The Axis powers in WW2 faced the problem of taking on the quantitatively and qualitatively superior fleets of the Allies. While they eventually lost the war, they did devise a number of cunning strategies which certainly kept the Allies on their toes.
The Japanese for instance, attempted to deal the American navy a crippling blow on the outset of war with the attack on Pearl Harbour, and succeeded in destroying two battleships and disabling five more. While the attack was ultimately seen as a disastrous strategic blunder, tactically it was a stunning success. American and Chinese military planners must no doubt be aware of the lessons of Peal Harbour - I doubt an attacking force would miss the American carriers twice...
More than a surprise attack, there is the possibility of sabotage to whittle away an opponent's numerical advantage in ships. A famous example also occurred during WW2 when Italian divers (or 'frogmen') raided the Port of Alexandria in December 1941, placing limpet mines upon the largest British ships they could find. Two battleships and an oil tanker were disabled and put out of action for many months. The Italians lost six men captured.
Aside from such tactical loopholes, the relevancy of aircraft carriers in general may not last forever. One of the most strategically significant events of the 20th century was the launch of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. As the first 'all-big-gun' battleship it rendered all previous warships obsolete. While one may think this would give the British a great advantage, the reality was that it reduced their naval lead over rival powers to just one ship. This greatly contributed to the naval arms race pre-WW1.
A similar event could happen in the near future, or may have happened already. While the aircraft carrier has ruled the seas since WW2, it may eventually go the way of the Battleship. Anti-ship missiles may advance to the point where large ships such as carriers are too vulnerable to operate anywhere near a hostile coastline. A Chinese missile called the 'Dong-Feng 21' has been cited in the media as such a possible 'carrier-killer', though others question if its significance has been over-hyped - http://thediplomat.com/2013/10/lifting-the-veil-on-chinas-carrier-killer/
The modern world also offers other possibilities. 'Cyberwarfare' is a term that has gained a lot of currency as the internet has spread around the world over the past twenty years. The most successful example so far would seem to be 'Stuxnet' - what has been universally suspected, if officially denied, to be an Israeli/American operation to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. Reportedly the virus disabled a fifth of Iran's centrifuges - used to enrich nuclear material. While we don't know exactly to what extent cyberwarfare may affect future battles, it could be very significant indeed. Like the machine gun in WW1 or the tank in WW2, their true significance may only be seen in hindsight.
Lessons like this then, show that the American's advantage, while great, is not necessarily insurmountable in the long run. After all, there are only ten Nimitz-class carriers. At any given time several of these will need to be in dock undergoing maintenance, and stationing all the others off the Chinese coast at once would probably be impracticable.
Thus, if through a combination of surprise and sabotage the Chinese took out three or four of them, and assuming their own carrier building program comes to fruition over the next decade or two, they could just about achieve parity with the American navy in the South China Sea at the opening of any conflict. This combination of events would still be decades away however.
But lets assume the worst. Lets say that, around the year 2050, the Chinese and Americans wage a major war on land or at sea. Possible triggers for this conflict could be found in the Middle East, Kashmir, Korea or Taiwan. Lets further conclude that the Americans lose, and are forced to withdraw from the western Pacific and accede to Chinese dominance over the region. Others have written about this possibility -
http://www.hudson.org/research/8885-defeat-at-sea-the-u-s-naval-implosion-of-2050/
As well as myself -
http://futuredemons.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/world-war-three-united-states-and-china.html
Again, this would all be a necessary prelude to an invasion of Australia. Aside from kicking out the Americans, the Chinese would have to neutralize - through force or diplomacy, all of the intervening nations between us (i.e. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia).
Such a chain of events may be possible, but we're talking a seismic shift in international politics, one on the scale of the world wars. Nonetheless, the Japanese did manage to achieve most of this, albeit briefly, in the 1940s -
One wonders roughly how many troops and ships you'd need to assemble in the first place, assuming you could safely transport them this distance. Australia is a big, big country. The only amphibious invasion of comparable size in all history, indeed, the only other amphibious invasion of a whole continent, would be the Normandy landings in June 1944.
Of course Australia's population is much smaller than Europe's, but the Allies in 1944 were not opposed by the French, but by the occupying Germans. As Hitler had committed most of the Wehrmacht's strength on the Eastern Front, roughly a million German soldiers remained to hold France.
By 2050, Australia is estimated to have a population of about 40 million. Using the World Wars as a guide (i.e. the last time industrialized nations fully mobilized for war) roughly one in ten people in a developed country can be put in uniform without collapsing the economy. This gives us a similar figure. It may even be an underestimate. Australia in WW2 had only 7 million people, yet just over a million served in all branches of the armed forces in total. Thus, we could conceivably put 2-3 million soldiers into the field.
Equipping them is another matter, but even if the Americans did not want to be drawn into a war directly, it would be simple for them to ship a few thousand excess tanks, guns and planes to Australia. Such a 'lend-lease' program to Britain and the other allies provided millions of tonnes of armaments during WW2. Given the necessity of the events described above, Australia would presumably have some years to prepare for an invasion.
Preparations for Normandy took years. The Allied invasion force eventually included some 7,000 ships, including 1,200 warships, 1600 support vessels and over 4,000 transport and landing ships. More than 150,000 troops were landed on the first day, and some three million by D-Day +90. Some 10,000 planes supported the invasion.
Even then, this armada only had to cross the English Channel, a distance of about 240km. This is comparable to the 130km width of the Taiwan Strait, a distance the Chinese probably could cross and perhaps even defend against American intervention, but Australia is thirty times more distant.
The largest long-distance amphibious invasion would probably be the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945, which involved 1300 ships, less than a quarter of the Normandy figure. Okinawa itself had about 500,000 inhabitants and a land area of 2,300 km2 - comparable to the ACT in Australia.
Admittedly Operation Downfall - the planned invasion of mainland Japan - would have been even larger. The Allies began assembling 42 carriers, 24 battleships and over 400 destroyers and other major warships for the landings. Even this vast fleet however, would have required the support of nearby bases like Okinawa to maintain.
As a preliminary to invading Australia then, the Chinese or anyone else would have to seize bases nearer to Australia as staging grounds. East Timor, the Solomon Islands or New Caledonia come to mind, or ideally they could bully or bargain with the Indonesians.
Even then however, there is the question of where in Australia you land your forces. When the Allies landed at Normandy in 1944, they were less than 200km from the Eiffel Tower.
As far as Darwin is from China, it is another 3,000km to Melbourne, comparable to the distance between Paris and Moscow. Northern Australia is only sparsely populated. Some 80% of Australians live in a broad coastal strip in the south and east between Adelaide and Brisbane.
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| Operation 'Death to the Foreign Devils Down Under' - June 2054 |
Finally, assuming that all of the above still happens, and the People's Republic of Australia is declared circa 2060, one wonders exactly what the invaders will have gained? They will have spent trillions of dollars building up a vast military machine, launched it on a war that will have killed millions of people, likely collapsing the world economy in the process, and ended up with...what?
We already sell billions of dollars worth of iron ore, coal and other minerals to Asia. The country is relatively underpopulated at present, but at half a million extra people a year it couldn't be growing much faster. Given that most of it is desert as well, it would be hard to support a much larger population anyway. A hundred million by 2100 is a remote possibility, but given China's projected population of 1.5 billion by mid-century, only a tiny portion of the excess could be resettled in Australia. Despite fears of a population explosion, most Asian countries have just about finished growing anyway, and many are coming to suffer from low birth rates. The one-child policy in China may actually leave them with a labor shortage in another generation or two.
So no, Australia is not the place to invade if you want more lebensraum, unless your master race is particularly fond of sand and giant earthworms.
One more scenario worthy of consideration are the after-effects of a major disaster affecting the nations north of Australia. If the severity of climate change exceeds most expectations, sea levels could rise by several feet by 2100. This would flood many coastal cities, potentially producing hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide. Other causes could be a major nuclear exchange, the sudden onset of a new ice age (not as remote a possibility as one may think), a terminator-style machine revolt, an asteroid strike or a technological singularity, beyond which all our predictions may be worthless.
All of these events, no kidding, may very well happen over the next century. Events away from our borders of this scale will most definitely affect us. The results would be more on the order of a 'massive wave of refugees' than an organized invasion however. Think of the few thousand 'boat people' we've had recently, and imagine what a few million may be like. If anything, this possibility is more likely than the organised invasion described above.
So yes, all that, Senator Lambie, is what it would take for a foreign invasion of Australia to occur.
Happy warmongering.
- DT
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