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Australia needs a “credible armoury straight away” in response to the growing threat posed by China, says The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan.

“The new things that we’re buying, the frigates and the submarines, don’t begin to arrive until the mid 2030s, and they don't completely arrive until the 2050s,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.

“But what we have to understand is that, compared to China, we are a weak power, and they are a strong power.

“The way weak powers hurt strong powers is through what the boffins called asymmetric warfare.

“In other words, tens, hundreds, thousands of little weapons which we can afford to lose, like these new frigates, are going to cost $3 billion each, we’re only going to have a few of them, we’re never going to risk losing them, but with drones and missiles, you can swarm an enemy.

“We’ve thought of ourselves as a great first world technological power as a unit of the United States.

“We need to think of ourselves as an independent nation of 26 million, and how can we raise the cost to a potential aggressor, namely China.”