A couple of points on the Hunter build cost.
I suspect if we built any modern large warship in Osborne Park, the cost would be significantly higher than in its indigenous shipyard. Be that a Burke, baseline T26, Maya or KDXIII. So a big component of the price is because we elected to build a frontline cutting edge warship in Australia from scratch with almost no supply chain or deep experience. We will get a capability for that additional cost, which has use in the future, and it would be expected that future batches have a lower cost from learnt efficiencies. That capability is the ability to make weapons independently of others when our neighbourhood has deteriorated and our allies can't help us. We could have perhaps avoided this expense had we not stopped ship construction following the ANZAC and AWD builds. This is the cost of that short sighted decision. The question is do we value this or not.
Secondly, the Hunter is expensive because the equipment going into it is expensive. The drivetrain for instance is designed to a submarine noise suppression specification that is multiple times the price of a standard Naval drivetrain that you would see on say a Burke. The Brits pay a lot for this in their T26 as well. The question is do we want ships with high end equipment to be able to counter enemy systems that are also high end.
Thirdly the Hunter is expensive because we had limited ability to keep it as a specialised single capability platform as per the British T26. It had to be multi purpurse on top of the ASW specialisation because it will need to operate independently in hostile environments. This point drove all the changes for the more powerful combat system and radar package. Our Navy is simply not big enough for single purpose ships and we would need to accept a much larger fleet to enable specialised platforms. The Brits can afford to send a T45 and T26 on a joint deployment, but even then only just. I will note here that our single biggest limiting factor on the size of the Navy is people. The question is do you want a smaller fleet of multipurpose warships with a smaller crew footprint, or do you want to pay for a larger fleet of single purpose vessels that must operate together with a larger crew requirement.
The fourth point driving expense is a view that undersea warfare will become the most concerning future threat environment. At the moment we mostly see that air warfare is the dominant and we talk about missile defence and offence. In 10-15 years (when the Hunter will come online in numbers), I would view that will switch to staffed and autonomous submarines as our single biggest operational threat. Instead of VLS capacity, we will be talking about noise supression, sonar sensitivity, helo capability and drone interoperability. ASW is more expensive and complex than AAW. The question here is do you want a warship built for tomorrow's threat environment or today's.
If the answer is yes to the above questions, then it unfortunately costs a lot of money. I feel like much of the critism is akin to asking for a Ferrari because we want to go professional racing, but expecting it to be the cost of a Hyundai.
