Defence Assessment 2021: A maritime (not naval) view

A proactive defence strategy focussed on the Pacific requires a higher level of persistent presence and more flexible platforms, writes maritime capability specialist and former Royal New Zealand Navy Officer Andrew Watts.

In an over three-decade career in the RNZN, CAPT Watts RNZNR commanded HMNZ Ships Pukaki, Wellington, Resolution and Te Mana, and served as Director, Capability Development and Programme Director Network Enabled Capability, and Captain, Fleet Personnel & Training. He is a Defence Adviser at KPMG based in Riyadh. Defence Assessment 2021 (DA21) provides clearer capability pointers than any comparable document since the mid-1990s. It pulls very few punches in highlighting the deterioration in our strategic environment and what that might mean for Aotearoa/New Zealand, and it requires a significant reevaluation of our strategy and our force structure. This article offers some thoughts on both.

To my way of thinking, the most significant break from the past in DA21 is embodied in this statement:

“We consider New Zealand’s defence policy should shift from a predominantly reactive risk management-centred approach to one based on a more deliberate and proactive strategy. A more strategy-led approach would better enable Defence to pre-empt and prevent security threats, and better build resilience against the impacts of climate change and other security challenges.”

The Pacific is an oceanic space. Proactively addressing security concerns in the Pacific requires a maritime strategy. In the bad old days of single service parochialism, such a statement would have been greeted with outrage, and even now, many will no doubt find it unsettling. However, it’s my contention that an effective maritime strategy requires seamlessly integrated naval and land capability, with neither taking precedence or priority for resources over the other.

A maritime strategy also requires special forces, air mobility, and the best possible intelligence and information management capability. The joint maritime force must be mission-flexible, adaptable over time, available when it is needed, and affordable.

“Maritime” capability means something very different from “naval” capability. Maritime capability provides the means to act in an ocean dominated space, including the means to act on land. Naval capability is the subset that enables sufficient control over the ocean environment so that we can use it for our own purposes (sea control); deprive an adversary of its use (sea denial); and project soft power (disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, capacity development) and hard power (combat forces) into a land space.

Sea control and sea denial require the highest level of maritime domain awareness that our resources can provide, while to state the obvious, soft and hard power projection requires land forces to project. The whole must be supported by a command and control capability that allows our people to make better decisions more quickly than our adversaries.

HMNZS Aotearoa and Wellington in Nuku’Alofa. Image courtesy NZDF

Joint capability principles have consequences for capability development. If the army’s protected mobility concepts require that combat forces deploy with 8 tonne Light Armoured Vehicles, the navy’s sealift capability must be able to transport, land, and support those vehicles. Similarly, the army’s capabilities must be compatible with sealift. Soldiers must look upon the latter as a flexible capability that extends their manoeuvre options (for instance, by providing a sea-base allowing footprint ashore to be minimalised, or by allowing a force to be landed and withdrawn from multiple locations), not solely as a means of transport.

Other naval capabilities can also extend the options available to the Land Commander. Naval gunfire can reach far inland to deter or defeat threats to the land force. Extended range guided munitions now available provide fire support an order of magnitude more effective than older systems, while allowing a far higher level of compliance with the proportionality and distinction principles of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Finally, the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities of naval ships and aircraft can do much to support the Land Commander’s situational awareness and decision making process. Maritime domain awareness is one of our greatest defence capability challenges, especially if we are to move to a proactive shaping strategy. The Pacific is vast, and our reactive forces will always be few in number – they must therefore be cued as efficiently as possible to potential threats. Significant progress is being made with space capability and the acquisition of the superb P-8A Poseidon aircraft, but the intelligence and information management capability that knits the surveillance and response capabilities together is just as important – without it, the investment made in space and P-8 capability will be wasted. Great work is being done in this area too, and it is to be hoped that the resources required to complete it continue to receive high priority.

DA21 is clear in its conclusion that the Pacific can no longer be considered benign:

“In the past, New Zealand’s defence policy has largely considered the Pacific as requiring only lower end capabilities suitable for responding to, for example, natural disasters or contained intrastate conflicts, whereas Defence activities further afield required high-end capabilities suitable for more complex operations and higher threat environments. This binary is now being eroded, and Defence operations within New Zealand’s immediate neighbourhood will increasingly require the use of more sophisticated military capabilities in support of regional partners…”

If an effective pro-active maritime strategy is to be carried out, defence capabilities must have certain critical characteristics.

Maritime capability must be flexible, able to operate across the spectrum of conflict from law enforcement to the deterrence and defeat of hostile combat forces. The current Offshore and Inshore Patrol Vessels (OPV and IPV) continue to do invaluable work in support of our Pacific partners, but they are not capable of operating where threats exceed law enforcement levels.

The level of emerging threat foreshadowed in DA21 requires combat capability – not just in terms of weapon systems, but also in terms of survivability, reducing acoustic and magnetic signatures, and radar cross section reduction. The ability to act as a fully connected element in a wider maritime force such as that fielded by our ally Australia will also be critical.

This is not to argue for a large force of frigate level combatants; even if this were desirable, it is plainly beyond our means. Without wishing to belabour the points made in my earlier articles, a modular capability strategy based on common survivable platforms with payloads tailored to the needs of particular missions, including combat, could be a key enabler in this regard.

Not all platforms need carry all the systems required for combat all the time. Only those combat systems required for the number of platforms we are likely to commit to a high level conflict or deterrence operation need be acquired, which is unlikely to exceed two at any one time. Platforms carrying out routine enforcement and capacity building operations in the Pacific need not be so equipped, although combat systems could be transferred to them so as to distribute the deployment burden across the fleet as a whole.

Maritime capability must be persistent. A proactive defence strategy focussed on the Pacific requires a higher level of persistent presence than that allowed by our current force structure. When frigates are assigned to Pacific enforcement operations, they incur wear and tear that reduces their availability for deterrence and combat operations. That leaves the two OPV, the Diving and Hydrographic Vessel (DHV), and in limited, risk managed circumstances, the two IPV.

The point could be argued, but in my view the frigate/OPV/IPV fleet as a whole does not provide the flexibility, persistence, and depth of capability needed for a Pacific-centric maritime strategy. [This is not to disparage the DHV/OPV/IPV fleet. They OPV/IPV are well matched to the roles and threat levels for which they were acquired, and the DHV is a superb capability that few navies can fully match. All three types have been and are being operated by highly committed COs, officers and ships’ companies who have got the most out of them].

However, a fleet centred on five modular platforms might provide the flexibility, persistence, and depth of capability needed, while at the same time providing the reactive combat and deterrence options for crises further afield that are still required and most of the capability offered by the DHV. Five modular platforms would thus replace seven specialised platforms (frigates/OPV/IPV/ DHV).

Naval and land capabilities must be more than just compatible, they must be mutually supportive and complementary. Amphibious capability is critical to a maritime strategy. It is a joint, not a naval capability, and it will be shaped by the requirements of the land forces we seek to project and the potential for a naval platform to support land operations across the spectrum. As indicated above, if army doctrine calls for protected mobility for deployed forces, the amphibious sealift capability must be able to support LAV.

If NH90 helicopters are central to the Land Commander’s operational plan, the ship must be able to support the NH90 – probably at least enough to support a single platoon lift, which means four aircraft (three for a single lift with one spare). Coupled with the need to support a force of sufficient size and staying power, this suggests a ship in the LPD class.

A proactive maritime strategy also requires two such ships, with operations and maintenance managed so that one is always

HMNZS Aotearoa in Tongan waters. Image courtesy NZDF

HMNZS Canterbury, with HMNZS Aotearoa in the background. Image courtesy NZDF available to respond to crises when required. If there were two, and they were flexibly designed and equipped, it might be possible to reduce the number of modular combat/patrol platforms in the fleet to three.

An LPD is a comparatively large ship, with a large flight deck and large cargo spaces. This makes them flexible. Equipped with autonomous vehicles instead of NH90s, an amphibious ship could be a very capable ISR platform, both at sea and overland.

Equipped with naval helicopters as well as remotely piloted aerial vehicles, they could be effective in protecting shipping against hostile surface threats, particularly in choke points such as international straits. They could be equipped with Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) capability in the form of towed array sensors and naval helicopters capable of localising and attacking hostile submarines.

Their capacity allows them to carry systems for more than one type of operation at a time – an LPD deploying a land force could also carry a significant Mine Counter Measures (MCM) capability without compromising either mission – in fact, the two could be mutually supportive. Finally, their size allows them to be equipped with weapon systems more commonly associated with frigates, including phased array radars, air defence missiles, and gunnery systems for anti-surface and fire support to land forces. In addition to being able to defend themselves and a land force, they might thus be able to deploy on reactive deterrence and combat missions. It could thus be said that an LPD is the ultimate modular combatant. Two such LPD and three modular patrol/combatant ships, and HMNZS Aotearoa, might be a very effective force structure. The beauty of writing in a forum like this is that no-one except the editor can red-ink ideas that they disagree with, and editors generally like a degree of provocativeness. So here’s a provocative idea – investigate a force structure based entirely on four LPDs supported by HMNZS Aoteraoa. In the Defence Technology Agency, we have operational research scientists who are an invaluable asset, particularly in capability planning. They are more than capable of the necessary modelling to explore this option and the alternatives. The capability offered by LPDs across the spectrum from disaster relief to force projection to sea control and denial could offer outstanding value for money.

In my previous attempts at describing naval capability options, I have tried to give equal weight to the people factor. If we are to execute a pro-active defence strategy, and if that is to have a significant maritime component, we will need higher levels of regional presence than that of which we are capable at present. Whether we achieve this with four ships or seven, this means more people.

There are many factors that contribute to naval work force attrition, but in my experience both personally and as the Captain Fleet Personnel and Training, the most significant is separation from home, friends, and family. Our work force must have sufficient people so that operating tempo is kept within reasonable bounds; a modular or an LPD based fleet that only embarks the capability it needs for a given mission might enable this.

In summary, a proactive defence strategy creates new demands on defence capability. The strategy must be maritime, with priority given to interlocking naval and land capabilities, a proportion of which must always be available, and which must be capable of sustained continuous presence. Modular patrol/combat platforms could provide affordable, flexible, and persistent naval capability, but projecting land forces will require significant amphibious sealift – at least two ships will be required.

A force structure based entirely on multi-role LPDs may be worth looking at, and the DTA operational research team are well placed to advise on that and other options. Finally, and most importantly, the people aspect of capability must be fully integrated with all strategy options if any are to be valid. We live in interesting times…