Author    Jim Rolfe

Two of my colleagues have used this forum recently to comment on the need for a naval combat force. Both have useful insights to make, but neither gets to the root of the issue.

Professor Robert Ayson assumes that because we do not have ships readily available today because they are being upgraded (and we seem to be surviving as a country without them) a future government may well decide that the cost of a warship capability might better be directed elsewhere. Perhaps so, but this seems to me to be hypothetical and drawing from a single data point.
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In contrast, Lance Beath argues that a naval combatant capability is essential, but that the real answer lies in an integrated single combat service for the armed forces. That is, however, to discuss structure rather than capability and to assume the context of the domains within which future operations will be conducted. 

Author    Lance Beath

In a recent Incline post titled ‘Where are the Frigates?’ Professor Robert Ayson notes, quite correctly, that the frigates currently undergoing refit in Canada represent ‘no small portion of New Zealand’s modest capacity to project military power.’ He then asks, ‘if New Zealand can have a period of months when it does without that capacity in its entirety, would the lights really go out if there were no frigates at all?’
 
A headline writer on Newsroom, in republishing Rob’s piece, added the provocative headline ‘Farewell to New Zealand’s Frigates?’ with a lead-in paragraph saying that ‘New Zealand’s inability to contribute naval frigates to a US-led operation near Iran may seem embarrassing – but as Robert Ayson writes, it may actually demonstrate we don’t need the vessels at all.’
 
Yet, as I read Rob’s piece, he seemed to me to be asking a rhetorical question. The current unavailability of the two major components of the Navy’s surface combat force does not demonstrate lack of necessity. More correctly, what it demonstrates is a larger and more pressing phenomenon that was the subject of an earlier Incline post by Van Jackson. Namely, an inability to do what the NZDF might be asked to do because of ongoing resource shortfalls or what Jackson called the ‘strategy-force mismatch’. 

Author   Robert Ayson

Australia has just announced that it will join the US-led mission to protect shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz against harassment by Iran. New Zealand not only seems unlikely to do the same. It seems unable. Defence Minister Ron Mark has said that "The bottom line [is] that I can barely struggle to keep two P3s [surveillance aircraft] flying ... I just don't see that we have any spare capability right now to engage in that kind of a mission."
 
When Donald Trump’s latest Defence Secretary was in town earlier this month, I implied that New Zealand already had an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card for any US request for assistance, at least on the naval side. One of New Zealand’s two frigates, I suggested, was away being refitted. It turns out I was wrong. Both of the ANZAC frigates, as a colleague corrected me, are in a Canadian dockyard.