This paper quantifies Australia's submarine capability under different options. The Defence White Paper of 2009 promised to deliver Force 2030, which had as its centrepiece a force of twelve new highly capable long range submarines. That’s not going to happen. One way or another, Force 2030 will have a submarine fleet that is a compromise...

There’s recently been a flurry of activity as Airbus has attempted to sell the virtues of its C-295 aircraft for the Australian Defence Force’s future battlefield airlifter. This paper examines both the Airbus solution and its rival, Alenia’s C-27J Spartan. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) airlift capability is critical to operations both at home and...

This paper explains that there are many possible prices for the future submarine, and the actual cost will be determined by choices that are made about the boat's capability and size. The cost of the future submarine project has been much discussed in the press. ASPI's earlier estimate of $36 billion has become a frequently...

In this paper, Andrew Davies and Edward Mortimer look at Australia's energy security. Energy is the lifeblood of modern economies. The correlation between energy consumption and prosperity is strong—and that's unlikely to change. Those simple observations have some profound implications. Australia, like all modern economies, needs an assured supply of energy to function effectively. As...

Australia’s submarine fleet should be managed not as a succession of essentially distinct projects and equipment types, but in a holistic capability-focused way. The future submarine project is potentially the nation's biggest ever engineering undertaking. But at the moment it is making little progress. In part that's because the ongoing saga of the Collins fleet...