Surface ships and armoured vehicles are on borrowed time

Andrew Davies

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Just for a change, there’s a bit of heat around discussions of the future of armour and surface ships. I thought ASPI analyst William Leben’s recent Strategist piece was a good one in its attempt to find some common ground.

I think a lot of the argument centres on a semantic misunderstanding of what it is for something to be ‘obsolete’. I’ve been guilty of using the word speciously myself, most recently on the subject of surface combatants, when what I really meant was ‘significantly reduced utility’. Strictly speaking, no capability is ever entirely useless. There are probably still occasional circumstances in which the crossbow, horse cavalry charge or 16-inch guns of a battleship would still be effective weapons. But those instances are so rare that no one sees the benefit of including them in modern force structures.