From board room to situation room. Why corporate security is national security

Corporations are making valiant efforts to protect their assets and capabilities from attacks in the physical and cyber environments. But such attacks are not just matters of commercial concern to companies and their shareholders. They have significant potential to weaken national resilience.

There exists a void between business and national security agencies when it comes to understanding each other’s capabilities and limitations. There are already in place some mechanisms, established by both the Australian government and state governments, for security agencies to “hook up” with business. But the structures are fragmented between and within government departments and agencies and are often based on sector-specific silos.

Developing a secure and resilient nation can only be ensured through mutual obligation whereby both government and business understand and are committed to developing and maintaining the measures required to safeguard Australia. The threats we face don’t recognise the walls that exist between Australian businesses and national security agencies. To safeguard Australia, we need to put more doors in those walls. Today, corporate security is national security.

The post-caliphate Salafi-jihadi environment

In 2019, the global Salafi-jihadi architecture is very different from the one that emerged in September 2001, when transnational terrorism burst on to the international scene, or July 2014, when ISIL controlled more than 34,000 square miles in Syria and Iraq and thousands of young men and women were flocking to be part of its ‘caliphate’.

Many of the leaders of the Salafi-jihadi movement are gone. Some, like Osama bin Laden and Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, have been killed, and many others have been captured or are in hiding. And yet, despite having no territory and having lost many of their leaders, both al-Qaeda and ISIL continue to pose a threat to the maintenance of international peace and security. In fact, one could argue that they pose more of a threat today, as the structure of the groups has moved from integrated to fragmented, making command and control more tenuous.

In 2018, there were at least 66 Salafi-Jihadi groups around the world, the same number as in 2016 and three times as many as there were in 2001. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has pointed out that in 2018 there were at least 218,000 Salafi-jihadis and allied fighters around the world—a 270% increase.1 These figures indicate that, despite 18 years of combat and the spending of trillions of dollars, we’re nowhere near ending the jihadist threat, as the ideology continues to resonate with people.

This Strategic Insight reviews the post-caliphate Salafi-jihadi environment, focusing on two issues: the franchising strategy of al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the evolving threat of online messaging. I highlight a change in the threat posed by Salafi-jihadis to Australia; it’s now less a ‘top-down’ threat than a ‘bottom-up’ one and emanates from homegrown individuals whose links with and understanding of Salafist-jihadism are minimal. Consequently, I offer three sets of recommendations for how Australia’s official counterterrorism community should change its strategies.

Evolution of the protection of civilians in UN peacekeeping

This year marks twenty years since the Security Council added the ‘protection of civilians in armed conflict’ to its agenda and authorised the first UN peacekeeping mission to explicitly protect civilians. Yet efforts to carry forward that mandate in the field over the last two decades have been mixed. While there is consensus among the member states within the UN that peacekeeping missions should protect, there remain different views among the various stakeholders on the limits and expectations of peacekeepers when it comes to implementing this mandate. And the consequences for the civilians on the ground—which expect protection from the UN—can be dire.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has called upon member states ‘to find consensus around the language and implications of peacekeeping tasks’ on the protection of civilians. This Special Report includes contributions from leading experts in the field examining some of the contemporary challenges facing UN peacekeeping missions and the actions that can be taken by member states to strengthen consensus on some issues of contention, including the role of the Security Council, managing host state consent, addressing performance and accountability, and identifying the potential limits of UN peacekeeping.

Additionally, the report explores the evolution in discussions taking place over the last decade, identifying some of the highlights and findings emerging from a series of ten workshops co-hosted by the Permanent Missions of Australia and Uruguay to the United Nations as one example of member state engagement on the issue.

With contributions from Richard Gowan, Aditi Gorur, Victoria K Holt and Lisa Sharland, this new report by ASPI’s International Program draws together analysis on the challenges faced by UN peacekeeping missions in their efforts to protect civilians over the last two decades, while offering some reflections on a way forward.

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist

North of 26° south and the security of Australia’, a new report by ASPI’s The North and Australia’s Security Program, presents a series of articles by a range of trusted and up and coming authors exploring the continued importance of Northern Australia to national security and defence strategy.

The last time real attention was paid to what our regional environment means for defence in the north of Australia was in Paul Dibb’s 1986 Review of Defence Capabilities and the 1987 Defence White Paper. Following that work, the Australian government invested billions of dollars in bases and bare base infrastructure in the north, with a real focus on the Northern Territory.

The strategic environment since then has changed dramatically.

First, regional nations continue to get richer and more capable, including in their ability to project military power within and beyond their own territories—meaning that near-region partners like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are becoming more important in Australia’s security and diplomacy.

Second, great-power competition and potential conflict have returned to the forefront of world affairs. China and the US are now actively engaged in deep strategic competition and arm-wrestling over political, economic and strategic relationships and technological dominance across our Indo-Pacific region.

There are credible prospects of a major military conflict between these great powers over the next couple of decades, which, if it happens, will most likely spill beyond a bilateral conflict into a wider regional war.

Northern Australia’s dispersed critical infrastructure and primary resources remain vulnerable to traditional and non-traditional national security threats. Modern weapon systems put these resources within striking distance of conventional weapons, and they’re also susceptible to hybrid warfare strategies like that used by Russia in Ukraine.

While Australia has a long-term defence capability plan, we need to continue to test our assumptions about the defence of northern Australia and the north’s significance to national security. On paper, government has made a strong declaratory commitment to northern Australia. But there is evidence of a widening gap between declaratory policy and Defence’s activities in the North.

This report provides much needed contemporary analysis of the criticality of the North to Australia’s national security and defence.