The world has entered a “new missile age”, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy declared in a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra today. “These weapons are increasing in numbers, speed, range and precision … More states now wield them – and they are no longer the sole preserve of states.”
Conroy was at the Press Club to announce new government investments into the manufacture of guided missiles in Australia, but first he needed to make the case for why that’s important, which he did by referring to the findings of the government’s own 2023 Defence Strategic Review. Conroy said:
The Defence Strategic Review concluded that the rise of this new missile age – crystallised by the proliferation of long-range precision strike weapons – has radically reduced the advantages of Australia’s geography.
But that claim about Australia’s geography is a substantial overstatement. The distances over which missiles need to travel in order to threaten Australia are vast, and that will always offer Australia a lot of protection. The constraints of physics and engineering have not suddenly been overcome in this new missile age. For missiles to fly farther they need to be bigger, which means more fuel, bigger engines and more sophisticated guidance systems. This all increases cost. The government knows this because, as Conroy says in his speech, Australia is procuring long-range missiles such as the Tomahawk and Naval Strike Missile, both of which cost around US$1.9 million a piece.
Distance is our protector, our greatest natural barrier against military threats, yet … successive governments have decided that distance is a barrier to be overcome rather than an advantage to be exploited.
This reveals a strange aspect of modern Australian defence policy: distance is our protector, our greatest natural barrier against military threats, yet via the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project and the focus on long-range missiles, successive governments have decided that distance is a barrier to be overcome rather than an advantage to be exploited.
This is not an argument against missiles. It is certainly in Australia’s interests to acquire weapons that can sink ships and shoot down aircraft and missiles as they approach Australia. And they should be purchased in sufficient quantities, which is Conroy’s main focus in announcing various new initiatives to manufacture guided weapons in Australia: “the time to build stockpiles and Australian industrial capacity is now.”
The focus on stockpiles is welcome in light of the Ukraine war experience, where munitions have been exhausted quickly and Western powers have had to scramble to rebuild their capacity to manufacture weapons. But does Australia necessarily need domestic manufacturing capacity to create those stockpiles? Presumably, if the Ukrainians had their time over, they would have built bigger stockpiles before Russia invaded. But whether those stockpiles were composed of weapons manufactured in Ukraine or elsewhere would have been immaterial. The only thing that matters is having enough.
The same logic ought to apply to Australia. Weapons stockpiles? Certainly. Industrial capacity to build those weapons? Well, that depends on whether we can build them cost-effectively or if it would be better to just buy them from overseas. Judging by the tens of millions in government subsidies that Conroy has announced for these initiatives today, we know the answer.
