The next day, a Chinese submarine fired a missile from the South China Sea into the Pacific. It splashed down between Nauru and Tonga, in our own neighbourhood. The warhead was a dummy. The message needed no explosives.
The two stories ran a day apart; one filed under trade and the other under defence. They are the same story.
Every trade deal rests on an assumption so basic that nobody writes it down: the ships will get through. A trade agreement is a stack of paper about goods that, for the most part, move by sea. And for New Zealand, that means nearly everything we buy and sell by volume (and by value about 85% of goods exports and 73% of goods imports) travels on ships. Economic security is the foundation on which our national security is built.
The milk powder that earns our living goes out by sea. The fuel that keeps the country running comes in by sea, every litre of it, since Marsden Point stopped refining in 2022. All the ingredients of our much-needed fertiliser are sourced offshore and arrive by ship.
Nearly a quarter of our exports go to a single customer, China, and much of that cargo passes through the busiest and most contested waters on earth. If the ships stopped, New Zealand would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks.
The sea does not keep itself open, though. For eighty years, the navies of the United States and its friends have done that work. They watch the choke points, the narrow straits where the world’s shipping squeezes through. Countries like ours have enjoyed the result without paying much towards it.
We have been served a small taste of the alternative with the on-going conflict over the access through the Straits of Hormuz and again when rebels in Yemen started firing at ships in the Red Sea. Freight costs jumped for everyone, including exporters here at the bottom of the world. Trouble half a planet away showed up in New Zealand invoices soon enough.
Economists have a word for what we have been doing: free-riding, taking the benefit of something while others carry the cost. It works until the others lose patience, and they are losing it. In May, the American Defence Secretary told an Asian security summit that spending two percent of GDP on defence “is freeloading”. New Zealand has an aspiration of working its way up to two percentage of GDP in a few years.
Which brings us to two old ships. HMNZS Te Kaha and HMNZS Te Mana are frigates, the middle-sized warships that can cross oceans, safely and effectively take part in conflict and if required war, hunt and attack submarines and keep going in a bad day during a Southern Ocean storm. They joined the Navy in 1997 and 1999, and by the mid-2030s they will be worn out.
Cabinet must decide by 2027, or sooner, what replaces them. It will be one of the biggest purchases any New Zealand government has ever made.
The choice has narrowed to a Japanese design and a British one, and to an argument about numbers, rather than strategy or capabilities: two ships are hard to keep at sea when one of them is so often in dock for repairs. Frigates also operate as landing zones for helicopters and aircraft, for which New Zealand has already set aside $2 billion.
I can hear the objection already. What difference would one or two New Zealand frigates make against a navy that can fire missiles across the Pacific?
Nobody keeps the sea open alone. Many navies do it together, a ship here and a patrol there, and the whole adds up to something no single country could manage. The question for New Zealand was never whether we can do the job by ourselves. It is whether we help with the job or just live off it.
The other objection is the one that wins budget fights: every dollar for a warship is a dollar not spent on education, hospitals, schools or roads.
But a country that will not help guard the sea lanes carrying its export income will end up, sooner or later, with less money for everything else. Nobody calls their house insurance wasted because the house did not burn down. A warship is insurance on the roughly $82.7 billion of goods we sell to the world each year.
I spent more than four decades in uniform. If those years taught me anything, it is that the world is not what you hope it will be.
So, the Prime Minister should chase his seven trade agreements, and I hope he lands every one of them. But each is a promise about ships, and somebody must keep the sea safe for them.
For eighty years, that somebody was mostly somebody else. It no longer is and our defence procurement decisions must reflect this new reality.
General John Howard is a retired military leader who now works with boards and senior executives as a private advisor on strategy, risk and organisational
performance. This article was sourced HERE
The milk powder that earns our living goes out by sea. The fuel that keeps the country running comes in by sea, every litre of it, since Marsden Point stopped refining in 2022. All the ingredients of our much-needed fertiliser are sourced offshore and arrive by ship.
Nearly a quarter of our exports go to a single customer, China, and much of that cargo passes through the busiest and most contested waters on earth. If the ships stopped, New Zealand would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks.
The sea does not keep itself open, though. For eighty years, the navies of the United States and its friends have done that work. They watch the choke points, the narrow straits where the world’s shipping squeezes through. Countries like ours have enjoyed the result without paying much towards it.
We have been served a small taste of the alternative with the on-going conflict over the access through the Straits of Hormuz and again when rebels in Yemen started firing at ships in the Red Sea. Freight costs jumped for everyone, including exporters here at the bottom of the world. Trouble half a planet away showed up in New Zealand invoices soon enough.
Economists have a word for what we have been doing: free-riding, taking the benefit of something while others carry the cost. It works until the others lose patience, and they are losing it. In May, the American Defence Secretary told an Asian security summit that spending two percent of GDP on defence “is freeloading”. New Zealand has an aspiration of working its way up to two percentage of GDP in a few years.
Which brings us to two old ships. HMNZS Te Kaha and HMNZS Te Mana are frigates, the middle-sized warships that can cross oceans, safely and effectively take part in conflict and if required war, hunt and attack submarines and keep going in a bad day during a Southern Ocean storm. They joined the Navy in 1997 and 1999, and by the mid-2030s they will be worn out.
Cabinet must decide by 2027, or sooner, what replaces them. It will be one of the biggest purchases any New Zealand government has ever made.
The choice has narrowed to a Japanese design and a British one, and to an argument about numbers, rather than strategy or capabilities: two ships are hard to keep at sea when one of them is so often in dock for repairs. Frigates also operate as landing zones for helicopters and aircraft, for which New Zealand has already set aside $2 billion.
I can hear the objection already. What difference would one or two New Zealand frigates make against a navy that can fire missiles across the Pacific?
Nobody keeps the sea open alone. Many navies do it together, a ship here and a patrol there, and the whole adds up to something no single country could manage. The question for New Zealand was never whether we can do the job by ourselves. It is whether we help with the job or just live off it.
The other objection is the one that wins budget fights: every dollar for a warship is a dollar not spent on education, hospitals, schools or roads.
But a country that will not help guard the sea lanes carrying its export income will end up, sooner or later, with less money for everything else. Nobody calls their house insurance wasted because the house did not burn down. A warship is insurance on the roughly $82.7 billion of goods we sell to the world each year.
I spent more than four decades in uniform. If those years taught me anything, it is that the world is not what you hope it will be.
So, the Prime Minister should chase his seven trade agreements, and I hope he lands every one of them. But each is a promise about ships, and somebody must keep the sea safe for them.
For eighty years, that somebody was mostly somebody else. It no longer is and our defence procurement decisions must reflect this new reality.
If you want to read the rest of the article please find it here (paywalled)
General John Howard is a retired military leader who now works with boards and senior executives as a private advisor on strategy, risk and organisational
performance. This article was sourced HERE
1 comment:
Do we need a navy? Look what Ukraine is doing to Russia in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov writhe air and sea drones.
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