Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "What's Going on With Shipping?" channel.

@biggpicture2930 : Historically, it has been true that the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has considerable difficulty getting enough people to crew subs. This is partly because it is a very small navy whose vessels mainly stay in port. Compare: The USA (population 333 million) has 628,000 people serving in the USN; Australia (population 26 million) has 15,300 serving in the RAN. To have the same ratio and crew readiness as the USN Australia would need 49,000 serving. Also partly due to low pay and a culture that ignores safety, and probably exacerbated by the Collins subs being duds. Why does Australia have such a small navy? Partly because as a non-manufacturing country it does not have the tax revenue to support a bigger navy, and partly because the government continually makes really stupid purchasing decisions. Also the RAN keeps insisting on customising everything they buy instead of buying standard models off the shelf, thus getting less hardware for more dollars spent. A friend of mine drooled over a new Rover luxury car and bought it. He then discovered he could not afford the gasoline and servicing costs, so he didn't drive it much. The RAN has the same mentality.
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@freefall0483 : Have you thought this through? We have thousands of kilometres of isolated coast on which to land a force and establish a command. The RAN will only be able to deploy three or 4 subs at any one time. If just one is knocked out by an enemy that pretty much neutralises the whole sub force. Any invasion is likely to be at least supported by airborne forces. China has and will have a sufficiently large air transport fleet and long range missiles they could do the whole thing by air. But they don't need to do anything with military force. If they want to put Australia out of business, all they need to do is order all imports and exports to/from Australia to stop. This AUKUS thing means an expenditure of $16,000 for every person in Australia. I can think of much better ways of making Australia better, eg, just give us all $16,0000; or spend it on hospitals, or raise pensions. Those long range missiles you write about are not confined to launching from a nuclear sub. They launch from a standard torpedo tube, which can be in any sort of sub - large or small, nuclear or non-nuclear. And they can be launched from land vehicles.
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This "What is Going On" guy has no idea what he's talking about. He makes small errors (Australia doesn't have 30 million people, it has 26 million) to major ones eg claiming Japan surrendered not because of nuclear bombs but because they were starved into submission. Utter rot. The Japanese emperor stopped the fight because the 2 nuclear bombs made him think his own life was in grave danger. For all he knew, the US could drop nuclear bombs from each of their thousands of B-29's and the entire Japanese country destroyed completely. Japan had preparations for a forced invasion by US forces well in hand and had amassed a vast quantity of munitions. Until the emperor ordered fighting stopped, the Jap military had absolutely no intention of giving up. The emperor's "stop fighting" speech was recorded, and had to be delivered to the radio station in secret, lest the Jap Army destroy it. Expecting an Australian submarine force to protect trade routes in ridiculous. It is not likely that they will be able to have more than 3 or 4 nuclear subs deployed any one time. They cannot be everywhere. Just about anything you can buy in Australia that is made in a factory comes from China. Most of Australia's exports go to China. So China blocking trade routes to Australia would be against their own interests. But if China really did want to punish or weaken Australia, all they need to do is order imports and exports to stop. There is nothing a few subs can do about that. Now let's look at why the AUKUS deal has been made: Both Britain and the US are in decline. Both are having trouble paying for their military hardware needs. The deal is to cost ~$400 billion in today's dollars. Only about half is for constructing the actual submarines. The other half is notionally payment for intellectual property and factory capacity. In other words, Australia has been sucked into subsidising the USA and Britain to help them meet their own future needs for submarines. The USA has to plan for loosing Guam in any attack by China or North Korea. Australia looks an attractive alternative base for them. Nobody will know if any subs in and around Australia are Australian or USN subs. Lastly, China has so many subs and other navy craft, that if a war came, Australia's entire fleet at sea if near China would likely be put out of action right at the start. There is another factor though. Australia is also buying a billion dollar's worth of long range cruise missiles that can be launched from a sub's torpedo tubes. Most likely the Australian Navy just expects the subs to cruise around close to Australia and never go near those trade routes. They don't need to go near those trade routes to hit any forseable enemy including China - if war came they can just launch the missiles.
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