Ah, Paul Dibb. Well, he was right, in a way. He was part of the Continental Defence versus the Forward Defence schools of thinking which existed in the 1970s. Forward Defence had failed dismally, in Vietnam. So it was the turn of the Continental Defence boys as represented by Dibb. The problem was the ADF didn't really have anybody to defend Australia against. We didn't want to upset the Indonesians, so we didn't name them in the 1986 Dibb Report or the following White Paper that grew out of it. So, it was a bit hard for the ADF to frame it's strategy other than "lets defend Australia and not interfere in anybody else's affairs". That managed to upset the Americans and then the Indonesians invaded East Timor. I remember writing a Masters paper on the Dibb Report and I interviewed the Indonesian Defence Attache and he was at a loss why everybody in Australia was so frightened of Jakarta. Suharto looked more northwards, than southwards and saw Timor as an aberration forced on him by the Fretlin victory in the Timorese civil war. What everybody appeared to have forgotten was that Suharto had come to power by destroying the Indonesian Communist Coup in 1965 and he was committed to stopping Communism. Fretelin was a hard-left Communist movement, so it represented a danger to Indonesian unity, so it had to be snuffed out. Unfortunate but that was the thinking at the time. Some good thinks, such as the Collins and ANZAC classes came out of the Dibb Report. Some bad things, which saw the Army lose it's way. I agree that Dibb needs to change his views now that the world has moved on, though.
The submarine replacement project preceded the Dibb report by more than a decade and the ANZAC project was a dumbed down version of the required River Class DE / frigate replacement, eight glorified OPVs / Light Frigates instead of six high end ASW frigates. Even the proposed increase in frigate numbers was actually a follow on from the decision not to replace the RANs sole remaining aircraft carrier and had originally been intended to be six to ten Australian built Oliver Hazard Perry class FFGs, subsequently cut to only two ships intended primarily to rebuild the lost naval shipbuilding capability.
Dibbs contribution was to see the RAN acquire eight patrol frigates fitted for but not with the minimum required systems to permit them to operate in even medium threat environments instead of acquiring a similar or slightly smaller number of Type 23s, additional FFG-7s, M Class or even Type 123s. Defence cuts that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that both the planned replacements for the Perth Class DDGs and original four Adelaide Class frigates, an integral part of the Dibb report, was cancelled and the proposed modernisation of the two Australian built AFP FFGs was expanded to include the four US built ships, while the only sensible part of the report, the twelve or so missile armed, helicopter equipped corvettes, were cancelled.
Like Sprey Dibb occasionally pops up and whinges that the ANZACs were to large and too capable for the requirement, when ironically they actually proved too small to be upgraded as required, making them part of the capability decline rather than the planned increase. For example imagine a larger Type 23 or Type 123 with the enhanced ASMD upgrades that the ANZACs received, imagine an Ocean type LPH instead of Bill and Ben, Dibb was wrong and when you read the actual intention behind the enhanced fleet it had little to do with interdicting Indonesia and more to do with controlling choke points, even to keep them open rather than closing them.
This is way off topic now and I think I will get back to visualising a bash of the Dragon 1/144 Tonka F3s, GR1s, F/A-18Es and F-14Ds I have sitting in my stash into some aircraft that would fit an F-16less world quite well. A Tornado based naval fighter attack aircraft, maybe a 1970s or 80s F/A-14 and a single seat Tonka of some sort.