Weekend musings on just how big the elephant in the room can be.

I’ve seen a lot of comments around various forums including LinkedIn for a while now, pointing out that an Aircraft Carrier is something Australia needs now and we should be working to attain asap. I get it, our chief potential adversaries in the region have them, and we can’t necessarily rely on our US & UK cousins to drop one or two on our doorstep at short notice while they’re already feeling the pinch of crewing and supporting their own, while facing their own needs to deploy on current operations.

So I agree, it would be great if we had at least one of our own. We’d be able to project our presence a lot further and with a lot more weight and potential punch. It would give us the ability to provide even more support to our IndoPacific neighbours in times of humanitarian need and demonstrate that the Australians Defence Force is indeed a force to be reckoned with.

It makes sense, until you start look a little deeper into the logistics of actually owning, operating, maintaining and supporting one.

An aircraft carrier cannot operate by itself for even short periods of time. Like any large, cumbersome, deployed strategic capability with a lot of moving parts, that often operates a long way from home and friendly supply chains, it needs to take a lot if not all of its support infrastructure with it. The carrier itself may have a lot of fast, pointy, well-armed flying capability and the ability to defend itself in short, sharp bursts; but that runs out very quickly without the ability to resupply and restock itself.

The logistics of crewing and supporting just one aircraft carrier alone suddenly become a lot bigger than you may first think.

Historically and contemporarily (is that the right word?) carriers need a fleet of support vessels and crews (each with their own support needs) to operate effectively and at a high tempo.

So what does a Carrier Group comprise? Some cliff notes below:

The Aircraft Carrier itself: The centrepiece of the Carrier Group, capable of launching and recovering a range of fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. The carrier is a mobile airbase, providing air support, reconnaissance, and strike capabilities. Note: an LHD is not an aircraft carrier.

Carrier Air Wing: The collection of aircraft embarked on the carrier. This can comprise fighter jets, attack aircraft, electronic warfare planes, airborne early warning and control aircraft, and helicopters.

Carrier Escort Ships: Including Guided Missile Cruisers, Anti Submarine Warfare ships and Destroyers. Collectively these provide air defence, surface warfare, and anti-submarine warfare capability to protect the carrier. The carrier cannot do any or all of these things for itself, let alone conduct flight ops effectively at the same time.

Carrier Logistics and Support Ships: Supply ships, replenishment oilers, and a minor fleet unit of other auxiliary ships and vessels needed to provide the fuel, food, and other supplies to sustain the Carrier itself and the carrier group's operations for extended deployments. Our current fleet has its own challenges in this space, now scale that up tenfold.

Submarines: Nuclear-powered, conventionally armed (in our case) attack submarines surveil and support the carrier group, providing covert reconnaissance, and strike capabilities. A good case can be made for a conventional Collins-like platform here also noting Oberon’s and Collin’s class successes in this space in past RIMPACs and other exercises.

On paper, that sounds like a lot of things we currently have or plan to have in our fleet really soon, right?

Nope.

Our current and planned fleet (yes, even the General Purpose Frigates) are not part of that solution; everything in our current maritime makeup has has a use case and planned purpose, including the requisite logistics support footprint required to achieve that tasking. We can't consider changing how we intend to use our fleet to support a carrier use case without covering off or replacing that capability we're taking away.

Realistically, to build and support a working Carrier Group, ignoring our current and already planned future Navy, we would need additional new ships, people, crews, industries, supply chains, fuel, training, technical data, well beyond what we can currently achieve.

AUKUS via Pillar II, may help to bridge some of those gaps, but achieving a working Carrier Group capability in the timeframes that would be relevant to our current geopolitical environment is something that we simply can’t achieve, and would be many orders of magnitude larger than our foray into Nuclear Powered and Conventionally Armed Submarines.

We'd be essentially looking at another complete mini-Navy to achieve the required outcome and lets face it, we don’t have the people or the support in place now to achieve what we have now and are planning for under the DSR / SFR / IIP.

Through all of this I haven’t even touched on the new aircraft we’d need, the training we’d need to put in place, the recruiting, and even the doctrinal changes we’d need to develop for new Navy and Air Wing operations. Sure the Super Hornets are "fitted for and not with" for carrier ops, and sure we used to do all this before with HMAS Melbourne; but our current Hornets have a use profile and Melbourne was “a while ago”, and it’s more than fair to say that things have moved on considerably since then.

Now, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to think about building a carrier or that it’s something we shouldn’t strive for because hey, imagine the size of the industrial growth and continuous shipbuilding (see what I did there?) we’d need to develop to actually achieve it.

Realistically though in the near term, the development of rapidly iterating and swarming autonomous systems and the current approach to buying into our US & UK cousin’s support frameworks, will help us help them to help us (confusing, I know) until we can come up with a good solution.

So, in short - “A Carrier” is a nice idea on paper, but at this stage, it’s just that.