This Dance of Three Collins Submarines reflects Australia's lack of direction in deciding on a Future Submarine design to replace the Collins. There are insufficient defence funds for the foreseeable future to build a new submarine.
Here's an interesting commentary in The Conversation from Andrew Phillips, Senior lecturer in International Relations and Strategic Studies at University of Queensland. I've bolded the parts most relevant to India:
"Defence White Paper: super-sizing Australia’s strategic geography for the Asian Century
May 7, 2013
Australia’s new Defence White Paper http://www.defence.gov.au/WhitePaper2013/docs/WP_2013_web.pdf [PDF 3 MB] reflects a revolution in
the way in which Australia thinks about its strategic geography.
The “Indo-Pacific” has now decisively displaced the
“Asia-Pacific” as defence planners’ preferred term for describing our
neighborhood. India’s robust economic growth and likely future military heft
provides a powerful reason for this change.
So too does the Indian Ocean’s growing importance as a
maritime superhighway connecting “factory Asia” with resource hubs including
East Africa, the Middle East and North-Western Australia. But radically expanding Australia’s strategic horizons also
risks a loss of focus and spreading our resources too thinly.
The problem of
priorities
The greatest danger of the Indo-Pacific concept lies in
treating the Indian Ocean and East Asian regions as of equivalent strategic
importance.
While the resources trade linking the Indian and Pacific
Oceans is growing in importance, the inter-state conflicts that most
immediately impinge on Australia’s interests remain concentrated in East and
especially northeast Asia.
An increasingly poisonous Sino-Japanese relationship, and a
nuclear armed North Korea, threaten stability in that part of Asia that
continues to be the primary engine of Australian prosperity. Short of an
Indo-Pakistani nuclear war, no security challenge west of the Strait of Malacca
comes close to threatening Australia’s interests as seriously as does the
spectre of a Northeast Asian Great Power conflict.
For Australia, the main security and economic game will
remain centered on the Sino-Japanese-Korean triangle for at least the next
decade. Thus the language we use to describe our strategic landscape should
reflect this reality as faithfully as possible.
The problem of
planning
In lumping the Indian and Pacific Ocean theatres together,
the White Paper’s authors conflate two very different environments.
Since the 1970s, Australia has pursued a strategy in East
Asia based on participation in America’s “hub and spokes” system of bilateral
alliances and engagement with an ASEAN-centred regional security architecture.
The Indian Ocean presents a more complicated challenge for
Canberra. It lacks a coherent US-centred alliance system for Australia to plug
in to, or a local equivalent of the veritable “alphabet soup” of multilateral
security fora now present in East Asia.
Australia must engage the Indian Ocean region, and the White
Paper rightly prioritises turbo-charging bilateral partnerships with India and
Indonesia as a means of achieving this goal. But a mere extension of
Australia’s tried and tested “dual track” technique of regional order-building
from an Asia-Pacific to an Indian Ocean is likely to fail.
The problem of
perception
Finally, the most recent White Paper has won praise for
abandoning a needlessly provocative approach of casting China’s rise as a
potential source of regional instability.
But Canberra’s focus on the Indo-Pacific risks undermining
this progress. This is because Australia-watchers in Beijing will be aware of
the concept’s early association with voices that advocated containing China
through the formation of a league of maritime democracies including India,
Australia, Japan and the United States.
To be fair, most Indo-Pacific boosters – both within and
outside of government – have consistently and correctly repudiated ambitions to
contain China as being both unrealistic and counter-productive.
Nevertheless, in the likely event that the Indo-Pacific
becomes a permanent part of Australia’s defence and foreign policy, a special
effort will be needed to privately reassure Beijing that the concept includes
an inclusive vision of regional order, as opposed to a dog-whistle to partisans
agitating for an anti-China “Axis of Good”.
Australia’s strategic environment is changing rapidly, and
the White Paper’s authors have shown considerable intellectual élan in trying
to capture the changes now re-shaping our region.
An exclusively East Asia-centric conception of Australia’s
strategic space increasingly sits uneasily with India’s rise, a growing
Indonesia and the undeniable importance of the Indo-Pacific “energy
superhighway” to regional economic development.
Nevertheless, stretching Australia’s strategic geography out
to an Indo-Pacific scale carries dangers as well as opportunities – the concept
requires further intellectual refinement. This is especially so in a time of
tight budgets, and when Australia’s political leadership cravenly refuses to
educate the public on the necessity of funding the increased defence and
especially diplomatic regional capabilities we urgently need to secure our
safety and prosperity.
Ultimately, unless finance and political leadership are
provided, broadening Australia’s strategic focus may merely further dilute our
limited resources and compromise our capacity to shape our region in the Asian
century."
