A defence expert has exposed Australia’s defence weaknesses as a Chinese vessel conducts intelligence gathering off the southern coast, warning the ADF lacks the military capabilities to capitalise on this “golden intelligence collection opportunity”.
Sky News broke the story earlier today that a Chinese government research vessel circumnavigating the coast of Australia was currently off the coast of South Australia and was within Australia’s exclusive economic zone.
Founder of defence think tank Strategic Analysis Australia, Michael Shoebridge, said Australia lacked the “right kind of capabilities” to monitor the ship and utilise its presence off the coast as an intelligence collection opportunity.
“To do that, we’d need to have the right kind of capabilities in our military, like lots of aerial drones to watch it and lots of undersea drones to see what it is doing,” Mr Shoebridge told Sky News Australia NewsDay host Kieran Gilbert.
“We don’t have those things despite Australian companies making them.”
Mr Shoebridge said if Australia had “hundreds” of both aerial and undersea drones, the presence of the ship would have marked “a golden intelligence collection opportunity for Australia”.
Instead, however, the ship will be conveying crucial intelligence back to Beijing while Australia remains in the dark.
“Everything that it collects will be passed to the People’s Liberation Army and it will inform their military capabilities and their war-fighting doctrine,” he said.
“This should be a golden intelligence collection opportunity for Australia. If we had hundreds of aerial drones, we could surveil it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“If we have hundreds of undersea drones, which are made by Australian companies, we would know what it was doing with its collection tasks. We don’t know those things.
“So although the Prime Minister is in Western Australia talking about health, the health of our military really needs to be on the agenda in this election.”
The vessel is considered a “spy ship” and is understood to have a dual purpose: legitimate scientific research while collecting intelligence.
Mr Shoebridge explained there was no distinction between a Chinese civilian vessel and a military vessel.
“This vessel will be a dual-use vessel. The Chinese don’t make a distinction between their civilian and military research like this, so this vessel got the capability to examine undersea cables, and it probably did that as it passed between New Zealand and Australia,” he said.
“It’ll be examining things about the water column, which is so important for how militaries operate.”
