Published by The New Zealand Initiative (Wellington), 14 July 2026
Foreword to John Howard’s research note Adrift – A Trading Nation, an Ageing Navy and the 2027 Frigate Decision
I asked Major General (Retd) John Howard, our Senior Fellow, to write a paper answering a question that sounds almost too simple for a man who spent more than four decades in uniform: what is a frigate?
I asked because my impression is that the basics are poorly understood. Much of the public, and perhaps some of our politicians, would struggle to say what such a ship does, why a small country should own one or why we should pay for it when every defence dollar competes with hospitals, schools and roads.
Those questions can no longer wait. Cabinet must decide by 2027 whether to replace HMNZS Te Kaha and HMNZS Te Mana, and with what. Alongside the 2025 Defence Capability Plan, the Government has committed to lifting defence spending to two percent of GDP within eight years, a level not sustained since the early 1990s. Yet the public debate on this decision has barely begun.
John’s answer is larger than the ship. A frigate, he shows, is the instrument through which a maritime trading nation exercises sea power. For a country that sends 99 percent of its trade by volume across the ocean and holds the fourth largest exclusive economic zone in the world, sea power is no abstraction. It is the precondition of our prosperity.
So this paper was never really about buying a warship. It is about what New Zealand wants its Navy, and its wider defence force, to be able to do. Ships, helicopters, drones, docks and the people who operate them form one system, and the debate we need is about capabilities across domains, not hardware in isolation.
Nor is the choice before Cabinet the binary one sometimes presented in budget rounds, defence against health or education. A nation that cannot help secure the sea lanes carrying its export income will eventually find it has less to spend on everything else.
As a German, I have watched my native country demonstrate how not to do it. In June, Berlin cancelled its largest warship programme since 1945, writing off billions after years of gold-plated requirements and bureaucratic drift. New Zealand could never fail on that scale, but neither can it afford to fail at all. As John puts it, capability must arrive at the speed of relevance.
He is also fond of reminding me that “our world is not what you hope it will be”. The strategic environment facing New Zealand is more volatile, ambiguous and uncertain than at any point since the Second World War, and hoping otherwise is not a policy.
I thank John for this research note, and I have already asked him for more. His next task is to describe what good would look like if the Minister, the Chief of Defence Force and the Secretary of Defence seize the opportunity the Defence Capability Plan has created, and what it will cost us if they do not.
New Zealand has not debated its defence seriously in decades. This paper is our contribution to that debate, and I invite you to join it.
