Australia’s north and space

This report examines opportunities for the development of sovereign space capability in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia. Given that those northern jurisdictions are closer to the equator, there’s a natural focus in the report on the potential opportunities offered by sovereign space launch, particularly in the Northern Territory and Queensland. However, I also consider the potential for other aspects of space besides launch, including space domain awareness, the establishment of satellite ground stations, and space industry. I explore the potential for the co-location of space industry—domestic and international—within or close to launch sites, which would result in the development of ‘space hubs’ in strategic locations in Australia.

Benefits are gained by situating space-launch sites as close to the equator as possible, and two sites—Nhulunbuy near Gove in the Northern Territory and Abbot Point near Bowen in Queensland—are now under development. The closer a launch site is to the equator, the greater the benefit in terms of reduced cost per kilogram of payload to orbit, due to velocity gained by a rocket from the Earth’s rotation.

The report then explores the transformation of Australia’s space sector that’s occurred within the past decade, from one solely dependent on foreign-provided satellite services and locally developed ground-segment capabilities, including for space domain awareness, to the growth of sovereign space industry and the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018. I note that, since the establishment of the agency, Australia’s commercial space sector has expanded rapidly, but now faces headwinds, with the recent cancellation of the National Space Mission for Earth Observation being a serious blow to Australia’s space industry. The Australian space industry sector must now fight to sustain funding. In this report, I argue that the best way to achieve success is to emphasise sovereign launch as a focus for Australian space activities and to reinforce the potential opportunities offered by the north, including for defence and national-security requirements in space.

Getting regulation right: approaches to improving Australia’s cybersecurity

What’s the problem?

As well as having a global impact, Cybersecurity is one of the most significant issues affecting Australia’s economy and national security. On the one hand, poor cybersecurity presents a risk to the interconnected digital systems on which we increasingly rely; on the other hand, well-managed cybersecurity provides an opportunity to build trust and advantage by accelerating digital transformation. Cyber threats can originate from a diverse range of sources and require a diverse set of actions to effectively mitigate them. However, a common theme is that much better cyber risk management is needed to address this critical threat; the current operation of the free market isn’t consistently driving all of the required behaviours or actions.

Regulation can provide a powerful mechanism to modify incentives and change behaviours. However, securing cyberspace depends on the intersection of many factors—technical, social and economic. Current regulations are a patchwork of general, cyber-specific and sector-specific measures with a lack of cohesion that causes overlaps and gaps. That makes the environment complex, which means that finding the right approach that will truly improve overall security and minimise unwanted side effects is difficult. It’s necessary to analyse the interconnected factors that determine the net effectiveness of cybersecurity regulations.

Furthermore, the pace of technological change is so fast today that, even if regulation is successful when first implemented, it needs to be appropriately futureproofed to avoid becoming irrelevant after even a few months. Recent rapid developments in artificial intelligence are an example of the risks here that will need to be anticipated in any changes to the regulatory regimes.

What’s the solution?

Regulatory interventions have an important role to play as one part of a strategy to uplift Australia’s cybersecurity, if done in the right way. This paper presents a framework for the government to make appropriate decisions about whether and how to regulate. That must start with defining which aspect of the cybersecurity challenge it seeks to address and the specific intended long-term impact. In cybersecurity, the most appropriate metrics or measures that regulation seeks to influence should, where possible, be risk-based, rather than specific technical measures. This is because the actual technical measures required are dependent on the individual context of each situation, will change over time, and are effective only when combined with people and process measures. The impact of the interventions on those metrics needs to be readily measurable in order to enable reliable enforcement at acceptable cost—both direct financial cost and indirect opportunity costs.

There’s often a focus on regulation to compel entities to do or not do something. However, compulsion is only one form of regulation, and others, such as facilitation or encouragement, should be considered first, treating compulsion as only one possible approach, which should used carefully and strategically.

Detailed implementation of cybersecurity regulations should use a co-design process with the relevant stakeholders, who will bring perspectives, experiences and knowledge that government alone does not have. It should also draw upon relevant experience of international partners, not only to benefit from lessons learned, but also to minimise the compliance burden for global companies and operators. Finally, in recognising the complexity of the problem, an iterative approach that measures impact and adjusts approaches to enhance effectiveness, incorporate lessons learned and absorb technological advances needs to be planned from the outset.

Incels in Australia: The ideology, the threat, and a way forward

This report explores the phenomenon of ‘incels’—involuntary celibates—and the misogynistic ideology that underpins a subset of this global community of men that has become a thriving Internet subculture. It examines how online spaces, from popular social media sites to dedicated incel forums, are providing a platform for not just the expansion of misogynistic views but gender-based violent extremism.

It raises key questions regarding Australian efforts to counter misogynistic ideologies within our nation. If there’s a continuum that has sexist, but lawful, views on gender at one end and gendered hate speech at the other, at what point does misogynistic ideology tip into acts of gendered violence? What’s needed to prevent misogynistic ideologies from becoming violent? And how do we, as a society, avoid the epidemic levels of violence against women in Australia?

This report doesn’t intend to provide answers to all of those questions. It does, however, seek to make an important contribution to public discourse about the increasing trend in misogynistic ideology through examination of a particularly violent community of misogynists, and proposes a range of policy options for consideration to tackle the threat that misogynistic ideology poses to Australia.

This report makes six recommendations designed to reduce and, where possible, prevent the risk of future occurrence of incel and similar violence in Australia. The recommendations include greater awareness raising and policy recognition that incel violence can be an ideological form of issue-motivated extremism which would provide certainty that incels could formally fall within the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—in addition to law-enforcement agencies—and would encourage tailored education programs focused on engaging young males at risk from indoctrination in this extreme subculture (along with their parents).

An inflection point for Australian intelligence: Revisiting the 2004 Flood Report

The 2003 Iraq war, and more particularly intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, led to a broad-ranging inquiry into Australian intelligence conducted by Philip Flood AO. Flood’s July 2004 report has proven an inflection point between the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence and forcefully advocated for sovereign intelligence capability. The scope of his review extended beyond more than ‘recent intelligence lessons’ – that is, Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands – to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability within the AIC (including priority setting), ‘division of labour’ between AIC agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for the Office of National Assessments – ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the L’Estrange-Merchant review of 2017.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across the AIC. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of 2023 and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

In addition, the Flood Report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today – including the vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence for policy purposes, the central importance of the intelligence community’s people (including training, career management, recruitment and language proficiency), intelligence distribution (including avoiding overloading time-poor customers), the need to maximise collaborative opportunities between agencies, and how best to leverage intelligence relationships (including broadening relations beyond traditional allied partners).

De-risking authoritarian AI

A balanced approach to protecting our digital ecosystems

What’s the problem?

Artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled systems make many invisible decisions affecting our health, safety and wealth. They shape what we see, think, feel and choose, they calculate our access to financial benefits as well as our transgressions, and now they can generate complex text, images and code just as a human can, but much faster.

So it’s unsurprising that moves are afoot across democracies to regulate AI’s impact on our individual rights and economic security, notably in the European Union (EU).

But, if we’re wary about AI, we should be even more circumspect about AI-enabled products and services from authoritarian countries that share neither our values nor our interests. And, for the foreseeable future, that means the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—a revisionist authoritarian power demonstrably hostile to democracy and the rules-based international order, which routinely uses AI to strengthen its own political and social stability at the expense of individual human rights. In contrast to other authoritarian countries such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, China is a technology superpower with global capacity and ambitions and is a major exporter of effective, cost-competitive AI-enabled technology into democracies.

In a technology-enabled world, the threats come at us ‘at a pace, scale and reach that is unprecedented’.1 And, if our reliance on AI is also without precedent, so too is the opportunity—via the magic of the internet and software updates—for remote, large-scale foreign interference, espionage and sabotage through AI-enabled industrial and consumer goods and services inside democracies’ digital ecosystems. AI systems are embedded in our homes, workplaces and essential services. More and more, we trust them to operate as advertised, always be there for us and keep our secrets.

Notwithstanding the honourable intentions of individual vendors of Chinese AI-enabled products and services, they’re subject to direction from PRC security and intelligence agencies, so we in the democracies need to ask ourselves: against the background of growing strategic competition with China, how much risk are we willing to bear?

We should worry about three kinds of Chinese AI-enabled technology:

  1. products and services (often physical infrastructure), where PRC ownership exposes democracies to risks of espionage (notably surveillance and data theft) and sabotage (disruption and denial of products and services)
  2. AI-enabled technology that facilitates foreign interference (malign covert influence on behalf of a foreign power), the most pervasive example being TikTok
  3. ‘Large language model AI’ and other emerging generative AI systems—a future threat that we need to start thinking about now.

While we should address the risks in all three areas, this report focuses more on the first category (and indeed looks at TikTok through the prism of the espionage and sabotage risks that such an app poses).

The underlying dynamic with Chinese AI-enabled products and services is the same as that which prompted concern over Chinese 5G vendors: the PRC Government has the capability to compel its companies to follow its directions, it has the opportunity afforded by the presence of Chinese AI-enabled products and services in our digital ecosystems, and it has demonstrated malign intent towards the democracies.

But this is a more subtle and complex problem than deciding whether to ban Chinese companies from participating in 5G networks. Telecommunications networks are the nervous systems that run down the spine of our digital ecosystems; they’re strategic points of vulnerability for all digital technologies. Protecting them from foreign intelligence agencies is a no-brainer and worth the economic and political costs. And those costs are bounded because 5G is a small group of easily identifiable technologies.

In contrast, AI is a constellation of technologies and techniques embedded in thousands of applications, products and services, so the task is to identify where on the spectrum between national-security threat and moral panic each of these products sits. And then pick the fights that really matter.

What’s the solution?

A general prohibition on all Chinese AI-enabled technology would be extremely costly and disruptive. Many businesses and researchers in the democracies want to continue collaborating on Chinese AI-enabled products because it helps them to innovate, build better products, offer cheaper services and publish scientific breakthroughs. The policy goal here is to take prudent steps to protect our digital ecosystems, not to economically decouple from China.

What’s needed is a new three-step framework to identify, triage and manage the riskiest products and services. The intent is similar to that proposed in the recently introduced draft US RESTRICT Act, which seeks to identify and mitigate foreign threats to information and communications technology (ICT) products and services, although the focus here is on teasing out the most serious threats.

Step 1: Audit. Identify the AI systems whose purpose and functionality concern us most. What’s the potential scale of our exposure to this product or service? How critical is this system to essential services, public health and safety, democratic processes, open markets, freedom of speech and the rule of law? What are the levels of dependency and redundancy should it be compromised or unavailable?

Step 2: Red Team. Anyone can identify the risk of embedding many PRC-made technologies into sensitive locations, such as government infrastructure, but, in other cases, the level of risk will be unclear. For those instances, you need to set a thief to catch a thief. What could a team of specialists do if they had privileged access to (that is, ‘owned’) a candidate system identified in Step 1—people with experience in intelligence operations, cybersecurity and perhaps military planning, combined with relevant technical subject-matter experts? This is the real-world test because all intelligence operations cost time and money, and some points of presence in a target ecosystem offer more scalable and effective opportunities than others. PRC-made cameras and drones in sensitive locations are a legitimate concern, but crippling supply chains through accessing ship-to-shore cranes would be devastating.

For example, we know that TikTok data can be accessed by PRC agencies and reportedly also reveal a user’s location, so it’s obvious that military and government officials shouldn’t use the app. Journalists should also think carefully about this, too. Beyond that, the merits of a general ban on technical security grounds are a bit murky. Can our Red Team use the app to jump onto connected mobiles and IT systems to plant spying malware? What system mitigations could stop them getting access to data on connected systems? If the team revealed serious vulnerabilities that can’t be mitigated, a general ban might be appropriate.

Step 3: Regulate. Decide what to do about a system identified as ‘high risk’. Treatment measures might range from prohibiting Chinese AI-enabled technology in some parts of the network, a ban on government procurement or use, or a general prohibition. Short of that, governments could insist on measures to mitigate the identified risk or dilute the risk through redundancy arrangements. And, in many cases, public education efforts along the lines of the new UK National Protective Security Authority may be an appropriate alternative to regulation.

The democracies need to think harder about Chinese AI-enabled technology in our digital ecosystems. But we shouldn’t overreact: our approach to regulation should be anxious but selective.

Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review: Learning from the past

The Australian Government commissions a review of its intelligence community every five to seven years. With July 2023 marking six years since release of the last review’s report and, with funding already allocated in this year’s federal budget, the next one is likely to commence shortly.

The best starting place for the forthcoming review is the work that precedes it, so reflection on 2017’s Independent Intelligence Review proves valuable. This report, Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review, reflects on the experiences of the 2017 review and the implementation of its recommendations, and draws lessons to inform the terms of reference, approach and suggested focus of the next review.

In doing so the report identifies three broad topics upon which the next review can most profitably ground its work: attracting, building and retaining a skilled workforce; adapting to rapid and profound technological change; and leveraging more, and closer, partnerships. It also highlights how the past six years have raised important and challenging questions in relation to each of those broad topics and identifies opportunities to further advance the future performance of the National Intelligence Community. In addition, specific recommendations are made to inform government’s planning and preparation for the new review.

AUKUS and critical minerals: Hedging Beijing’s pervasive, clever and coordinated statecraft

AUKUS has a heavy focus on R&D of military capabilities. A number of departments, including defence, foreign affairs and prime ministerial equivalents are engaged. The science and technology to deliver those capabilities must resolve issues of insecure supply chains. Currently, supply chains for processed critical minerals and their resulting materials aren’t specifically included.

Yet all AUKUS capabilities, and the rules-based order that they uphold, depend heavily on critical minerals. China eclipses not only AUKUS for processing those minerals into usable forms, but the rest of the world combined. Without critical minerals, states are open to economic coercion in various technological industries, and defence manufacturing is particularly exposed to unnecessary supply-chain challenges.

This is where Australia comes in. Australia has the essential minerals, which are more readily exploitable because they’re located in less densely populated or ecologically sensitive areas. Australia also has the right expertise, including universities offering the appropriate advanced geoscience degrees, as well as advanced infrastructure, world-class resources technology and deep industry connections with Asia and Africa, which are also vital global sources of critical minerals.

This paper outlines why Australia offers an unrivalled rallying point to drive secure critical-mineral supply among a wide field of vested nations, using AUKUS but not limited to AUKUS partners, how WA has globally superior reserves and substantial expertise, and why northern Australia more generally has a key role to play. The paper also explains why policy action here must be prioritised by the Australian Government.

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist, Volume 7

The Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre’s latest report, North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist, Volume 7, is a series of articles published in The Strategist over the last six months. It builds on previous volumes by identifying critical intersections of national security, nation-building, resilience 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 critical minerals, rare earth, equatorial space launch, agriculture, advanced manufacturing, fuel and water security, and defence force posturing. Importantly, it addresses the Defence Strategic from a northern Australian perspective. It also features a foreword by the Honourable Madeleine King MP, Minister for Northern Australia.

Minister King writes, “Northern Australia is central to the prosperity, security and future of our nation and will be the engine room of Australia’s decarbonisation effort and drive towards net zero.”

The 24 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.

The big squeeze

Video Explainer

Executive Director’s foreword

This is a very different year for the defence budget. We are in a time of significant change and upheaval.

Uncertainty is rife, but some fundamentals can help in working through uncertainty, especially in the world of defence policy, planning, capability programming and budget. The order of those words is important.

Defence budgets are not arbitrary. Capability requirements must drive budgets. It doesn’t mean that the budget is unlimited but it demands that governments consider proposals for what is required and assess what can be afforded. If budgets drive capability, it risks the true capability needs not being put to government which results in failure to ask of government what they are elected to do – make decisions based on all available information.

The oft-cited metric of defence spend as a percentage of GDP is helpful as a point of comparison on the rate of effort of specific economies towards defence outcomes. It establishes a baseline from which we can measure – and therefore tell a story about – defence spending over time, and in the context of broader geopolitics. The low percentages across major European economies helps to illustrate why deterrence failed against the Putin regime and should be a lesson for all in relation to why defence spending is so important for managing tension and long-term peace.

But a percentage in isolation is not helpful in assessing whether the budget allocated to Defence will allow it to deliver the capabilities for which the government has asked.

The Albanese government released the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and its Portfolio Budget Statements (Budget) within weeks of one another. The DSR establishes the future strategic direction for the Department of Defence and the ADF, including by identifying priorities that must be acted upon in the immediate term. The Budget represents a continuity approach with the strategic and budgetary guidance from the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2016 Defence White Paper.

There is, therefore, a disconnect between the two. This can be addressed and will be through a series of further reviews and specific activities to be progressed by Defence in the coming year. There are significant additional bodies of work yet to be finalised that will affect the future defence budget; all indications point to a steady and possibly substantial rise.

Australia must of course invest in defence capability commensurate with the challenges of the strategic environment. Crucially, however, the role of defence to help deter wars, while being ready for times of conflict, requires spending even in times of relative peace. A detailed discussion of how defence is budgeted to both deter and win wars, and the external and internal dynamics that drive budget (and other) programming and management, is more important today than at any time in the post-Cold War era. This document is a must read for those interested in current and future defence spending and for increased understanding of its importance to the government’s overall budget theme of providing increased certainty to Australians in an increasingly uncertain world.

Executive summary

Defence has long been seen as a necessary burden on the federal budget. However, it is assuming the status of an urgent priority in the wake of the AUKUS agreement and the far-reaching reform urged by this year’s Defence Strategic Review (DSR). Both are responding to a much more challenging geopolitical environment and the realisation that Australia doesn’t have the luxury of time to achieve readiness.

This year’s Defence budget reflects the urgency of the demands upon Defence to the extent that it includes the initial spending on the nuclear-powered submarines and the first response to the DSR, despite there being only very approximate estimates for how that spending is to be scheduled and for the savings that will pay for them.

However, the urgency of the demands upon Defence isn’t reflected in its short-term funding. The only increase in the Defence budget over the next three years is compensation for the increased cost of imported military equipment flowing from a fall in the value of the Australian dollar.

Excluding this, the core funding of Defence (not including the Australian Signals Directorate) has actually been reduced at a time when unprecedented demands are being placed upon it. Between 2023-4 and 2025-6, Defence funding, excluding compensation for adverse foreign exchange movements, drops from $154.0 billion to $152.5 billion.

Both the AUKUS submarines and the DSR conclusions highlight an approach in which capability will drive budget conversations – not vice versa. That is welcome. But there is clearly much more work to be done to clarify the capability implications of the DSR, and then reflect those accurately – and at the appropriate time – in the budget.

The difficulty in bringing the DSR reforms and the spending on submarines into the budget is understandable. The timing of the DSR meant it reached the staff compiling the Defence budget very late in the annual process, while the nuclear-powered submarine program is of historically unprecedented complexity for any government project. The broad outline of the submarine program was only announced in March 2023.

New programs responding to the DSR such as a long-range strike capability or the hardening of the northern Australian bases, are not the subject of budget measures, with Defence expected to provide the additional funds needed with savings obtained from other programs.

Funding in each year continues to move faster than the predicted annual rate of inflation, consistent with the recommendations of the 2016 Defence White Paper (DWP) and the 2020 Defence StrategicUpdate (DSU).

However, the Defence Department’s financial controllers have fewer real resources to work with over the next three years than they were expecting in March 2022, when the Budget still contained the French submarine program and the DSR hadn’t even been commissioned.

The surge of inflation over the past year has made the constraints of a reduced funding base even tighter. The Treasury now expects inflation to reach 6% this year, or double the level it predicted a year ago. Inflation is being powered, both in Australia and globally, in large part by an overheated economy that’s the result of record low interest rates and large government deficits and further exacerbated by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on food and energy markets.

With unemployment at near record lows, Defence has been unable to meet its recruitment targets, which has been further exacerbated by increasing separation rates among uniformed personnel.

Defence had planned for the ADF to raise its numbers this year (2022-23) by 2,201 but instead faced a contraction in size by 1,389 uniformed personnel.

The rigid constraints on Defence funding over the next four years reflect the Treasury’s judgement that total government spending must be curbed if inflation is to be brought under control. Treasury’s economic forecasts assume that the combined efforts of government and the Reserve Bank of Australia will succeed in taming inflation over the next 18 months, bringing inflation back into the Reserve Bank’s target band by 2024-25.

The government will start providing increased funding for defence from 2027-28 onwards. An amount of $30.5 billion has been set aside for defence spending out to 2032-33. It’s expected that this will increase the defence share of GDP from around 2.05% to more than 2.3%. The additional funding will lift Defence’s share of government spending from about 8.2% now, including both operational and capital spending, to about 9.7% by 2032-33.

However, the principal task for Defence over the year ahead is to decide how to reconfigure its force structure and capability acquisition programs in line with the DSR and the difficult budget constraint.

That work is to be completed ahead of the planned 2024 National Defence Strategy, which is expected to be released before next year’s budget. The uncertainty surrounding the existing Integrated Investment Program (IIP) will affect defence industry as the scope and schedules of major programs are reviewed. Although Defence has raised the share of its procurement sourced domestically from about 45% to 55% over the past five years, it’s possible that the pressure to acquire new capabilities quickly will result in more ‘off-the-shelf’ imports.

Given the intense re-ordering of the Defence capital program expected over the year ahead, this year’s ASPI defence budget brief isn’t a detailed examination of the major acquisition programs. Rather, it’s a guide for the government, industry, academia and citizens interested in Australian defence strategy, capability and budget.

The strategic context for the 2023-24 defence budget is complex and extremely challenging. There’s currently a gap, and quite a significant one, between the rhetoric of the 2023 DSR and the 2023-24 defence budget (and forward estimates). How Defence and the rest of government will work together to bridge the gap will become clearer over the coming year. This publication focuses on what ASPI can usefully contribute to that process, and where the key issues lie in the defence budget.

Impactful mateship: Strengthening the US–Australia defence relationship through enhanced mutual understanding

AUKUS, and the Australian Government’s release of the 2023 report of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR), reinforce to Canberra and Washington DC that there’s an urgent need to continue strengthening the US–Australia alliance. Those efforts underpin allied cooperation within the Indo-Pacific, which is an increasingly complex security environment. 
 
This report highlights 9 opportunities for both US and Australian defence decision-makers at a vital time in the relationship as it develops in complexity and builds towards the ambitions of AUKUS over the coming decade. 
 
A series of ‘quick wins’ for the US DoD are recommended, including arranging more training for inbound DoD personnel and conducting allied-centric training for relevant US-based action officers and planners at US headquarters. US DoD Funding should be provided for US action officers to visit Australia to build rapport with their counterparts and facilitate appreciation for the relationship in person. Broadly, US professional military education at every level should incorporate Australian Defence-centric views when appropriate, and the DoD can better leverage its US liaison network throughout Australia earlier in planning and when considering new initiatives. 
 
Recommended quick wins for Australian Defence to include further leveraging of US-based Australian Defence personnel and encouraging greater transparency with US counterparts regarding capacity. Enhanced transparency would provide maximum clarity on capacity challenges at all echelons, especially regarding the potential impacts of a future crisis within the Indo-Pacific. It’s also recommended that Australian Defence provide greater clarity regarding sovereignty and security concerns for the US DoD. 
 
Finally, this report also makes a major long-term recommendation that will require more resourcing, coordination and focus from US and Australian defence decision-makers, and that’s to establish and empower a US Forces Australia headquarters (USFOR-A) to synergise US DoD efforts with the Australian defence establishment. It’s inevitable that the US–Australia defence relationship will grow in scope and complexity. That will quickly outgrow and challenge the current coordination structure, which was built and implemented decades ago. This report also notes that there are lessons to be learned from the US–Japan bilateral coordination mechanisms, especially in the light of the US–Japan–Australia defence relationship, as it is set to grow in importance in the coming years.