Strategist Article Archives - Page 1149 of 1181

A peer on the promise and perils of the pivot

8 March 2013

In basketball, a pivot is a tactic, not a strategy.

Yet the US pivot to Asia looms as a strategic shift of fundamental import. This is high-level strategy that responds to the gravitational effect of geoeconomics as well as the push and pull of geopolitics. And it is a pivot in the sense of turning away as well as turning towards.

In Washington, the term ‘pivot’ has had to do bureaucratic battle with ‘rebalancing’.

Peter Jennings reports that Hillary Clinton held the State Department true to the pivot terminology because it had a basketball provenance that meant something to Obama. So, for the next four years at least, the pivot lives for the White House, if not for many other parts of the US polity which want to keep on balancing rather than turning. Read more

The audacity of Jokowi

7 March 2013

It’s March 2013, and looking ahead to September 2014—when Indonesia’s new president should be elected—it’s too early to speculate on the result. In fact, we’re not even sure who’ll line up for the race. But last week, ANU’s Marcus Mietzner made a bold prediction; that not only would Jakarta’s governor, Joko Widodo (aka Jokowi) run in the presidential election, but he’d win. Mietzner’s case was compelling, and if Australia has begun to give a Prabowo presidency some thought, it’s worth reflecting on what ‘President Jokowi’ might mean for Australia.

To sum up Mietzner’s presentation, Jokowi will sail to victory with a popularity (buoyed by intense media attention and pop culture appeal) and the hope of the people that no other political figure in Indonesia’s recent history has been ever able to muster. Jokowi hails from a modest background and self-made wealth as a furniture entrepreneur, which has given him a down-to-earth quality and sensitivity to the issues of Jakarta’s poorer residents. For those Indonesians fatigued with the usual suspects in elections, Jokowi makes an unconventional and therefore appealing candidate. He signals the potential for a new chapter in clean politics and accountability—a perspective that opinion polls are now beginning to show. According to one survey, he’s secured 21.2% of votes and leads the race. Read more

Will arms growth in Asia threaten the ‘long peace’?

7 March 2013

Asian powers are complicating an uninterrupted thirty-year peace by becoming a bumper market for the international and regional weapons trade. Now that standards of living in Asia are on the rise, and internal stability is increasingly the order of the day, governments are feeling the pressure to provide more than rhetoric to protect the fruits of their prosperity. China’s rapidly growing naval capability is also encouraging its neighbours to hedge by developing their own forces. This, in turn, raises tensions between within existing relationships in Asia. Neighbourly suspicion and nationalism serve to divert attention from equally pressing security challenges like natural resource depreciation, natural disasters and insurgency. It is unlikely that large-scale procurement is an effective response to the localised nascent risks faced by Asia–Pacific powers today.

A recently released SIPRI list of the 100 largest arms companies in the world in 2011 has delivered some food for thought. Global arms sales have decreased since 2011 but Asian activity has charged ahead. Of the 100 top companies of 2011, 16 were from Asia (including four from Australia), contributing $US23.9bn (a 79.6% increase) to the regional weapons trade turnover. Regional economic growth, combined with better access to military technology (largely supplied by the US, Russia and western Europe), has allowed Asian nations to quickly leapfrog generations in military equipment. As well, increasing wealth and industrialisation have created favourable conditions for indigenous weapons development and intraregional trade. Japan and South Korea in particular have stepped up their regional exports.

It’s important to note that expanding procurement programs aren’t just a function of increased GDP—hedging against Chinese military power is a significant driver of the increase in Asian arms investment. Jung Sung-Ki of Defense News suggests the increased interest in South Korea’s jets and ships from countries like Malaysia and the Philippines is a direct response to China’s naval capability build-up. But Asian counties can’t ignore their neighbours in defence planning, making for a complex regional dynamic of incremental arms competition that potentially threatens our region’s uneasy peace. Read more

The United States’ persistent hope for China

6 March 2013

Based on what they read in the national press or hear the talking heads on TV say, Australians could be forgiven for thinking that the Americans and Chinese are totally at loggerheads. We keep getting told at Australia has to choose between the two. And, to be fair, there are China Hawks in Washington who seem to regard the Chinese with the deepest suspicion, and China’s state controlled press frequently invokes American efforts to thwart Chinese interests. In fact, the situation is far more nuanced than those views would tend to suggest. Seen over a very long period, there is an American view of China that is much more sympathetic, and there is no shortage of American thinkers rooting for a Chinese success story in the twenty-first century.

Americans have a resilient hope in China, and they feel a special rapport with the Chinese. The origins of this trait lie in Christian missionaries being the first Americans to live in China, reinforced in the period of the Open Door Notes, when Americans had superior motives, they believed, in upholding Chinese sovereignty in the face of European colonialism. Canberra’s first-ever diplomat based in China, Keith Waller saw the syndrome in Chongqing during World War II: ‘There was a romantic side to Roosevelt’s attitude to the Chinese stemming, I suppose, from the renunciation of the Boxer indemnity.’ Waller’s skeptical Australian eye watched the missionaries in Chongqing: ‘They used to send [to mission headquarters in New York] regular and pretty glowing reports suggesting that with a little more effort the great nation of China would become Christian… this was undoubtedly a major factor in the American tenderness towards China.’

The persistent hope is indeed remarkable. The 1898–1901 Boxer Rebellion shot down US hopes for a cosmopolitan China; a realisation dawned that China, after all, was different from the US Tiananmen 1989 was even worse than the Boxers, this time the villain was not Chinese culture, but Leninist dictatorship. Yet neither upheaval nor others in between cancelled American’s hope toward the Chinese. Read more

Learning to teach the ADF

5 March 2013

Critical to the success of any defence force—including the civilian agencies which support it—is the training and development that each person, individually and collectively, undergoes. Today the typical ADF member will pass through a number of courses during his or her career. Many of these courses will make internal sense and allow certain boxes to be ticked along career and professional pathways, and others appear to be conducted for the sole purpose of being seen to conduct training.

There seems, however, to be little symmetry or cohesion across the wide range of training activities which members of the ADF must undertake and the models around which these activities are framed. The result is a general view of military education as a process, rather than a quality outcome for the individual and the ADF—and a very real concern that members aren’t gaining a systematic and integrated body of knowledge which contributes to the mastery of their profession.

Over the past 20 years, training and education in the ADF has gone through a number of changes and attempted enhancements. Included in this has been the adoption of a vocational education and training (VET) system aligned with the national qualifications framework and various iterations of the traditional Systems Approach to Training (SAT). Read more

Sturm und drang: stress proofing soldiers’ ethics in Afghanistan

5 March 2013

In the midst of confusion about what led to the recent, untimely deaths of two Afghan boys, two things are clear. First, the deaths are a tragic loss. Second, no Australian who was present will have been callous or indifferent to their sad fate. In an ideal world, there would be no armed conflict—and if, on occasion, it should occur then it would be moderated by the practical application of the traditional principles of just war theory. Under conditions of discrimination and proportionality, young boys would not lose their lives simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong times. But nothing about the situation in Afghanistan is ideal. Nor could it be while insurgent forces employ tactics deliberately designed to test to the limit the capacity for ethical restraint amongst ISAF and Afghan forces.

Beyond responding at a personal level to the individual tragedy that unfolds with every death of a non-combatant, Australian personnel are also keenly aware of the strategic costs of such events. In today’s conditions of rapid and communications, where a local incident can soon find a global audience, they are also acutely aware of the maxim (quoted in an earlier post for The Strategist), ‘lose moral authority, lose the war’. It’s a maxim understood equally by both sides of the conflict in Afghanistan—but, like so much else in that theatre, it’s applied asymmetrically. Read more

Indonesia’s complex ascent

4 March 2013

I recently had the pleasure of attending the National Security College’s workshop ‘Indonesia’s Ascent: power, leadership and Asia’s security order’ at the ANU. The presentations were delivered as part of a larger publication project that will explore and challenge different elements of Indonesia’s rise. In this Canberra workshop (the other being in Jakarta), the key message of most speakers was that, overall, Indonesia is on the right trajectory but is still grappling with questions of democratisation, governance and security.

Sue Thompson from the National Security College presented a historical overview of Indonesia’s self-perception as a leader and discussed the legacy of colonialism and great power interference in Indonesia’s affairs. Delivered at the outset of the workshop, these historical experiences provided an important framing device for subsequent presentations that explored the potential for Indonesia to assume a more powerful and influential role in the region. Also discussing historical legacies, independent researcher Robert Lowry explored a number of security fault lines in Indonesia—in particular, separatism—that could threaten its ascent if not addressed carefully. Read more

ASPI suggests

4 March 2013

Welcome back for our weekly round-up of news, reports and events in the defence, NatSec and strategy world.

It’s one minute past midnight, as the sequester—USD$1.2 trillion of cuts across the US federal budget over the next decade, including defence—has gone into effect. Expect more bickering to follow, writes The Economist.

For readers interested in strategy, Adam Elkus has a short and sweet review of a new edited volume by John Andreas Olsen and Colin Gray called The Practice of Strategy: from Alexander the Great to the present which asks the fundamental question, is there unity to all strategic experience?

There’s cautious optimism from Trita Parsi in this piece on recent negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program; the meeting in Almaty saw the paradigm of the talks shift from perpetual escalation to an exchange of concessions and incentives.

On a related note, why eliminate nuclear weapons? James E. Doyle has a new Survival article available free for download here. Read more

Kiwi and kangaroo (part IV): future imperfect

3 March 2013

This is part IV of a series on Australia–New Zealand relations (part I here, part II here, part III here).

The Australian Army can find positive things to say about its Kiwi counterpart, usually in a sardonic tone. My favourite in this version of an Oz Army compliment: ‘The Maori Army? Better than Gurkhas! They bring their own officers and you don’t have to pay them’.

In the South Pacific, we can add to those assets the fact that the Maori Army can sing while the Australian Army has a hard time just chanting. The Kiwi cultural feel for the region can matter. In East Timor, the Australian Army on foot was known for its sunglasses. The Kiwis stomped on the habit because of their awareness of the need for eye contact when out amongst the people.

The NZ Army is admired for doing what it does on a shoestring. The other side of the same budgetary coin is that it’s derided for bludging off others when it does turn up at a job—looking to fellow forces to overcome Kiwi deficiencies in transport and kit.

The Australian and New Zealand militaries have had a lot to do with each other in what have been long-term jobs in Bougainville, Timor and the Solomons. The old bonds have been burnished by new experiences. Read more

Marines in Darwin – make it so

1 March 2013

We’re in Washington this week for the Alliance 21 project being run by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. It’s an interesting time to be in Washington. Over the next 24 hours the US budget negotiations will come to a head, potentially resulting in substantial cuts to US defence spending by way of sequestration.

To say that the situation has the attention of American defence planners is putting it mildly. The prospective cuts to come are likely to be deep and potentially long-term. Civilians in the Pentagon could see their working days (and income) reduced, and service personnel are facing a period of reduced training and limited promotion opportunities. As grim as those possibilities are for the individuals concerned, the impact of most interest to Australia and other American allies and partners is the potential reduction in the preparedness and capability of America’s armed forces.

This possibility comes at a particularly unfortunate time as far as the United States’ pivot/rebalance to the Asia–Pacific is concerned. After talking a big game, there’s now a real question mark over their ability to follow through. Further cuts to US defence spending would likely have two major effects. First, the ability of US forces to substantially change their force structure, let alone ramp up numbers in the region, would be in doubt. Moving forces around is expensive, especially when substantial facilities are required. Read more