Introducing Australia’s Antarctic challenge

Guest editor Anthony Bergin 

Basilisk and Ginger at Cape Denison, captured by renowned photographer Frank Hurley on first Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), which was led by Sir Douglas Mawson.Here’s Australia’s Antarctic scorecard:

  • We claim 42% of Antarctica – an area roughly the size of Australia minus Queensland
  • We’ve been there for over a century, and one of Antarctica’s greatest explorers was Australia’s Sir Douglas Mawson
  • Australia is an original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty, and our then Minister for External Affairs, Lord Casey, played a significant role in its negotiation
  • We have three major research stations in the Australian Antarctic Territory, a research and supply icebreaker, and, in the last decade, the ability to fly direct from Australia to Antarctica in the austral summer

And we support this important national effort with a budget of a mere $112.8M for Australia’s Antarctic program – not bad, eh?

But while other nations are ramping up their Antarctic activities, has Australia taken its eye off the ball? The last two austral summers has seen a flurry of activity in Antarctica brought on by the various centenaries of great expeditions of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.  The visibility of Antarctica has been enhanced by these commemorations, and the period has also been marked by some high profile visits to the continent itself. Read more

Graph of the week – Moore’s Law

This week’s graph isn’t news in its own right. Moore’s Law—which exists in various formulations—concerns the rate of increase in computer performance. It’s well known and has been around for almost fifty years now. But the effect it describes has already had a profound effect on pretty much everything we do and will have an even more dramatic impact in the future. And defence technologies won’t be exempt from its impact. 

AD2

To be a bit more technical, Moore’s Law in its original guise concerned the number of transistors in an integrated circuit. In crude terms, it describes how much computing power you can stuff into a given volume. Gordon E. Moore first made his observation back in the relatively early days of mass produced computers, and it’s been argued at times that the rate of increase will eventually taper off. The laws of physics can’t be defied and there are theoretical limits that will one day bring further development to a halt, but we aren’t there yet. And if quantum computing produces practical mass market devices (which I’d be willing to place a small bet against, but that’s another story), computing power will bound ahead for decades to come.

In any case, there’s a consensus that we have at least twenty more years on the current trend line. It’s worth contemplating what means. Moore’s law describes exponential growth in the number of transistors on a microcircuit, with a doubling time of around two years. The actual performance of computers actually increases even faster than that because the transistors are also become faster as well as more numerous.

That means devices today are roughly a thousand times more powerful than those of 20 years ago. In 2033 contemporary devices will be a thousand times more powerful than todays (and so a million times more than those from 1993). The flexibility, power and connectivity of the iPad I’m writing this blog piece on was inconceivable twenty years ago. Twenty years from now, there will be devices as far ahead of it as it is ahead of the 486 chip based computer that was state of the art in 1993.

There’ll be applications of future machines that we can’t predict today—or at least I can’t. (Which might of course explain why I work for ASPI and not for Apple…) But there are some applications that I think are predictable, and some of those are in the defence area. One of them is the possibility of autonomous robots—machines that have enough processing power to sense the world around and make their own decisions. Clint Arizmendi wrote about those on The Strategist last week. Another area where computing power and robotics could come together to have profound military effects is the detection of platforms that rely on stealth for effectiveness, such as aircraft and submarines.

Stealth aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are designed to be hard to detect because of a combination of absorbing some radar energy and reflecting radar signals away from the radar producing them. Submarines do it a little differently because they start with the advantage of being in a medium that is opaque at many wavelengths and is noisy. The use of sound waves is the usual way of trying to detect a submerged boat—either by listening for the submarine’s own noise (passive sonar) or by putting sound into the water and listening for reflections (active sonar). Submarines use a combination of a coating that absorbs sound and having quiet onboard systems that radiate only low levels of acoustic energy, which is rapidly drowned out by ambient noise from other, usually natural, sources.

In principle, given enough processing power and enough sources of data, even low power signals can be extracted from background noise. And that’s where Moore’s Law and robots come in. Future processors will be faster and more powerful, and will be able to process large quantities of data fast enough to have a much better detection capability against quiet submarines or low radar signature aircraft. By having multiple sources of radar (or sonar) energy in different locations combined with multiple detectors also in different locations, the trick of reflecting radar away from the original source suddenly becomes much less effective. Using cheap drones to carry these sensors in an airborne grid could make life much more difficult for stealth aircraft.

In the submarine case, a fleet of small unmanned platforms (either remotely controlled or autonomous) could cover a large area of ocean. If each one carried a simple sonar receiver and transmitter and a means of communicating what it hears to some central processing unit, a submarine trying to cross the area will be faced with a very difficult problem—it will never know where the next detector might be, or where the next sonar ‘ping’ might come from. There’ll be no trouble moving data around either, because bandwidth is also increasing exponentially. An Australian company is working on small unmanned vessels which generate their own energy from solar panels, wind and wave motion. To my eye, it’s the sort of technology that could revolutionise anti-submarine warfare.

In the future, the sky and the ocean could be full of cheap and numerous detectors, processors and communication links. As the American Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Greenert observed last year (p. 18):

The rapid expansion of computing power also ushers in new sensors and methods that will make stealth and its advantages increasingly difficult to maintain above and below the water… With better processing in the future… weak, fragmented signals can be combined to create actionable target information.

In short, the very expensive stealthy platforms of today will have their work cut out for them staying hidden. The F-35s and future submarines we are going to invest many billions of dollars in will find themselves in a much more challenging environment than today during their expected lifespan of 30–40 years.

Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The StrategistImage courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Islamist Extremism: potential for greater US-Australian cooperation

The stop sign on the corner of New York Avn and Patton Loop, Camp AriJan, Kuwait. This is a shortened version of a longer paper presented to the Alliance 21 meeting in Washington. Abridgment by Kristy Bryden.

Islamist extremism—sometimes also referred to as radical Islamism or jihadism—motivates a diverse global movement that has the potential to affect the peace, prosperity and security of nations world-wide. It is important to clarify the distinction between Islam (a religion), Islamism (political Islam) and Islamist extremism, as one can combat the latter without being at all hostile to Islam.

My Hudson Institute colleague Abram Shulsky, Brookings Institution scholar William Galson and I recently published a study entitled Organizing for a Strategic Ideas Campaign to Counter Ideological Challenges to US National Security (PDF). Among the key recommendations of the study were the creation of: a strategy for countering Islamist extremism; an interagency body to direct the efforts of country teams and combatant commands to implement the strategy; and a new private organisation modelled on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to support constructive voices and conduct research.

There’s potential for US-Australian cooperation on this issue. In particular, there’s value in working together on a common threat assessment and in pooling experience to produce common doctrine to counter extremist ideology. This would involve an agreement on: the definition of Islamist extremist ideology; the nature of the national security threat posed by Islamist extremist ideology; the identification of key individuals and groups in the Islamist extremist movement; and finally, a doctrine for countering the ideology. Read more

What can the US strategy for homeland defence teach us?

Based on previous Defence white papers, this year’s white paper will, among other things, address the question of how the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) should support Australian civil authorities in peacetime.

Areas where the ADO’s responsibilities and those of other government agencies overlap include border security, protection for major events, counterterrorism, emergency response to natural disasters, and marine search and rescue. This year’s white paper writers would benefit from reading the US Department of Defense’s Strategy for Homeland Defense and Defense Support of Civil Authorities (PDF). Read more

Defence: the most fundamental task of government?

GURESHK, Afghanistan--Danish soldiers patrol outside the Mayai Village of the Gureshk District in Helmand Province on Jan. 26, 2009.

When Prime Minister Gillard announced the National Security Strategy in January this year, she said: ‘national security is the most fundamental task of government’. Indeed Section 51 of the Constitution provides the Commonwealth with powers that leaders of both major political parties over the years have (in their own words) referred to as ‘the first and most important task of Government—the defence of the nation.

Given bipartisan support for the importance of this task, how has it come to pass that respected analysts and commentators are now saying that Defence ‘is an incoherent mess, to mix the metaphors, an approaching train wreck of colossal proportionsand that ‘plans set out in 2009 are in disarray; investment is badly stalled, and the defence budget is an unsustainable mess’. Read more

Ross Terrill’s long road to China

Ross Terrill’s life course and professional experience mirror much of what has happened in Australian geopolitics and economic life since WWII. The country lad growing up in Gippsland started with the ‘umbilical cord’ view of Australia’s link to Britain. But the Australianness of Ross Terrill found its expression in spheres well beyond the Victorian bush or the joys of Melbourne University. Terrill went on to become a citizen of both the United States and Australia, as he immersed himself in the study of China.

The Professor’s working life has been in the US and China but he offers a distinctly Australian view of these two giants. The Terrill who went on the journey to China with Gough Whitlam in 1971 (in several senses a trail Ross Terrill had mapped) can write of the similarities between the Labor Prime Minister of the 1970s and today’s US President: Read more

Two thoughts on the DPRK question

Tanya Ogilvie-White’s recent article is a thoughtful and sensible piece that sparked two thoughts. First, the proposition that Chinese and US interests in respect of the DPRK are beginning to align means, I believe, that China is showing signs of placing the nuclear proliferation dimension of the DPRK issue at the top of its list of interests. There’s evidence of this, but this was also the case immediately after the other two nuclear tests conducted by the DPRK (in 2006 and 2009). In the earlier cases, China seemed to drift back to assigning top priority to being protective of Pyongyang, so I’d regard the jury as still being out on alignment, although it’s something to hope for. The 6-Party Talks went through a number of twists and turns but one scenario not tested was all five of Pyongyang’s partners making clear that they regarded a particular package of proposals as generous and fully responsive to the DPRK’s interests—that is, a package that Pyongyang needed to regard as an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Second, I’d be inclined to be somewhat more forgiving of the stark signals Washington elected to send to reinforce its deterrent message. The cost of a deterrent posture, even one as onerous as the US has sustained on the Korean peninsula for decades, is typically dwarfed by the shortest imaginable war. When you are the ‘deterrer of last resort’, when the number on everyone’s speed-dial is yours and responsibility to prosecute any conflict is inescapable, and when you are dealing with a newish and still unfamiliar power configuration in Pyongyang, erring on the side of making certain the other side appreciates what might be in store is not only understandable, but might in fact have been decisive in keeping the crisis away from the brink.

Ron Huisken is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, ANU.

North Korea: still sliding towards the abyss?

Pyongyang Subway Museum MuralSpurred on by Tanya Ogilvie-White’s post on Friday, I want to add some thoughts to the mix on the current situation on the Korean peninsula.

What do we know about what’s really driving decision-making in Pyongyang? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not very much’. So we have to work by theories instead. A first theory says that Kim Jong Un might well be using this crisis to consolidate his position internally. That’s plausible—in communist dictatorships it’s not uncommon for a leadership transition to take about four years. If that’s true in North Korea’s case, we’re still only about one third of the way through that period. Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011 pushed North Korea into a political contest for which the family was only half prepared. Remember how long they took to announce the death?

In the years before Kim Jong Il’s death, some Chinese interlocutors at ASPI exchanges were speculating that the family probably couldn’t get the third generation up and into place. Sometimes that thought has popped back into my mind while watching current events play out. Kim Jong Un is still young—if he can entrench his rule, he’ll likely be there for thirty years or more. So his opponents have an incentive to topple him early. If the current crisis is all about regime consolidation, then we have to conclude that the harder Kim Jong Un pushes the buttons for tensions on the peninsula, the less secure he feels in his position. Judging by recent events, then, he feels far less secure than many suppose. If that’s true, one of the scenarios we should be thinking about is a post-Kim Jong Un North Korea, even though it’s far from obvious how such a transition might proceed. Read more

Good deeds and good strategy: humanitarian and disaster relief operations

President Barack Obama waves to people in the gallery after addressing the Australian Parliament in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Nov.17, 2011.This is a shortened version of a longer paper presented to the Alliance 21 meeting in Washington. Abridgment by Kristy Bryden.

The arrival of US Marines in Australia has started a national, regional and international debate that will run for some time. The debate centres on the obvious advantages of an enhanced regional humanitarian and disaster response (HADR) capability and the disadvantage of an increased US military presence in Australia, seen by China part of a wider effort to circumscribe their emergence as a regional, and potentially global, power.

How the increased US presence is understood within the region will do a lot to shape the nature of the alliance between Australia and the United States into the 21st century. It’s hard however, to counter the perception that the increased US military presence in Australia is a response to the growing power of China. The reality of the deployments and the potential for more extensive deployments, especially air and naval forces with strategic reach, places Australia firmly in the American camp. Read more

Wars of necessity: naive militarism

Jim Molan’s polemical article in Quadrant (March 2013) (and his précis on The Strategist last week) presents a target-rich environment. Putting aside what I’ll describe as Jim’s robust style of argument, he addresses the two key perennial policy questions for Defence: how much to invest and what to do with the investment.

His main proposition seems to be that good strategy leads Australia being capable of engaging in ‘high-end warfighting’ in so-called Wars of Necessity. ‘That is why we build the ADF’, he says. So what’s his justification for this level of capability?

At one level, Jim seems believe we should invest just so that the ADF ‘can conduct a level of sophisticated joint warfighting operations appropriate to a nation such as Australia’—whatever ‘appropriate’ means in this context! To be fair, however, the appeal to national pride and institutional vanity is not the only or the primary argument offered in the article. Read more