuming Australia  significantly lowers its cost of production (which may prove very hard to do).  Because Australia is already starting to emerge as the most dependable military  ally of the United States in the Anglosphere, the alliance of these two  great energy producers of the future could further cement Western influence in  Asia. The United States and Australia would divide up the world: after a  fashion, of course. Indeed, if unconventional natural gas exploitation has  anything to do with it, the so-called post-American world would be anything  but.

The geopolitical emergence of Canada — again, the result of natural gas and  oil — could amplify this trend. Canada has immense natural gas deposits in  Alberta, which could possibly be transported by future pipelines to British  Columbia, where, with liquefaction facilities, it could then be exported to East  Asia. Meanwhile, eastern Canada could be the beneficiary of new shale gas  deposits that reach across the border into the northeastern United States. Thus,  new energy discoveries would bind the two North American countries closer, even  as North America and Australia become more powerful on the world scene.

China also has  significant deposits of shale gas in its interior provinces. Because Beijing  is burdened by relatively few regulations, the regime could acquire the land and  build the infrastructure necessary for its exploitation. This would ease  somewhat China’s energy crunch and aid Beijing’s strategy to compensate for the  decline of its coastal-oriented economic model by spurring development  inland.

The countries that might conceivably suffer on account of a shale gas  revolution would be landlocked, politically unstable oil producers such as Chad,  Sudan and South Sudan, whose hydrocarbons could become relatively less valuable  as these other energy sources come online. China, especially, might in the  future lose interest in the energy deposits in such low-end, high-risk countries  if shale gas became plentiful in its own interior.

In general, the coming of shale gas will magnify the importance of geography.  Which countries have shale underground and which don’t will help determine power  relationships. And because shale gas can be transported across oceans in liquid  form, states with coastlines will have the advantage. The world will be smaller because of unconventional gas  extraction technology, but that only increases the preciousness of  geography, rather than decreases it.

Editor’s Note: Stratfor offers a combination of  geopolitical insight, source-driven intelligence and objective analysis to  produce customized reliable information and forecasting for businesses,  organizations and government agencies. For more information about Stratfor’s  client solutions offerings, click here: http://info.stratfor.com/solutions/

Read more:  The Geopolitics of Shale | Stratfor

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