Japan’s security strategy

This special report demonstrates the extraordinary proactivity of Japan towards issues of regional order-building, security and defence policy, and military capability development and teases out the implications for Australia as a closely aligned partner.

The author collates and presents a wide range of disparate official source documentation and thematic analyses to render an appraisal of Japan’s security strategy in a comprehensive but digestible format. The report concludes that, while Japanese activity in the security sphere has been unprecedented and prolific, Canberra must also be aware of certain limitations in terms of resources, and political caveats to Japan becoming a ‘normal country’ or bona fide ‘great power’.

Canberra, too, must be a creative, practical policymaker if the full benefits of the deepening special strategic partnership with Japan are to contribute to a truly free and open Indo-Pacific.

Assessing the impact of CCP information operations related to Xinjiang

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using technology to enforce transnational digital repression and influence unwitting audiences beyond China’s territory. This includes using increasingly sophisticated online tactics to deny, distract from and deter revelations or claims of human rights abuses, including the arbitrary detention, mass sterilisation and cultural degradation of minorities in Xinjiang. Instead of improving its treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, the CCP is responding to critiques of its current actions against human rights by coordinating its state propaganda apparatus, security agencies and public relations industry to silence and shape Xinjiang narratives at home and abroad.

Central to the CCP’s efforts is the exploitation of US-based social media and content platforms. CCP online public diplomacy is bolstered by covert and coercive campaigns that impose costs and seek to constrain international entities—be they states, corporations or individuals—from offering evidence-based critiques of the party-state’s record on human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and other sensitive issues. This asymmetric access to US-based social media platforms allows the CCP to continue testing online tactics, measuring responses and improving its influence and interference capabilities, in both overt and covert ways, across a spectrum of topics.

The impact of these operations isn’t widely understood, and the international community has failed to adequately respond to the global challenges posed by the CCP’s rapidly evolving propaganda and disinformation operations. This report seeks to increase awareness about this problem based on publicly available information.

What’s the solution?

The exploitation of information operations and propaganda by Russia and China during Putin’s war on Ukraine demonstrates the importance of taking measures to reduce the power and impact of such activities before a crisis or military conflict is underway.1 This is a viable option, given both the success of the West in countering Russia’s false pretexts for instigating an invasion of Ukraine by revealing Russian plans,2 and the outstanding success of the Ukrainian Government’s communication efforts globally. This has undercut attempts by Putin to establish legitimacy in the conflict and has also pressured Beijing into moderating its international and material support for Moscow during the conflict. However, collective action was largely taken only after Russia’s invasion. The CCP has a different modus operandi and seeks to achieve its objectives without military force. It relies on other countries having high tolerance levels before those countries take action, which often means that the harmful impacts of information operations are occurring before any countermeasures are taken.

CCP information operations targeting Xinjiang narratives and human rights abuses should be countered now to mitigate the party’s global campaign of transnational repression and information warfare. Achieving that requires governments and civil society to work more closely with social media platforms and broadcasters to deter and expose propaganda organisations and operatives.

Governments must lead this policymaking process in coordination with allies and partners with shared interests. Economic sanctions regimes that target the perpetrators of serious human rights violations and abuses should be expanded to include the distributors of disinformation and foreign propaganda who silence, intimidate and continue the abuse of survivors and victims of human rights violations. Sanctions targeting propagandists and state media have already been used as an effective tool of statecraft. For example, the Australian Government,3 in coordination with other governments in the US, UK and Europe,4 has sanctioned Russian propagandists and state media for spreading disinformation and propaganda during Putin’s war. Sanctioning Chinese propagandists and state media for their repression of global free speech will curb the CCP’s disinformation and foreign propaganda prior to a conflict, undermine its capabilities during conflicts and deter future information campaigns.

CCP information operations are also evolving and changing. Governments should disrupt Chinese propaganda assets and identify strategic data sources—such as public opinion mining of US-based social media—that are being exploited to improve the party’s influence and interference capabilities. In addition, governments, civil society actors, think tanks and social media operators should create countermeasures and responses to CCP information operations and propaganda activities focusing on the discourse on human rights to blunt and deter malign CCP activity. This should include funding research exposing the Chinese foreign propaganda system, including public relations firms, cultural corporations and public opinion monitoring companies based inside and outside China.

Full Report

You can download the full report here.

  1. See Samantha Hoffman, Matthew Knight, China’s messaging on the Ukraine conflict, ASPI, Canberra, 23 May 2022. ↩︎
  2. Julian E Barnes, Helene Cooper, ‘US battles Putin by disclosing his next possible moves’, New York Times, 12 February 2022. ↩︎
  3. Marise Payne, ‘Further sanctions on Russia’, media statement, 8 March 2022. ↩︎
  4. ‘Treasury sanctions Russians bankrolling Putin and Russia-backed influence actors’, media release, US department of the Treasury, 3 March 2022. ↩︎

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist, Volume 5

The Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre’s latest report is a series of articles published in The Strategist over the last six months, building on previous volumes by identifying critical intersections of national security, nation-building and Australia’s north.

This issue, like previous volumes, includes a wide range of articles sourced from a diverse pool of expert contributors writing on topics as varied as biosecurity, infrastructure, critical communications, cyber-resilience, maritime infrastructure, foreign investment, space, and Indigenous knowledge-sharing. It also features a foreword by ASPI’s new Executive Director, Justin Bassi.

The 19 articles propose concrete, real-world actions for policy-makers to facilitate the development, prosperity and security of Australia’s north. The authors share a sense that those things that make the north unique – its vast space, low population density, specific geography, and harsh investment environment – are characteristics that can be leveraged, not disadvantages.

Australian views on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework

Australian officials surveyed for this research view the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) as an opportunity to bring more investment into the Indo-Pacific region, shape standards setting, form collective solutions to supply-chain risks, and influence the direction of clean energy infrastructure. The IPEF is viewed as a potentially innovative way to boost regional investment rather than as a mechanism to strengthen the usual substance of trade agreements, such as market access into the US.

While we note that the officials interviewed aren’t the ultimate decision-makers and that there’s a new government in Canberra with its own emerging priorities, this report offers insight into the potential opportunities for Australia to shape the framework.

Cultivating friendly forces: The Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in the Xinjiang Diaspora

This report is a part of a larger online project which can be found on the Xinjiang Data Project website.

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed well-documented and large-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other indigenous minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that amount to crimes against humanity. Through its complex united front system, the CCP is actively monitoring members of the diaspora, including Uyghurs, creating databases of actionable intelligence, and mobilising community organisations in the diaspora to counter international criticism of its repressive policies in Xinjiang while promoting its own policies and interests abroad. These organisations are powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad, and ultimately control the Chinese diaspora, but they’re also poorly understood.

These organisations purport to represent and speak on behalf of ‘Xinjiang’ and its indigenous peoples.

They subsume Uyghur and other minority cultures and identities under a nebulous yet hegemonic ‘Chineseness’, which is defined by and connected to the Han-dominated CCP. In reality, these organisations and their leaders play important roles in muting alternative and independent voices from the community while amplifying CCP messaging and spreading disinformation. They exploit the openness of democratic and multicultural countries while assisting the CCP and its proxies to surveil and even persecute members of the Xinjiang diaspora community or individuals who are critical of the CCP’s Xinjiang policies.

Like united front work more broadly, the activities of these groups and their links to the Chinese Government are often overlooked and can be difficult to parse. While human rights abuses in Xinjiang are being exposed internationally, the mechanisms and tactics developed by united front agencies to co-opt overseas Xinjiang-related community groups have gone largely unnoticed. Our research demonstrates how these groups can sow distrust and fear in the community, mislead politicians, journalists and the public, influence government policies, cloud our assessment of the situation in Xinjiang, and disguise the CCP’s interference in foreign countries.

What’s the solution?

Transparency is the best weapon at our disposal. The international community must expose and counter the CCP’s overseas influence and interference operations. In order to counteract Xinjiang-related united front work, we must shine a brighter light on community organisations that cooperate with the CCP to achieve its repressive political aims overseas; at the same time, we must safeguard the ability of citizens of all backgrounds to engage in public life free from outside interference.

Governments must first acknowledge the problem and then denounce the CCP’s interference operations publicly. They should work together to disrupt the CCP’s capacity to covertly intrude in sovereign countries and open societies, carry out transnational repression and cover up its human rights abuses in Xinjiang. They must strengthen countermeasures through intelligence work, law enforcement and legislative reform, and provide additional funding to analyse the CCP’s united front system while working closely with other countries to safeguard universal human rights in China and other parts of the world. Understanding the CCP’s united front system, tactics and methods is a crucial starting point.

Finally, we must increase the capacity of political figures and civil society organs to understand and resist interference by the CCP and other nefarious state and non-state actors and strengthen the ability of the policy sector, academia and the media to identify and call out foreign interference and misinformation. This is playing to the strengths of open societies in particular, but is also key to any state’s ability to exercise sovereignty in the face of corrosive CCP activities.

The Australian Defence Force and its future energy requirements

The global energy system is undergoing a rapid and enduring shift with inescapable implications for militaries, including the ADF. Electrification and the use of alternative liquid fuels are occurring at scale across the civilian economies. Despite that, fossil fuels, such as diesel and jet fuel, will be around for a long time to come, given their use in long-lived systems like air warfare destroyers, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 aircraft, M1A2 Abrams tanks, and in capabilities still in the design stage but planned to enter service beginning in the mid-2030s such as the Hunter-class frigates.

Australian supply of these fuels is provided by globally sourced crude oil flowing through a handful of East and Southeast Asian refineries. Supply arrangements for these critical commodities are likely to become more fraught, however. This is already occurring because of the fracturing of global supply chains and the drive for national resilience in many nations, driven by Covid-19, the return of coercive state power and, of course, Putin’s war in Ukraine. Australia’s dependence on imports for liquid-fuel security, at least as it pertains to the ADF, extends well beyond insufficient reserves and refineries.

The government and Defence must recognise this long-term risk to a fundamental input to our military capability and start acting to mitigate it for the future.

The cost of Defence ASPI defence budget brief 2022–2023

The cost of Defence ASPI defence budget brief 2022–2023

One hundred & thirty-three million, one hundred & ninety-one thousand, seven hundred & eighty dollars & eighty-two cents per day.

Executive summary

Shortly before the recent election, the previous government released a defence budget that continued its record of delivering the funding it promised in the 2016 Defence White Paper (DWP) and subsequent 2020 Defence Strategic Update (DSU).

This year, the consolidated defence funding line (including both the Department of Defence and the Australian Signals Directorate) is $48.6 billion, which is 2.11% of GDP based on the Budget papers’ estimates of GDP. That funding represents a very substantial nominal growth of 7.4%. It’s the 10th straight year of real growth, but with inflation running hot, it’s hard to determine a precise percentage; we’ve estimated it at 3.8% based on the Budget papers, but, if inflation stays around 5%, the real growth figure will be less. That will hurt Defence. Just as inflation eats into Australian families’ budgets, it’s eroding Defence’s buying power.

Despite disruptions to supply chains, Defence and its industry partners have achieved significant increases in acquisition spending. While Defence may have fallen short of its acquisition spending target in 2021-22, it still achieved a $2.1 billion increase on the previous year, which was itself a $1.5 billion increase. That’s translating into growing local spending, both in absolute terms and in relative terms compared to overseas spending. We’ve written previously that the Australian defence industry will need to eat a very large elephant as Defence’s acquisition and sustainment budgets grow.

So far, it’s demonstrating that it has the appetite to do that.

Capability continues to be delivered across all domains. There’s no doubt that the ADF is getting better. But we’re seeing the realisation of risks inherent in an acquisition program built around megaprojects. Such projects take years or decades to design and deliver, while spending huge sums for little benefit in the short term. When they encounter problems, those problems are big. The Attack-class submarine program has cost over $4 billion and delivered nothing. The Hunter frigate program continues to experience delays and won’t get a vessel into service for over a decade. The Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicle project has spent close to $2 billion, but only 25 training vehicles have been delivered. While the nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) program has the potential to deliver a huge step-up in undersea warfare capability, it’s the mother of all megaprojects and has a risk profile to match. As the megaprojects ramp up (with over $20 billion in infantry fighting vehicles potentially added to the list of committed funds), their cash flow requirement will increase, tying the government’s hands at a time of rapidly growing strategic uncertainty and evaporating warning time.

The new government will have some significant issues to address. Perhaps the biggest one is the size of the defence budget. The incoming government has said that it supports the current level of funding. While that continues to grow in real terms, it was originally developed in 2015 and hasn’t changed since then, despite the significant worsening of our strategic circumstances. Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that war has not gone away and remains a tool of authoritarian states. China’s influence in our near region is growing and could result in a permanent Chinese military presence. The US is looking to its allies and partners to do more, as they must.

As always, the government will need to adjudicate between competing priorities for funding. At a time when Australians are dealing with the rising cost of living, spikes in energy prices and the grinding pressure of housing affordability, it may be tempting to reduce defence spending in the face of competing budget priorities. However, the government should be aware of the results of doing so. The budget is already full, with no pots of unallocated cash. Any short-term windfall delivered by the cancellation of the Attack-class submarine is already gone-as the cancellation of the SkyGuardian armed uncrewed air vehicle to help deliver a $9.9 billion offset for the REDSPICE cyber program reveals. So even holding the defence budget strictly at 2% of GDP will result in substantial, multibillion-dollar reductions to the DSU funding line, inevitably leading to cuts in capability.

Furthermore, it’s not clear that the DSU funding line is even sufficient to deliver the current investment plan. That program includes platforms far larger or more numerous than those they’re replacing as well as entirely new capabilities, all requiring a much larger workforce. Many capabilities have ended up costing more than was originally budgeted for in Defence’s investment plan. The SSN program will cost significantly more than the Attack class; it’s anybody’s guess how much more. So the first order of business should be for the government to understand the affordability of the current plan.

Then it will need to assure itself that the planned force structure is aligned with what the government thinks the ADF should be doing. It’s easy to make a case for the tactical utility of any capability, but how does it fit in the overall strategy? The government will need to make decisions about which sovereign capabilities it needs to hold and where it can rely on allies and partners. And the nub of our current security challenge is that the former are growing while the latter are shrinking.

A further challenge that the government will need to consider is Defence’s people problem. The number of contractors in Defence’s external workforce continues to grow at significant cost, but Defence can’t deliver its ambitious capability program without them. Is that growth the best option available to Defence or simply the only one? Moreover, the investment program will require 20,000 more uniformed personnel to operate the capabilities it’s acquiring. With the ADF averaging net annual growth of only 300, is that target attainable? And, if it’s not, is the future force structure viable?

In these testing times, the government needs to seize every opportunity available to it to increase capability rapidly, even if that means overruling Defence’s long-term vision for the future force. That means doing more with what we’re already getting, such as increasing the lethality of the offshore patrol vessels that are soon to enter service.

There are encouraging signs that Defence is engaging more actively with ‘the small, the smart and the many’; that is, cheaper, disposable, highly autonomous systems that can be produced rapidly by Australian industry. Investing more heavily in such systems is a crucial hedging strategy against the risk inherent in the megaprojects; plus, such systems will figure heavily in future warfare, whatever may become of the megaprojects.

Similarly, the new AUKUS partnership’s advanced technologies programs and the sovereign guided weapons enterprise offer the prospect of delivering meaningful capability soon. Yet we’re two years into the guided weapons enterprise and still have heard nothing about which weapons will be produced and how it will be done. We can’t apply the kinds of timelines and processes inherent in the megaprojects to these lines of effort.

Overall, the government has its work cut out for it. Whatever path it chooses, it will need to bring the Australian public along on the journey. To do that, the government will need to reset the conversation about the defence budget and how it’s spent. That will require a commitment to transparency, accountability and sharing information. That means accepting the risk that bad news will get out along with the good, but an informed public is fundamental to democracy.

Countering the Hydra: A proposal for an Indo-Pacific hybrid threat centre

What’s the problem?

Enabled by digital technologies and fuelled by geopolitical competition, hybrid threats in the Indo-Pacific are increasing in breadth, application and intensity. Hybrid threats are a mix of military, non-military, covert and overt activities by state and non-state actors that occur below the line of conventional warfare. The consequences for individual nations include weakened institutions, disrupted social systems and economies, and greater vulnerability to coercion—especially from revisionist powers such as China.

But the consequences of increased hybrid activity in the Indo-Pacific reach well beyond individual nations. The Indo-Pacific hosts a wide variety of political systems and interests, with multiple centres of influence, multiple points of tension and an increasingly belligerent authoritarian power. It lacks the regional institutions and practised behaviours to help ensure ongoing security and stability. And, because of its position as a critical centre of global economic and social dynamism, instability in the Indo-Pacific, whether through or triggered by hybrid threats, has global ramifications.

Because hybrid threats fall outside the conventional frameworks of the application of state power and use non-traditional tools to achieve their effects, governments have often struggled to identify the activity, articulate the threat and formulate responses. Timeliness and specificity are problematic: hybrid threats evolve, are often embedded or hidden within normal business and operations, and may leverage or amplify other, more traditional forms of coercion.

More often than not, hybrid threat activity is targeted towards the erosion of national capability and trust and the disruption of decision-making by governments—all of which reduce national and regional resilience that would improve security and stability in the region.

What’s the solution?

There’s no silver-bullet solution to hybrid threats; nor are governments readily able to draw on traditional means of managing national defence or regional security against such threats in the Indo-Pacific.

Because of the ubiquity of digital technologies, the ever-broadening application of tools and practices in an increasing number of domains, it’s evident that policymakers need better and more timely information, the opportunity to share information and insights in a trusted forum and models of how hybrid threats work (we provide one here). Exchange of information and good practice is also needed to help counter the amorphous, evolving and adaptive nature of hybrid threats.

We propose the establishment of an Indo-Pacific Hybrid Threat Centre (HTC, or the centre) as a means of building broader situational awareness on hybrid threats across the region.1 Through research and analysis, engagement, information sharing and capacity building, such a centre would function as a confidence-building measure and contribute to regional stability and the security of individual nations.

While modelled on the existing NATO–EU Hybrid Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Finland, the centre would need to reflect the differences between the European and Indo-Pacific security environments. Most notably, that includes the lack of pan-regional Indo-Pacific security institutions and practice that the centre could use. There are also differences in the nature and priorities assigned to threats by different countries: the maritime domain has more influence in the Indo-Pacific than in Europe, many countries in the region face ongoing insurgencies, and there’s much less adherence to, or even interest in, democratic norms and values.

That will inevitably shape the placement, funding, and operations of an Indo-Pacific HTC. A decentralised model facilitating outreach across the region would assist regional buy-in. Partnership arrangements with technology companies would provide technical insight and support. Long-term commitments will be needed to realise the benefits of the centre as a confidence-building measure. The Quad countries are well positioned to provide such long-term commitments, while additional support could come from countries with experience and expertise in hybrid threats, particularly EU countries and the UK.

As with the NATO–EU Hybrid CoE, independence and integrity are paramount. That implies the positioning of the Indo-Pacific HTC core in a strong democracy; better still would be the legislative protection of its operations and data. Accordingly, we propose scoping work to establish policy approval, legislative protection and funding arrangements and to seed initial research capability and networks.

Introduction

Hybrid threats are a mix of military and non-military, covert and overt activities by state and non-state actors that occur below the line of conventional warfare. Their purpose is to blur the lines between war and peace, destabilise societies and governments and sow doubt and confusion among populations and decision-makers. They deliberately target democratic systems and state vulnerabilities, often leveraging legitimate processes for inimical ends, and typically aim to stay below the threshold of detection, attribution and retaliation.2 They’re the same activities that the Australian Government attributes to the ‘grey zone’, involving ‘military and non-military forms of assertiveness and coercion aimed at achieving strategic goals without provoking conflict.’3

Hybrid threats are increasingly of concern to governments as they grapple with the effects of digital technologies, Covid-19 and an increasingly tense geopolitical environment. Ambiguous, evolving, at the intersection of society, commerce and security, and transnational in character, hybrid threats challenge and undercut ‘normal’ conceptions of security. Unmet, they stoke division and anxiety in societies and states. They threaten to erode national security, sovereignty and societal resilience, leaving nations and their people vulnerable to coercion, particularly by authoritarian states and criminal elements.

The immediate targets of motivated hybrid activity are typically non-traditional, in the sense that government security apparatuses aren’t expected to manage and repulse them. Hybrid activity takes advantage of other, easier targets and means of generating confusion and disruption at the nation-state level: individuals may be targeted for repression or assassination; fishing vessels harassed; intellectual property stolen; commercial advantage pillaged; researchers and journalists intimidated; ethnic communities hijacked; and elites co-opted for corrupt ends.

The Indo-Pacific region is particularly vulnerable. For example, it lacks the more practised security frameworks, cooperative mechanisms and understandings present in Europe. There’s little shared awareness and understanding of the nature and consequences of hybrid threats. The region is also especially economically and demographically dynamic and socially diverse, featuring a number of competing political systems and institutions.

That offers both challenge and opportunity. In this paper, we consider the nature of hybrid threats, explore the threat landscape in the Indo-Pacific, turn our attention to the potential ‘fit’ of an Indo-Pacific HTC and make recommendations for the way forward.

A number of the thoughts and insights incorporated in this paper emerged during ASPI’s consultations with governments, businesses and civil society groups in the Indo-Pacific, as well as in Europe and the UK. We thank those respondents for their time and insights.

  1. Danielle Cave, Jacob Wallis, ‘Why the Indo-Pacific needs its own hybrid threats centre’, The Strategist, 15 December 2021. ↩︎
  2. See NATO’s definition, online, and the Hybrid Centre of Excellence’s definition. ↩︎
  3. Defence Department, Defence Strategic Update, Australian Government, 2020, 5. ↩︎

China’s messaging on the Ukraine conflict

In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, social media posts by Chinese diplomats on US platforms almost exclusively blamed the US, NATO and the West for the conflict. Chinese diplomats amplified Russian disinformation about US biological weapon labs in Ukraine, linking this narrative with conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19. Chinese state media mirrored these narratives, as well as replicating the Kremlin’s language describing the invasion as a ‘special military operation’.

ASPI found that China’s diplomatic messaging was distributed in multiple languages, with its framing tailored to different regions. In the early stage of the conflict, tweets about Ukraine by Chinese diplomats performed better than unrelated content, particularly when the content attacked or blamed the West. ASPI’s research suggests that, in terms of its international facing propaganda, the Russia–Ukraine conflict initially offered the party-state’s international-facing propaganda system an opportunity to reassert enduring preoccupations that the Chinese Communist Party perceives as fundamental to its political security.

The transnational element of a ‘domestic’ problem: Policy solutions to countering right-wing violent extremism in Australia

The rise of right-wing violent extremist (RWE) ideas bursts to the forefront of public attention in flashes of violence. Shootings and vehicular attacks perpetrated by individuals motivated by hateful views stun the public. They have also sharpened government attention to and galvanised action on addressing such violence.

These incidents of violence and these disturbing trends call for renewed vigilance in confronting RWE, which ASIO has since classified as ‘ideologically motivated violent extremism’ (IMVE), in Australia’s security agencies’ policy and law enforcement responses. As governments respond to IMVE, it is important to nuance how they conceptualise the challenges posed by RWE and, therefore, scope their solutions.

This report looks at four case studies, qualitative interviews, and expert literature to highlight important transnational dimensions of RWE, as well as expand the way governments understand the RWE threat and craft policy responses to it.

The result shows a clear need for governments to take a broader lens when understanding and responding to RWE. While governments may conventionally see terrorism in ‘domestic’ versus ‘international’ terms, RWE attackers and their sources and legacies of inspiration are not bound by national borders. Efforts to address RWE, then, should take into account these transnational dimensions while examining the challenge at hand and developing and implementing solutions.

The report’s recommendations point to early steps Australia can take to improve international collaboration and coordination on countering RWE. Our approaches and solutions must recognise this threat to democracy and include efforts to bolster resilience in democratic institutions and processes. Public trust and confidence in these institutions and processes is a critical element of this resilience to mis/disinformation broadly, and the violent extremism it enables. This report shows that it’s not only important for governments to take RWE seriously, it matters how governments do so.