Absolutely.
In fact, it's even more ambitious. The open literature has said it's going to be 12 submarines. It's basically a conventional nuclear-powered French submarine that they're buying.
With the Australian model, part of the thing that always drives anybody when they are getting their defence procurement done right—and this is the one thing that comes out in the open literature—is that the more the decision-makers see and feel that there are real security threats, the more you have bipartisan agreement. It's not a criticism of our system, per se. However, if you look at the Australians, every time the Indonesians were becoming more of a threat—in any of the white papers from 1965 onward—the more you saw bipartisan agreement. In other words, the threat seemed to bring the ideas together. We can say the same thing about the Japanese with regard to North Korea and some of the issues. In other words, there seems to be a relationship between bipartisan and democratic states and the threat perception that exists in that particular context.
In terms of the model that the Australians are doing, the one piece I would say works the best, that we may want to take issue with, is that the Australians have an ongoing process of white papers, examinations, and other means of determining what the threat is. The Australians are a Commonwealth nation, just as we are. They take the practice of white papers just as we do, but it does not end with the white paper. You have this constant re-evaluation of what the threat is and then what they have to do.
The significance of that is twofold. First of all, it allows you to deal with the ongoing issues, so you can respond to changes much more rapidly than simply by doing the examination at the beginning of any government term in office. Second of all, I think the critical point is that it educates decision-makers.
In other words, if you are required to be constantly looking at that—you guys have such limited time to focus on any of these issues, as all of you are very well aware—so that you have to dedicate this amount of time and you have to rethink this, that has a means of educating any governance system. That is part of the reason we see countries like Australia, France, Japan, South Korea that are able to do this, because you have to bring in the decision-makers on a more regular basis.
I would say going beyond simply looking at the navy, you need to be able to deal with the threat environment around you on an ongoing basis. That then mixes the decision-makers with the threat perception.