The suggestion that the first 3 GPFs be acquired "as-is" off the foreign production line and "Australianise" them when they go into a major refit or MLU is great for the politicians as it makes them seem like they are being active in increasing the number of warship hulls in the RAN.
This suggestion is probably the worst combination of options, compared with doing nothing (i.e. introducing new technology streams into service) or doing the integration before the vessels are built. Doing the "Australianisation" at the major refit or MLU means that the issues associated with the ILS are compressed into a 10-15 years period rather than the 25 years through life. The change at MLU then throws additional load onto the existing support systems for the "Australian" systems, with commensurately less time to resolve before EoL.
But politicians are not renowned for their willingness to listen to advice which threatens their very short term political view or challenges their idealogical stand, however misguided it is in reality.
We probably won't know until the ships hit the water what is exactly changed and modified and what isn't.
Personally I don't think putting Saab 9LV consoles are deal breakers, depending on how much and how ambitious, they could be fitted to the first ships built in Japan. They could be filed under English language signage. The bigger issue is probably 9LV itself not built for the crewing and automation of the ship itself. I guess it depends how much of the combat system has been integrated with the rest of the ships systems on the baseline Mogami. So you could have 9LV and consoles fitted, but it doesn't mean anything to the crew, or makes their lives harder.
CEAFAR2 probably is at least in the initial builds, a bridge too far. But we probably need to ask ourselves, what do we need from our radars, do we need to turf the entire existing setup or just see if we can fit a few bits here and their.
On the CMS itself, the space itself is evolving, maybe both Japan and Australia end up fitting Aegis and their local consoles, Japan and Korea were the initial inspiration for that kind of fit out on the Hobart to handle local integration issues.
Given that we are building them here, we will probably have decent support for them, eventually. Not going through normal process to do that will be interesting. Like does Mitsubishi work with existing SME to do that, or does Mitsubishi just setup its own entity and do everything, basically as a dropship warehouse locally, shipping everything from Japan. Is that what we mean as sovereignty.
Which again gets back to building frigates in WA. Never been done. Plenty of risk there. Perth being the most remote city on the planet, trying to support a build program bigger than anything in say Germany or the UK. How many SME are in Perth to support that. How many are prepared to jump onto that bandwagon when we have seen the attack disaster which burned a huge number, and the Hunter numbers now apparently kind of cut. The bigger risk is government actually committing to the project and ensuring numbers actually come through.
So really the biggest risk is the politicans. Both for as you mentioned their inability to listen, or see the world how it actually is rather than their ideological belief, and also because they are flightily and fickle things, and unreliable even if they are capable and listening.
