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Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."

Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.

I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.

We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.

Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.

But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.

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>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.

I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.

During Talisman Sabre 25, a RCAF C-17 air-dropped a Himars and some ADF personnel on Christmas Island, simulated a firing and then left.

Pushes the defensive line quite a bit further out from the mainland, and you could potentially cover choke points for a naval invasion from the north.

I didn't know that. That's actually impressive, both strategically and in terms of our readiness and capability.

That puts Jakarta in range. I'm sure the Indonesian military took note as well.

Plus we've got Tomahawks now, that's 2500km range, sea launched.

Yeah, so much drama around the gigantic submarines, we should be building water drones of some kind.

We literally are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Shark_(submarine)

But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.

So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.

Which is why Australia is re-orienting its defence by moving towards missiles, UAVs, USVs, while still being lumbered with AUKUS.

It's also shoring up diplomacy with Japan, South Korea, was trying to with India, when Biden was attempting to move India away from China.

The future wars are going to be mostly unmanned and Australia will need hyper-local defence, so has to be low cost and easily deployed.