The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  Since the Syrian war closed the border to narcotics traffickers, he thinks the main changes in strategy have been in reducing the earlier, bulk loads to smaller loads of higher purity and in becoming better at devising hiding places on the dhows. ‘So methodology is changing, as you would expect. We need to change with it.’

  He says that sometimes only the master of the dhow knows that there are narcotics on board because it has been loaded secretly at night. ‘We’ve had information where the crew have been moved to the end of the deck and told, “Turn around and do not look,” while the gear is loaded on board. So they know there’s something on board, they just don’t know where it is. Other times, the crew come on board when it has already been loaded so they won’t have a clue, only the captain may be aware of what’s on board. And a lot of the time that’s because the syndicates know that law enforcement or navy personnel will question the crew and they might give up where it is.’

  One navy seizure where the AFP was involved right down the chain started with a tip-off in the region that a load was heading towards a port.

  ‘Then essentially the vessel was identified and followed and it was boarded by the navy,’ he says. ‘It was late in the afternoon so the navy members went on board trying to find the narcotics. Had no luck – it was getting too dark – so they got off the vessel, reboarded it the next morning then after a couple of hours finally found the narcotics.

  ‘And for us, that was a fairly big relationship-building exercise because the navy got on board, they drilled a lot of holes and weren’t finding anything. It wasn’t until we started to really push that we got a better indication of where it might be in the vessel. And then to have the navy just sit there that night, surveil it and then go back in the next day, trusting us, and actually finding it where we said it was, I think that really helped build the relationship.’

  Another interesting development is that a few people who went to Australia on people-smuggling boats are involved in the drug trade direct from Iran to Australia.

  ‘So it’s something else that we are conscious of. Some of them are playing with a habit as well. People think that in the Middle East Region there’s not too much of those drug habits because [of] the death penalty and other punishments, but the reality is, a lot of these countries have the social issues of drug addiction.’

  The AFP’s work in the region is not well known in Australia. But Fox says, ‘Being able to try and identify the funding or locate and seize narcotics as close to the source as we can, which is what we’re trying to do, has been pretty effective.’

  21

  Bringing them home

  There is growing excitement on board HMAS Darwin as she sits gently at anchor in Jervis Bay on the afternoon of Saturday, 16 July 2016. It is the last night at sea after seven long months for the thirty-two-year-old frigate and her 228-person crew.

  The birdies have safely deposited on board the special ‘welcome home’ guest – Commodore Luke Charles-Jones from Fleet Headquarters – and the speeches, promotions and awards presentations are out of the way.

  Now the officers and sailors and a handful of visitors are tucking into the final ‘steel deck’ barbecue dinner of the old warship’s final deployment to the Middle East. Somehow the rissoles, sausages, chicken and salads that we washed down with the obligatory cordial taste better as the lights of Huskisson and Vincentia twinkle in the distance.

  Since 1990, when she joined Adelaide and Success in the first Australian Task Group for Operation Damask 1 following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Darwin has deployed to the Gulf a record-equalling seven times.

  During her 2016 tour the ship has steamed more than 50,000 nautical miles or 92,500 kilometres. Her chefos have dished up more than 100,000 meals and the crew has conducted dozens of boardings that have turned up the record seven-tonne weapons haul and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illicit drugs.

  Chief of the Australian Defence Force Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin regards the Middle East as an important training ground for the Royal Australian Navy’s future leaders.

  Sitting in his expansive office on the top floor of building R1 at defence headquarters in Canberra, with a beautiful view over Lake Burley Griffin and the Brindabella mountains, Binskin reflects on the thousands of naval personnel who will have served in the Gulf region during sixty-four ship deployments to mid-2017.

  ‘If you look at each ship with about 250 people on board, that’s a lot of people from navy over the years,’ he says. ‘On the list of the captains’ names or the commanders of the operation during Damask and Slipper there are future chiefs of navy – there are a lot of two stars in there. They took those skills from there on their future careers.’

  The variety of tasks has also been a great operational and training opportunity.

  ‘We went through counter-piracy for a bit, then the drugs, trying to interdict the finances of terrorists, rebels, depending on where they might be fighting in those particular areas in the Middle East and then in the last few months weapons have started to come to the head on the dhows that have been picked up,’ Binskin reflects. ‘We’re not sure if this is a longer term trend or will we start to see more drug interdiction again, but it just shows the variety of what we’re seeing out there and what our crews have to be ready for.’

  While the impact of the interdictions on terrorist finances is not huge in global terms, Binskin is confident that the RAN is making a difference. Every bit counts.

  Many Australian sailors have spent a substantial chunk of their careers patrolling the waters around the Middle East Region and not just in the frigates.

  ‘We’ve had FFGs, we’ve had Anzacs, we’ve had HMAS Kanimbla over there during the 2003 Gulf War, we’ve had Westralia and HMAS Success,’ Binskin says. ‘Success was over there just before Anzac Day [2014] and she was actually resupplying and refuelling ships that were on station, as well as doing some missions herself. We then chopped her to NATO and she did a couple of weeks as the only NATO ship on Ocean Shield, which is a counter-piracy patrol, before she went up the Red Sea and then up for Anzac Day commemorations. So their ability to chop between the various task forces and missions shows they’re pretty versatile, pretty good people and ships.’

  Binskin was a navy fighter pilot before he transferred to the RAAF when all fast jets moved over to the air force. Like many of the senior navy officers he refers to, he has had personal experience with the mission. Before becoming chief of the air force he spent four months serving in the Middle East as commander of the Combined Air Operations Centre in 2004, an intense period directing all military air movements in the area of operations. He was the first RAAF officer to run it and direct its vast array of air power.

  While there, he flew out one day to the American aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

  ‘We landed in the C2 greyhound quad [resupply aircraft] and as I got out I looked to the portside and there was HMAS Melbourne tucked in close as the rescue destroyer and in close protection,’ he recalls. ‘Just seeing a red kangaroo on the side of the ship was really good and then being able to see how our ships could seamlessly integrate with their task force in doing that in close protection for them was terrific.’

  Binskin knows just how hard navy crews work in the region.

  ‘There’s a lot of activity so I can’t see them getting much sleep there when they’re in the Arabian Gulf,’ he says. ‘That is not just for those doing the navigation and the bridge work and the operations area. There are a lot of crew members volunteering for jobs such as boarding parties, so a cook will be trained up and be roping out of a Seahawk onto vessels, or in the RHIBs and doing boarding parties. It’s a pretty exciting life.’

  The other important aspect is the opportunity to operate alongside warships from other nations. ‘That helps to tie down the tactics, techniques and procedures and it gives our sailors the chance to see that we are a pretty slick operation when you compare us to other navies around the world. We’re very professi
onal and we’re very capable.’

  Binskin’s military career has been moulded by the instability of the Middle East.

  ‘I can’t see it changing in the shorter term anyway and so for us, we might not be in the Middle East in ten years’ time but we may well be somewhere else,’ he says. ‘Adaptability is the key [for] any acquisition that we make, any training that we do, any exercise constructs that we have. We’re always cognisant of the fact that we’ve got to be interoperable with our major ally, the US, and then with those that we look like we’re going to be operating with into the future. A lot of those are NATO forces, NATO navies.’

  Nothing happens in the military without a strictly ordered set of official arrangements. The Chief of Navy is responsible for raising, training and sustaining the nation’s maritime forces and for positioning all ships and submarines and ensuring they can do the job. But the Australian warships deploying to the region are ‘force-assigned’ from the navy to the ADF’s Chief of Joint Operations, based in Bungendore near Canberra, who is the operational commander of all Australian forces deployed overseas.

  Since the 1999 East Timor crisis, when the realities of a truly ‘joint force’ and the ADF’s own shortcomings hit home, the joint model has been fully implemented and the handover of warships from navy to Headquarters Joint Operations Command is now virtually seamless.

  ‘I look at where we’ve come to now from back then [1999] and we are well ahead, with a far better understanding that joint isn’t doing everything the same,’ Binskin says. ‘Joint is about bringing the best of the three services and the public service together to get the best combination you can for that particular operation. We’ve done it so many times but what we’re tending to do now is that JOC [Headquarters Joint Operations Command] will have a lot more oversight as the ship is transiting or doing other operations. It’s easier now because JOC has all the command and control systems to do it.’

  Operations in the maritime domain will dominate future ADF operations, he thinks. ‘It’s very obvious that we’re a maritime power, not a naval power, and we should structure ourselves that way. That means the three services being able to operate in that maritime environment, whether it be archipelagic or a bit broader. You’re going to see a lot closer integration between the three services.’

  Interoperability has been a catchcry in the defence force for years and Binskin believes technology will enhance it. ‘For example, having the frigates being fully interoperable with the air warfare destroyers means that the air warfare destroyers can detect, target and designate and use the weapons off the frigate to engage. So the air warfare destroyer doesn’t have to be a long way down threat [close to the enemy] – you can have frigates down threat doing anti-submarine warfare and the air warfare destroyer can use its weapon systems in the anti-air battle. That’s the sort of integration that you need to have in the modern battlefield.’

  Navy chief Vice-Admiral Tim Barrett does not believe there will be a significant change to the single-ship Gulf deployment model for some time to come.

  For a small navy to deploy a warship for seven or nine months, at least three ships need to be engaged in the rotation. One deploys as another trains up and the third returns home. Given that the RAN has just twelve surface warships or major combatants (one air warfare destroyer, three guided missile frigates and eight Anzac Class helicopter frigates), the Middle East commitment occupies twenty-five per cent of the fleet and places a heavy strain on resources.

  ‘We have been sending single ships there for decades now and we have only a finite ability to be able to do more,’ Barrett says.

  From his office at Sydney’s HMAS Kuttabul overlooking Garden Island and the old and the new of the Australian navy, the former navy helicopter pilot acknowledges that the RAN enjoys a very strong reputation within the Combined Maritime Forces and many others in foreign military and political command chains.

  ‘We are at the sophisticated end of the navies that are in that force,’ Barrett says.

  His own experience in the region dates back to 1981 when as a young midshipman he served on board the guided missile destroyer HMAS Perth in the northwest Indian Ocean during the Russian war in Afghanistan. At the height of the Cold War between 1981 and 1986 it was the activities of Russian warships and planes rather than pirates or drug smugglers that were on the radar of Australian ships deployed to the US-led naval coalition. Barrett was back in the region in 1992 on board the guided missile frigate HMAS Canberra. This time the job was enforcing sanctions against Saddam Hussein following his invasion of Kuwait.

  ‘So what started for one reason has largely developed over time,’ he says. ‘It’s a demonstration of national resolve in having a capability to have ships there almost permanently to be able to support a variety of actions – be it Soviet presence, the invasion of Kuwait, maritime security issues in terms of piracy or a fear of state-sanctioned transport of illicit drugs and goods.’

  That is not to say that Australia’s commitment to the CMF is open ended or permanent. There is constant scrutiny of the mission, the reasons why the navy is there and the effect that is being achieved. To date, successive governments have judged that the cost and effort are worthwhile. As the officer responsible for ensuring that the navy can meet the national commitment, Tim Barrett is fully engaged in that review process. But with strife in Yemen and the Red Sea area on the increase he thinks there is no reason to believe that the navy will be out of the Middle East Region in the foreseeable future.

  Most of the world’s navies face more work than they have the capacity to do. Responses have to be carefully weighed up and are driven by risk-based intelligence fed from a variety of sources – human intelligence, surveillance by aircraft and satellite and information shared by like-minded countries.

  ‘Rarely would we send a single ship out there to do its sole surveillance on the basis it might come across something,’ Barrett says. ‘It might be patrolling in an area, but its movement within it will be directed by an intelligence-led side and with that you’re going a little further than what’s within the ship.’

  While he has witnessed huge amounts of technological change during his forty-year naval career, in many ways the job remains much as it did. Back in 1976 he was at sea in a patrol boat off Darwin looking for Vietnamese boat people. Today he sends sailors to sea still to look for boat people from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. ‘It’s important to understand what it is we are required to do and differentiate that from how we do it. It’s the difference between the nature of war and the character of war. One’s enduring, one’s ever-changing.’

  Continual motivation is vital to the task. ‘To actually motivate and to get people to do it again and again and again, it’s still important, I think, that they understand where they fit and why they’re doing the things they’re being asked to do. I insist and persist with all my COs that we need to tell our sailors why it is they do the job and put it in context, not just for the navy but in context of the nation and why it’s significant and why it’s important.’

  The strategy is evidently working, with recruitment and retention levels at record highs. Recruitment is running at about ninety-six per cent for sailors, while separation rates are down to 8.2 per cent. With an entirely new fleet coming on line during the next decade the future looks bright as young people are attracted to a career at sea in comfortable, highly technical, state-of-the-art warships and submarines. That process is underway with two landing helicopter docks and three air warfare destroyers and will continue with a new fleet of offshore patrol vessels and two new tankers by the early 2020s. Then comes a new Australian-built frigate fleet and twelve new French-designed submarines. The total cost will be in the order of $200 billion, making navy the biggest Australian defence capital equipment buyer by a long way.

  To Barrett, it is not just about beautiful shiny new ships but also the advanced technology they will carry.

  ‘Where we’re going now is the combat system design and t
he way the technology will be used and that’s the bit where I think there is absolutely a greater deal of excitement around how it might look,’ he says. ‘To some extent it is what I think younger people today would expect to see. It almost provides the things they would expect to see if they were playing games at home. It is the ability to make rapid decisions based on fused data that is now readily apparent and not having to be done through manual intervention.

  ‘A lot of it comes down to bandwidth, it comes down to connectivity, it comes down to the protocols that are used, but it also comes down to the ability to feed certain information at certain levels. All of those things are advancing rapidly and we’re in on that. Not every navy gets to see those advances in the levels that I think we have over the last couple of years.’

  HMAS Darwin will not see the advances that Tim Barrett refers to, but the fine old warship is a classic example of the tough, high-speed escort frigates built to protect US aircraft carriers during the Cold War.

  After a final journey down Australia’s east coast following a gala stop in the Top End, where the ship and crew were lauded by the citizens of her namesake city, the frigate unloaded her munitions in Twofold Bay at Eden on the New South Wales far south coast before turning north, bound for Sydney and home, starting with a quick dash up the coast to Jervis Bay.

  There Darwin anchored off one of the navy’s idyllic havens – HMAS Creswell near Huskisson – to drop off a few family members who had joined the ship and experienced life on board for the final leg of the voyage.

  From ashore at the picture postcard base, the ship is the embodiment of a sleek fighting vessel anchored about 500-metres out in the bay.

  A group of ‘early leavers’ from the crew, who left the ship in Muscat for a break so that they could man her when the rest of the crew took leave, board the ship again for the cruise up to Fleet Base East at Garden Island in Sydney Harbour. A TV crew from Network 10 also climbs aboard to record the ship’s homecoming.