Canberra has accepted a mine warfare risk. Here’s what that actually means.

Week 26 | June 2026

Before we get underway this week, my heartfelt thanks to each of you who sent personal condolence messages following the recent passing of my family member. 

Now, let’s get to it.

Australia has two minehunters left. Both are over 20 years old. Both are approaching the end of their service lives and neither has a funded replacement. 

SEA 1905, the program that was supposed to fix this, was suspended in April 2024 and has appeared in neither the 2024 nor the 2026 Integrated Investment Program. No line item, no timeline, and no explanation beyond what officials were willing to say on the record at Indo-Pacific 2025. 

Rear Admiral Stephen Hughes, Head of Navy Capability at the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), put it plainly: the current capability “meets minimal viable capability” and represents “a risk profile we’re willing to take.”

That should be read twice.

Six Huon-class minehunters were commissioned for RAN between 1999 and 2003. Two were decommissioned in 2018 without replacement. HMAS Huon itself, the lead ship, paid off on 30 May 2024 after 25 years. A second followed in December of the same year. That now leaves HMAS Diamantina and one sister, both approaching the same service threshold, and both without successors anywhere in the acquisition pipeline.

SEA 1778 Phase 1 delivered a genuine if modest autonomous toolbox, reaching final operating capability in Q1 2024: four Bluefin-9 and three Bluefin-12 UUVs, eight SeaFox expendable neutralisation systems, three support craft and two USVs. Mine Warfare Team 16 in Sydney operates this fleet, which is a real capability, and the RAN is right to point to it.

What the first phase of SEA 1778 cannot be is a substitute for a dedicated minehunter hull. A Bluefin-9 weighs 70 kilograms and has eight hours of endurance. In every practical sense, it is a sensor you lower from a boat. Operating in or near a live minefield requires something different: a low-signature hull built to suppress its own mine-detonation signature, glass-reinforced plastic construction, with an inherently low magnetic signature and shock-resistant hull design built to operate safely in a minefield. That is what the Huon class was. Nothing in the current acquisition queue replaces it.

Jennifer Parker, a Naval Strategist and former RAN warfare officer now at the ANU National Security College, put the stakes plainly earlier this year: “Nuclear-powered submarines are of little use if the waters outside their ports are mined.” Here she is specifically referring to HMAS Stirling. Port Hedland also comes in for mention. Ninety-nine percent of Australian international trade moves through ten priority ports. Mines near those approaches do not require a sophisticated adversary or a declared war to be catastrophically disruptive. They require a ship, some water, and intent.

Neither the 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) nor the 2026 Integrated Investment Program mentions naval MCM. At all. That is two consecutive NDS and IIP cycles without a single line item for mine warfare or minehunter recapitalisation.

A calibration on framing before we go further: What the public record shows is deliberate, budget-driven deprioritisation with explicitly accepted risk, and RADM Hughes was unusually candid about it. A ranked choice was made. Submarines, frigates, long-range strike, and hardening northern infrastructure absorb the available capital. MCM waits. He put the return horizon at “Epoch 3” -  a term now formally defined in the NDS as mid-2030 and beyond.

Nobody failed to think about this. The challenge is whether the accepted risk is correctly calibrated against the actual threat environment. Spoiler: the threat environment did not consult the IIP.

China holds an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 naval mines, assessed in USNI Proceedings as the second largest inventory in the world. Over 30 variants are in service. Mine warfare sits explicitly in Chinese doctrine as a tool of area denial, what Beijing calls an “Assassin’s Mace” capability: asymmetric, cheap, and engineered to exploit the MCM weakness Western navies have spent two decades building.

Taiwan Strait bathymetry suits all types of PLAN mines. US Naval War College analysis records that the PLAN itself assesses Taiwan's MCM capability as unable to counter a sustained mining campaign. Any coalition response scenario requiring Australian naval assets to transit contested approaches runs directly through that calculus.

Mining Port Hedland or the approaches to HMAS Stirling takes a decision, a ship, and some water. Canberra just formally deprioritised the counter-capability to that scenario until the 2030s.

Allied navies are already fielding the capability to address the gap.

Belgium and the Netherlands took delivery of the first rMCM City-class vessel under a two-billion-euro program with Naval Group and Exail. M940 Oostende moored at Zeebrugge in November 2025: this is a drone-carrying hull, not a traditional minehunter. Belgium’s Chief of Defence described it as a vessel that carries robots, not one that hunts mines with its own sonar and divers. That distinction is operational, not semantic. A crew never approaches the minefield.

Kraken Robotics demonstrated their KATFISH towed synthetic-aperture sonar, launched and recovered from an uncrewed surface vessel, off Istanbul in April 2026, demonstrating autonomous detection and classification of mine-like objects without human intervention. A follow-on MOU with SEFINE’s SISAM research centre signed at SAHA Expo in May adds joint development of automatic target recognition: AI that identifies mines in sonar data in near-real time.

SYOS unveiled the SU10 UUV at the Combined Naval Event in the UK in May 2026. Operating depth 500 metres, 10-kilogram modular payload, deployable from shore, crewed vessel, or SYOS’s own USV, satellite-controlled from anywhere in the world. SYOS holds a separate multi-domain contract with the New Zealand Defence Force covering surface, air and ground vehicles. Earlier AUV variants have operational history in offshore oil and gas pipeline survey.

Norway’s Eelume AS, developed with Kongsberg Maritime, brings a snake-form AUV built specifically for the seabed environments that defeat conventional torpedo-shaped vehicles: rock fields, harbour floors, confined geometries where mines are most effectively placed. A single unit detects, classifies, and visually identifies.

All of this is deployable. Or deploying. Or contracted.

Australia has none of this in an active acquisition program. The obvious counter-argument deserves a direct answer. The IIP does invest between $94 and 130 billion in undersea warfare and uncrewed maritime systems, specifically listing Ghost Shark and the Bluebottle uncrewed surface vessel. But neither is an MCM platform. Ghost Shark is well known, it’s an extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle designed for offensive and ISR missions. Bluebottle is a surface vessel. Neither is designed or tasked for the MCM mission.  Across the two major maritime capability buckets in the 2026 IIP - between $94 and $130 billion for undersea warfare and $62 to $77 billion for surface combatants -  there is no dedicated MCM line item. The gap is specific and it is unfunded.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment before the “autonomy will solve it” response arrives. Autonomy solves the sensor problem. It does not solve the platform problem.

As it currently stands, autonomous systems need a mothership: a purpose-built, low-signature hull that can carry the toolbox to the operational area without triggering the mines it is there to find. Ask the Royal Navy. They bet on autonomous MCM without fully solving the mothership question. RFA Stirling Castle, the intended support vessel, ended up laid up in Liverpool. Systems exist. A dedicated platform to deploy them from does not.

SEA 1905 was cancelled before Australia resolved the same question.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue on 30 May 2026, the three AUKUS partners announced their first Pillar 2 signature project: a trilateral program for UUV payloads and enabling systems, usable across each partner's UUV fleet, with delivery from 2027. Mine countermeasures is explicitly listed among the mission sets.

This is real movement. After considerable criticism that Pillar 2 produced more statements than capability, UK Defence Secretary John Healey acknowledged as much: "For too long in AUKUS, we talked too much and delivered too little."

The question of which hull Australia operates those sensors following the last Huon-class minehunter being paid off remains unanswered and unfunded.

Procurement sequencing is the problem. Technology is not. And the thread connecting a PLAN mine inventory of 50,000 to 100,000 weapons to Australia’s ten priority ports runs directly through a capability gap that two consecutive National Defence Strategies chose not to name.

ACUA Ocean and the shore-side stack: what FleetMind, Lloyd’s Register Human Factors, and UK Workboat Code 3 compliance actually mean for autonomous vessel operations at scale.

Since you have been, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Mick

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For Rosie. † With love always.