Tag Archive for: ADF

Australian tripwire forces: an idea whose time has come?

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In the public mind, long-range strike options, such as land-based missiles and the AUKUS submarines, are ‘the deterrent’. If so, the Australian Defence Force is stuck in a holding pattern for many years to come. But the Cold War demonstrates there are many ways to signal deterrence, including through the use of the humble soldier, deployed far forward of the country, and honour-binding a response, should they come to harm.

In our new report, Forward presence for deterrence: implications for the Australian Army, published by the Australian Army Research Centre, we explore the use of forward-presence land forces to support deterrence. By placing Australian troops in key locations—such as on as the Cocos (Keeling) and Christmas Islands, or in foreign countries at the invitation of regional partners—Canberra can begin signalling to adversaries its specific deterrence commitments and laying the operational foundations for a denial strategy. To clarify the different political and operational purposes of forward-presence, or tripwire, forces, we identified three different models.

First, there are ‘thin tripwires’, which are intended, primarily through their sacrifice, to trigger an honour-bound political and military response. This would require the smallest day-to-day force-sustainment costs but, given the need to demonstrate a substantial and credible threat of retaliation, does not carry little cost.

Second, Australia could adopt a ‘thick tripwire’ model, which, while still sacrificial, would be sufficiently armed to force an adversary out of the grey zone, requiring much larger forces, open conflict, and thus strong indicators of warning. This force might also contribute significant intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Finally, there is the ‘forward defence’ model. Under this approach, Australia would not only signal a commitment and intention to respond, but seek to have capabilities that could meaningfully deny an adversary the objective they seek. Such a model would depend on preparations for reinforcement that bring their own resource burden.

What would that look like? In our studies of forward-presence forces, such as Wake Island, the Berlin Garrison, the Falkland Islands and NATO’s eFP forces, we found that political considerations and practical challenges—not least of force generation—are at least as important as operational concepts of warfighting should deterrence fail. Deterrence is about signalling, so a forward presence needs to be imbued with political significance that—to choose a catastrophic failure—Britain’s meagre land forces on the Falklands lacked in 1982. Forces deployed to send signals in crises are not necessarily suited to support coherent operational postures—and the limitations of such forces can be a feature, not a bug, if expectations of allied support need to be tempered as much as they need to be substantiated.

As a purely hypothetical example, we imagine a case where Australia wants to support the Philippines. Canberra and Manila have signed a ‘strategic partnership’, Manila is a US ally, and the Philippines is an important site for resisting China’s growing interference with the sovereignty of regional states. If requested by the Philippine government, Australia might consider stationing forces in the Philippines, such as on Palawan Island, as a demonstration of political solidarity. Would we want to send newly acquired long-range strike capabilities that would raise the question of their use, even if the Philippines’ main islands were not yet under attack?

In time, Australia’s increasing options for long-range strike will certainly strengthen its capacity to deter. Yet across our historical case studies and hypotheticals, we consistently found that many other factors shaped the ultimate success of a deterrence effort. Better appreciation of the complex relationship between deterrence, lethality, signalling and forward presence will be crucial if Australia is to implement the broad direction set by the 2023 defence strategic review.

If Canberra wants to actively contribute to regional and local deterrence in the short to medium term, and to build the skills needed for the next tense few decades of trying to deter conflict, sending parts of the ADF forward as a tripwire may be an idea whose time has come.

Army has a critical role in defence strategic review’s ‘integrated force’

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We tend to look for winners and losers in any Australian government announcement, and the defence strategic review (DSR) is no exception. Reading the headlines about the two-thirds reduction in infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and cancellation of a second regiment of self-propelled howitzers, it sounded at first blush like the army had been deprioritised.

But some of those who contributed to writing the DSR—including former Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, who co-led the review with former defence minister Stephen Smith, and Peter Dean, who served as senior adviser to Smith and Houston and co-led the review secretariat—have entered the public debate to challenge the view that the army has been gutted or sidelined. On the contrary, Dean says, the army has a critical role in the ‘integrated force’ that the ADF will become, which includes projecting force further into Australia’s northern approaches to deliver deterrence through denial.

Dean’s view gels with Defence Minister Richard Marles’s call at the launch of the DSR for ‘reshaping’ the army to have a ‘more focused mission, with a much more enhanced capability’.

To deliver those enhanced capabilities, Defence will accelerate and expand the acquisition of the army’s landing craft (littoral manoeuvre vessels) and long-range fires, including land-based anti-ship missiles, repurposing funds from the IFV and howitzer programs.

So far, this narrative is familiar, framed in media coverage of the DSR as Australia entering the ‘missile age’ at the expense of armour. But a closer examination of the DSR and information released since its publication reveals a fuller picture.

Far from abandoning armour, the DSR is emphatic on the crucial role of the IFVs, advising that ‘only by concurrently delivering these capabilities—littoral manoeuvre vessels, long-range fires (land-based maritime strike) and infantry fighting vehicles—will Army be able to achieve the strategic and operational effect required of the ADF for National Defence and a strategy of denial’.

While the IFVs are reduced to a single mechanised battalion, that capability will be oriented to littoral manoeuvre, around which the army ‘must be transformed and optimised’. This littoral manoeuvre capability will be provided by sea, land and air, including leveraging the mobility provided by a new suite of helicopters.

The emphasis on littoral manoeuvre reflects the fact that the maritime domain, as Dean put it in his interview with ASPI’s Jennifer Parker, is Australia’s ‘dominant geography’, as an island whose adversaries would project force against us though the archipelago to the north. In this archipelagic environment, land is important for projecting and sustaining military power and influence.

Emphasising the littoral dimension of the maritime domain has important implications for the ADF’s force structure and operations. In the past, coordination between the navy and air force was central to denying the so-called sea–air gap, which underpinned the 1986 Dibb review and 1987 defence white paper, while the army would tackle adversaries that made it to Australian shores. By developing littoral manoeuvre and long-range strike, the DSR gives the army a key role in denying what some analysts have long argued is really a land–sea–air gap in the archipelago to Australia’s north.

To picture the army’s maritime role, analysts like Michael Green at the United States Studies Centre have drawn parallels with the US Marine Corps, which Dean has also studied. But the differences in circumstances are important—not least the fact that the US Marines operate alongside the US Army, with its armour and logistical networks, whereas the Australian Army must cover both roles.

The unclassified version of the DSR understandably doesn’t go into detail on specific contingencies and threats, but for public understanding it’s helpful for analysts to translate abstract concepts like the army’s role in the maritime domain into plausible scenarios. So, let’s consider how the Australian Army could help counter China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy.

One of the ‘missile age’ threats Australia faces is a new generation of Chinese surface warships equipped with large numbers of vertical launch cells that could stay offshore and target Australia or its supply routes. As the DSR notes, ‘the use of military force or coercion against Australia does not require invasion’, and so deterrence through denial requires that we threaten China’s surface fleet at range, including limiting undue Chinese influence on land around Australia’s northern approaches.

But Chinese warships present a hard target, protected by their own air and undersea defences. An integrated ADF, focused on the threat from China, could approach this problem from multiple angles and domains, with the army contributing to the mix of tactical options.

Offensively, the army’s land-based anti-ship missiles provide new strike vectors, exploiting Australia’s vast northern coastline and potentially working from forward locations in the archipelago. The army, including special forces, will also contribute to the ‘integrated targeted capability’ called for in the DSR, supporting strike by the navy or air force and vice versa.

Defensively, as Chief of Army Simon Stuart told an audience in Canberra in March, the army offers ‘persistence’ to the ADF, which improves deterrence by signalling that Australia could withstand a surprise attack. While a potential adversary like the PLA may believe it can pinpoint the Australian navy’s and air force’s relatively small numbers of ships, planes and bases, the same cannot be said for the army assets, which can disperse and conceal. The army also contributes to integrated air and missile defence, improving national resilience.

Technology is important to the army’s transformation, but only in conjunction with people. Addressing the Army on Anzac Day, immediately after the DSR was published, Stuart explained that the character of war is being reshaped by technology, which will require the army to incorporate uncrewed systems, AI and quantum capabilities; but the nature of war will remain ‘a truly human endeavour’, especially on the land and among populations.

As with any transformation, the DSR vision for the army includes capability trade-offs, which carries risk.

Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie cautioned that the ‘degradation of land power’ undercut the overall strategy of the DSR because long-range fires depend on land forces to protect them. On this point, the DSR foresees enhanced Army Reserve brigades—hopefully freed from natural disaster relief roles—protecting and expanding northern bases, enhancing the survivability of the ADF and visiting forces.

In a similar vein, retired Major General Mick Ryan is among the land warfare experts who have noted that the DSR has little to say about the close fight, which remains integral to war. That’s true, although we know the classified version of the DSR was much longer. And the DSR does say that the army must still prioritise ‘close combat capabilities, including a single armoured combined-arms brigade, able to meet the most demanding land challenges in our region’.

Viewing the DSR in context, the government continues to invest in advanced close combat platforms. After the DSR was published, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy confirmed new orders for Abrams main battle tanks, which maintain unique capabilities in high-intensity environments. Equally, Australia remains committed to acquiring Apache armed reconnaissance helicopters, which some analysts had speculated might be trimmed. Hopefully, Hanwha or Rheinmetall would stick to plans to manufacture IFVs in Australia if it wins the contract, which allows for scaling up supply onshore if Australia’s needs change.

In terms of land warfare scenarios, the army must continue to plan for regional stabilisation and assistance missions, such as those in Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands in recent decades, which may become more frequent and complex as climate change drives instability. It would be dangerous to assume that these stabilisation missions and counter-insurgency operations will only be ‘low intensity’, especially for those involved, when measuring intensity in terms of the frequency and scale of engagements. Equally, the army may need to conduct joint operations to defeat technologically advanced land forces, including, for example, if the PLA developed a base close to Australia.

But caveats aside, it’s important to recognise that the DSR will affect Australia’s capacity to fight large-scale land engagements by reducing the army to a single combined-arms brigade. In theory, some of the risks this causes could be mitigated by not asking the ADF to fight certain kinds of wars. By stressing the importance of our northern approaches to Australia’s ‘primary area of military interest’, the DSR indicates that the ADF should be spared the burden of sending expeditionary contingents to US-led coalitions in the Middle East. It also implies that the ADF’s focus would stay closer to home in a Taiwan contingency.

Understandably, some will remain sceptical that this is achievable. At various points throughout its history, the Australian Army has weathered the consequences of being told to prepare for a certain type of conflict and then ordered to fight in very different circumstances. Those making these points should be heard respectfully; for too long, many of those engaged in Australia’s debate on the army have talked past each other.

The acid test will be whether the transformation advocated in the DSR will be properly resourced by the government and embraced by the army. For instance, it’s essential that strike, littoral and close combat forces have the resources to train together—on the field and through simulations. And the logistical challenges in posturing select capabilities in northern Australia can only be overcome through close engagement with northern governments and people, including First Nations communities, as well as US visiting forces.

As Stuart told the army on Anzac Day, he is relying on every soldier to meet the challenges and opportunities of this ‘inflection point’. After all, institutional change, like war, is ultimately a human endeavour.

Australia should examine Plan B-21 as it weighs up long-range strike options

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The government has said the Australian Defence Force requires greater long-range strike capability. This was first stated in the previous government’s 2020 defence strategic update, which emphasised the need for ‘self-reliant deterrent effects’. The current government has endorsed that assessment: Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles has said: ‘The ADF must augment its self-reliance to deploy and deliver combat power through impactful materiel and enhanced strike capability—including over longer distances.’ He’s coined the term ‘impactful projection’ to describe the intended effect of this capability, which is to place ‘a very large question mark in the adversary’s mind’.

The term may be new, but the idea is not. To us, it’s a restating of the concept of deterrence by denial; that is, having sufficiently robust capabilities to convince an adversary that the cost of acting militarily against Australia isn’t worth any gains that might be made.

But the need for the ADF to have those kinds of capabilities has become much more urgent. As the defence strategic update noted, there’s no longer 10 years of warning time of conventional conflict involving Australia. And this is not just the prospect of conflict far from Australia’s shores. The force-projection capabilities of China’s People’s Liberation Army have grown dramatically in the past two decades and include long-range conventional ballistic missiles, bombers and advanced surface combatants that have already transited through Australian waters.

The worst-case scenario for Australia’s military strategy has always been the prospect of an adversary establishing a presence in our near region from which it can target Australia or isolate us from our partners and allies. PLA strike capabilities in the archipelago to our north or the Southwest Pacific, whether on ships and submarines or land-based missiles and aircraft, would represent that worst case. That could occur as China sought to horizontally escalate a conflict with the US to stretch its military resources. So, an enhanced ADF long-range strike capability is not primarily about a conflict off Taiwan or in the South China Sea.

Unfortunately, the ADF’s strike cupboard is rather bare. Defence is acquiring more modern maritime strike and land-attack missiles for its existing platforms. But, even if equipped with better weapons, strike systems built around fighter planes or surface combatants are unlikely to have the affordable mass or range needed to deter or defeat a major power’s attempts to project force against Australia.

There’s no doubt that the defence strategic review commissioned by Marles is considering new strike options. According to the review’s terms of reference, those capabilities need to be delivered by 2032–33. In our ASPI report, released today, we consider options to increase the ADF’s strike power in that time frame.

We start with the US Air Force’s B-21 Raider bomber, which was recently shown to the public for the first time. The B-21 has become a topical issue, but so far there’s been little reliable information to inform the discussion. This report is a first step in investigating the public data that is currently available on the B-21, while also analysing the aircraft’s suitability for Australia’s needs.

As an extremely stealthy bomber that can deliver large amounts of ordnance across our near region, the B-21 is the gold standard in strike capability. It could potentially be delivered by 2032–33. But that capability comes at great cost. We estimate the total acquisition cost for a squadron of 12 aircraft to be in the order of $25–28 billion and it will have a sustainment cost that would put it among the ADF’s most expensive current capabilities (but be significantly less than nuclear-powered submarines).

But that cost is potentially offset by a number of factors. A single B-21 can deliver the same effect as many F-35As. The stealth bombers would not require the overhead of supporting capabilities such as air-to-air refuellers when operating in our region. They could also prosecute targets from secure bases in Australia’s south, where they would have access to workforce, fuel and munitions.

Of course, there are other options for long-range strike. These have their own constellations of cost, capability and risk. Long-range missiles, including hypersonics, have also received much recent attention. But they may be deceptively expensive; the further we want a missile to fly, the more expensive it is, and none of its exquisite components are reusable. History suggests that very large numbers of missiles will be needed to defeat an adversary—more than we’re ever likely to be able to afford or stockpile.

Any assessment of capability options needs to be informed by robust cost–benefit analysis. The B-21 certainly has a high sticker price, but if, by virtue of its stealth, it can employ cheaper, short-range weapons, then in the long run it may be more affordable and deliver greater effects than long-range missiles alone. It was analysis of this kind that persuaded the US Air Force to go down the path of a new bomber in the first place. Of course, such exercises are assumption-rich activities, and all assumptions need to be rigorously tested; what’s valid for the US might not be for Australia.

Then there are several options that fall under the heading of the ‘Goldilocks’ bomber: a strike system that doesn’t have the eye-watering cost of the B-21 but still delivers a meaningful capability enhancement. One option is provided by palletised munitions dropped from military cargo aircraft. There are two attributes of this approach that have appeal in Australia’s circumstances. The first is that many of the components, such as the missiles and aircraft, are already in the ADF inventory or are being acquired. The second is that airlifters can operate from the short and unprepared airfields found in our region. More strike aircraft operating from more locations enhances the survivability of our strike system and complicates the adversary’s operating picture.

Another Goldilocks approach is potentially provided by autonomous, uncrewed systems. They will still need to be relatively large to provide the range needed for impactful projection. However, it’s possible to discern what the solution could look like—for example, a larger version of the MQ-28A Ghost Bat ‘loyal wingman’ that can deliver ordnance across our near region. At some point, the future of strike will involve larger crewed and uncrewed systems supported by large numbers of ‘the small, the smart and the many’—cheap, disposable systems that Australian industry can responsively produce in mass. The key question is: can that be done within the defence strategic review’s 2032–33 target time frame?

There’s potentially a way for Australia to have its cake and eat it too: by hosting USAF B-21s. Under the Enhanced Air Cooperation stream of the US Force Posture Initiatives, USAF B-1, B-2 and B-52 aircraft visit northern Australia. In future, having our major ally rotate B-21s through northern Australia could obviate the requirement for Australia to have this kind of long-range strike capability in its own order of battle. Ultimately, the issue comes down to how much independent, sovereign strike capability the Australian government requires. And any sovereign Australian capability adds to the overall alliance pool, which is the core concept underpinning AUKUS.

Our report also examines some of the main arguments against the B-21. While all of them need to be considered seriously, we would also note that the world has changed. The September 2021 AUKUS announcement under which Australia will acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability demonstrates that. Things that were previously inconceivable are now happening, so we shouldn’t dismiss the B-21 out of hand. Our recommendation is that the Australian government engage with the US government to gain access to the information on the B-21 program so it can make an informed decision on the bomber’s viability for Australia.

Australia needs more defence grunt in its Pacific policy

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When it comes to Australia’s policy in the Pacific islands, what’s first needed is a changed mindset. We need to recognise that the region is key terrain. It’s essential for US and Australian defence; it’s not a secondary theatre where we do ‘just enough to keep the locals calm and on side’. What we do in the Pacific islands region will tie directly to success or failure in a war with China over Taiwan.

Consider the challenges posed by a Chinese presence (military and otherwise) in the Pacific islands, even in peacetime. For Australia, it’d be tough to try to fight our way up towards Taiwan without getting whittled down in the process. The same goes for the US having to fight its way across the central Pacific.

The second key point is that our approach should be one of no ‘cargo cults’. We should look at the totality of what the US and Australia (and our partners) are doing in the region. If it looks like a cargo cult—showing up, putting on a good show and then leaving—then we’re doing things wrong.

It should be a permanent presence and should leave no part of the region untended. If you’re not there, you’re not interested. It doesn’t matter how handsome a party you put on when you pitch up. We should look at things from the locals’ perspective, not from a ‘theatre engagement matrix’ perspective where being busy is the main thing.

The third point to bear in mind is that money spent in the Pacific islands is like a maintenance fee or insurance. It is far cheaper than having to fight a war to recover them.

It’s also useful to consider the World War II analogy: China is interested in the Pacific islands for the same reason Japan was interested in them. It’s all about complicating US access to the Western Pacific.

From an Australian military perspective, it’s not about bases but rather ‘rotational access’, which we should now deepen and broaden, along with the US. Australia should create a Pacific regiment. The focus should be on building island capacity in areas like disaster mitigation and response. The regiment could be headquartered in Fiji or Papua New Guinea with Australian Defence Force personnel integrated into it under a South Pacific command. We should find some junior officers who want to contribute to regional resilience in areas such as small unit tactics, surveillance and boat operations.

Working with locals, this would develop skills for local youth along with discipline that pays off later in life and feeds directly into local societies. It would seem to be a natural activity for the US Marine Corps’ new littoral combat regiments, offering valuable experience while influencing and facilitating US access. Australia should encourage the US to consider opportunities for bringing us and Japan into the effort.

We should set up national guard programs in certain island nations with US and Australian defence support. Disaster response can be the main focus. One or two such relationships should be with a combined national guard and Australian Army reserve unit. And maybe in a few cases we could designate a reserve unit to a Pacific island as well. The Australian government has promised to establish a defence training school in the Pacific. Along with the host nation, we should make it a joint effort of the US, Australia and Japan and make it a priority.

Australia should encourage the US to establish a marine expeditionary unit or amphibious ready group operating out of Darwin and elsewhere in northern Australia. It would be multinational. But with US, Australia and Japan as the core. This means that the Australian government needs to end the lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company. The lease is preventing the rapid development of the port for more important security purposes and is slowing and complicating greater US Marine Corps and ADF use of the port.

Enabling greater US access to expanded facilities here in Australia is about our security and improving our defence facilities for our own use and for the use of our allies and partners. If Washington can capitalise on Palau’s offer for the US to establish a base there, then Australia should offer some military assets there. We’re now building 12 offshore patrol vessels. There could be a rotational access of, say, four OPVs through the area.

US and Australian defence forces should deliver health assistance to the islands. The Mercy, a 1,000-bed US Navy hospital ship, has sailed throughout the Pacific offering medical care to many island populations. Australia now has a Pacific support vessel that will expand the range of support we provide across the region, including delivering medical assistance. Australia should also work with the US to develop regular rotations of teams of military clinicians through host-nation hospitals for around four weeks each to leave a more lasting impact by developing a cadre of local health experts.

Australia, working with support from the US, should initiate a joint Australia–PNG project to enhance the port facilities and airfield at Milne Bay. It offers better potential defensive coverage of the vital Solomon and Coral Seas than Manus Island more than 900 kilometres to the north. Australian forces could operate from Milne Bay in support of PNG and other Pacific Islands Forum partners.

South Pacific defence ministers last year agreed to a Pacific-led initiative to develop a regional humanitarian and disaster response framework to refine the way countries in the region work together when disaster strikes. Why not take this to the next level with Australia and the US working with the islands to create a regional stabilisation and disaster response force?

Finally, Australia should be recruiting Pacific islanders into the ADF. Pacific recruitment sits comfortably with the goal of security and economic integration with Australia over time and at a pace and scale that’s welcomed by Pacific island countries. Military service is a unique offer we can make that China can’t and won’t. No changes to defence legislation would be required, only a change of policy.

Australia and the US must respond to both development challenges and geostrategic competition in the Pacific islands region. We can’t afford the luxury of choosing. And the military forces of the US and Australia have a vital contribution to make.

Aggressive action required to meet Defence’s ambitious emissions-reduction target

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Despite the inevitably heavy redactions, the Department of Defence’s brief for the incoming government makes for interesting reading, including its section on climate change.

The briefing, released under freedom of information laws, acknowledges that Defence’s cooperate with the Office of National Intelligence on an assessment of the national security implications of climate change. It also states that ‘Defence will continue to provide … support to disaster response within the context of climate risk’—but says this is placing increasing pressure on the Australian Defence Force’s capacity to fulfill its other missions.

Much of the information outlined was already known, but its reiteration among key points for the new government signals the seriousness with which Defence’s leaders are taking climate change.

An even stronger signal about these concerns is provided by the emissions-reduction targets the brief reveals:

Defence has initiated a range of investments to drive a 43 per cent reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2040. The Defence Renewable Energy and Energy Security Program is delivering renewable energy and associated technologies, leading high-level feasibility assessments of low-emission technologies including hydrogen, battery energy storage, micro-grids and alternative liquid fuels.

Defence is matching the government’s overall 43% target by 2030 (presumably relative to the same 2005 baseline, though that isn’t said in the brief). Moreover, it has apparently committed to a net-zero position a decade ahead of the government’s overall national target.

This is a remarkable commitment. Defence operates a range of capabilities that are very difficult to decarbonise because we don’t have viable replacements for things like powerful jet and marine engines, and nor do we yet have access to alternative fuels for such systems. Moving the defence estate to green electricity is one thing; getting the air force’s F-35 jets and the navy’s giant landing ships off legacy fuels is another.

Nevertheless, an ambitious approach to emissions reduction is entirely justified for Defence. First, it faces genuine social-licence concerns in the long term. While Australia lacks readily available data on the defence organisation’s contribution to public-sector or national emissions, the numbers from allied countries are significant and indicative.

The UK armed forces account for 50% of the UK government’s emissions. The US military similarly accounts for 56% of US government emissions, is the world’s single largest institutional petroleum user and carbon emitter, and would rank as the 55th largest CO2 emitter if it were a country. One widely cited estimate puts it at around 6% of total US emissions. Even if that estimate is on the high side, a single institutional user accounting for even 1% or 2% of national emissions is significant.

If underlying military emissions remain steady or even rise, their portion of public-sector and national emissions will increase significantly as decarbonisation proceeds in the broader economy. It is certainly true that criticism of military emissions isn’t yet mainstream and that exemptions for militaries like the ADF are not domestically controversial. But we should expect that these issues will be increasingly contested as military emissions take on greater relative significance.

A second reason for taking an ambitious approach is that the legitimacy of those emissions is also likely to be increasingly contested as climate-change impacts deepen and worsen. Without compromising its ability to deliver military power, Defence should be doing everything it can to avoid contributing to the climate-driven problems to which Defence itself will need to respond (for example, disaster responses at home and abroad, or increased regional instability). Avoided climate change is not a mere footnote.

Third, there are numerous benefits of alternative energy sources from a military point of view. For example, Australian Army leaders placed great emphasis on the tactical benefits of the Bushmaster all-electric protected mobility vehicle when it was unveiled last month in Adelaide: it is quieter, quicker and mechanically simpler than its conventionally fuelled sibling. Dependency on fossil-fuel supply chains is a longstanding anxiety of some strategic thinkers. Military bases with independent renewable power supplies are more resilient and operationally useful than those that aren’t, which is another reason for the great emphasis in the defence brief on solar supplies at various bases.

At this point, it’s unclear how Defence will achieve these bold targets and what is wrapped up in the ‘Defence Renewable Energy and Energy Security Program’, though the briefing does indicate some of the technical priorities that will be required. In estimates of US Department of Defence energy use, ‘operational energy use’, defined as that ‘required for training, moving, and sustaining military forces and weapons platforms’, represents 70% of the department’s energy consumption. More than two-thirds of that total is jet fuel.

If the ADF’s energy use and emissions profile (they are not same thing) are anything vaguely like the US military’s proportions, even complete decarbonisation of the defence estate and non-operational activities may not be enough to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030. Aggressive action to approach complete decarbonisation of that part of the portfolio will be required in parallel to work attacking the operational side of the problem.

As we outlined in our report, The Australian Defence Force and its future energy requirements, earlier this year, solving the more difficult technical problems required to shift away from legacy fuels at scale requires long-term thinking in partnership with industry.

Such partnerships could include collaboration among researchers, key industry players like Qantas and Virgin, and the defence organisation to realise promising technologies like ‘power-to-liquid’ at a meaningful scale. The jet fuel example is also central because the ADF, Qantas and Virgin make up such a significant portion of the Australian consumer market that concerted action by this relative handful of players would have a potentially outsized effect.

Airport and port operators are other key partners in realising alternative fuel use at scale across the country. Defence is partly dependent on such commercial facilities, but they are also critical because they represent the physical nexus at which many of these technologies and inputs need to be pulled together.

Targeted but significant investment in research on hydrogen and battery technologies should also be in the policy mix, and hopefully that’s all part of what the department refers to when it cites these technologies in the brief.

How Defence’s efforts on this front are integrated with those of our allies, whose economies and militaries operate at significantly greater scale than our own, is another important open question.

Our conversations with major industrial and investment players in this space have indicated that there’s significant investment appetite remaining, beyond existing and high-profile initiatives like the Sun Cable venture. The right policy levers need to be pulled to ensure that a portion of this capital is allocated to potential technologies and capabilities with strategic military, not just economic, relevance. As much transparency as possible about Defence’s strategy to meet its targets should be part of such an approach, because it’s necessary to facilitate engagement with partners across the economy.

We now know that Defence has set itself remarkably ambitious emissions reductions targets. Modest innovations like the electric Bushmaster and investment in solar power across the defence estate are important steps forward. If a net-zero commitment for 2040 is to be met with more than huge purchases of carbon offsets, still larger policy steps will be needed without delay.

New government can deliver what Australia needs to defend itself in a dangerous decade

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Skilled diplomacy, a powerful and achievable deterrent capability developed with urgency, and the highly trained personnel to drive a technically skilled defence force will be crucial to Australia’s defence in the uncertain decades ahead.

A big dilemma confronting the incoming defence minister is how to resolve the disconnect between the 2020 defence strategic update, which signalled that Australia might find itself embroiled in a major conflict without the 10 years’ warning time that has long been considered likely, and the 2020 force structure plan which set out a plan to re-equip the Australian Defence Force that would not be delivered for decades.

During the election campaign, Labor’s defence spokesperson, Brendan O’Connor, signed up to the Coalition’s increases to Defence spending, with the March budget increasing it to $48.6 billion and further growth set to take it to $70 billion by 2030. Labor also agreed with the big investments being made in frigates and nuclear-powered submarines.

The challenge for the new government on defence, though, isn’t about the headline budget figures, or the massive, long-term projects it’ll have to manage. It’s to use the large and growing defence budget to make Australia more secure this decade—over the next 1, 3, 5 and 8 years—not from 2035 and out to 2050 as the new frigates and submarines slowly arrive.

The 2020s look to be a dangerous decade for Australia and our region because of an aggressive China under Xi Jinping. And that aggression isn’t just a long way away, in places like the South China Sea and around Taiwan. It’s close to home given China’s growing presence in the South Pacific and the implications of the security deal Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has made with Beijing. Unravelling that agreement will be another major challenge for the incoming minister and their counterpart in foreign affairs. It’s a time to gather strength with friends and allies, as in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s priority dash to the Quad meeting in Tokyo.

The good news for the new government is that there are things to build on and accelerate—like the work underway to get at least some of the guided weapons our military use produced in Australia so that we aren’t dependent on risky and vulnerable international supply chains. As we’re seeing every day in the war in Ukraine, these essential military supplies are needed in numbers.

Like militaries all over the world, the ADF is watching closely the lessons from Ukraine, right down to footage of model aircraft enthusiasts dropping grenades from small commercial drones and of the Moskva, Russia’s Baltic Sea flagship burning and sinking.

Do the columns of wrecked and rusting hulks of Russian tanks signal the end of armoured vehicles as an effective force? Probably not. Armour was very badly handled by the Russians despite the Ukrainians being badly outnumbered. It needs to be used as part of a system including infantry, artillery and air support, which the Kremlin did not provide, but armour’s vulnerabilities to cheap weapons are undeniable.

The new government will need a comprehensive early briefing from the ADF on all the complex detail of the AUKUS agreement with the US and UK and plans to help Australia obtain eight nuclear-powered submarines.

That will include the content and progress of the talks the Royal Australian Navy’s nuclear-powered submarine taskforce is involved in with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that the plan doesn’t weaken the international non-proliferation regime.

The navy has said it will ensure the project embraces such high safety standards that it will set a rigorous new benchmark under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT.

The reactors on both US and UK nuclear-powered submarines use highly enriched, or ‘weapons grade’, uranium that does not need to be replaced for the boat’s 30-year life. Such fuel could be used to make nuclear bombs.

Other nations, including France, use low-enriched uranium in their submarine reactors but they need to be refuelled several times through the life of the submarine. That uranium is not suitable for bombs, but the refuelling process is a complex one that would probably require ongoing help from the provider country.

The submarine enterprise is as massive as it is ambitious.

It is likely to see Australia obtaining an advanced new boat, still being designed, from either the US or the UK.

In the meantime, Australians will find themselves crewing US or UK submarines to gain experience and professional skills.

When its AUKUS allies are satisfied that Australia can meet the highest nuclear-safeguard standards, the RAN may eventually ‘borrow’ a nuclear-powered boat from one of them.

But AUKUS is about much more than submarines.

As defence minister, Peter Dutton chose the big US companies, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, as industry partners for missile production. The new government must push these companies to start production in Australia by 2025, not allow them to slow-roll things over a decade. And it would be wise to bring in some faster-moving competition through companies like Norway’s Kongsberg and Israeli-Australian partnership Varley Rafael, which would each get production of missiles the ADF have chosen started fast and push our American friends to also get moving quickly.

The new government can push the navy to do what it should have done all along and arm the only new ships Australia is getting into the fleet before 2035, the Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels. These warships are more relevant than ever given the Chinese navy’s push into our near region.

Labor can focus where it traditionally likes to in defence, on local industry. Medium and small Australian firms can provide the military with technologies from artificial intelligence capabilities, cyber systems and armed and unarmed small drones. They can get these new technologies into the hands of our military to use and adapt much faster if they aren’t forced to navigate the labyrinth that is the Defence bureaucracy and procurement system.

It will take a strong prime minister and determined defence minister to break through this internal process logjam, but that can be a satisfying role for a new minister—and it’s one our security environment demands. The MQ-28A Ghost Bat drone also known as the loyal wingman and the investment in large unmanned undersea vessels announced by Dutton during the election campaign are tantalising glimmers of what’s possible.

Delivering new capability to the Australian military over this decade—not just in the mid-2030s—will show taxpayers they are getting something for the billions going into Defence in economically challenging times. And, with Australia’s powerful partners in Washington, Tokyo, Delhi and Seoul, it’ll help deter Beijing from thinking conflict is a quick way to achieve its goals. The Chinese military does respect countervailing military power. So, how novel and fortunate for an Australian defence minister to have the prospect of starting projects and seeing them deliver results to our military while they are still in the job.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that nothing short of a courageous armed defence can stop a violent and autocratic aggressor, war can also be an unnecessary consequence when diplomacy and armed deterrence fail.

But diplomacy remains a crucial first element and a stronger and better resourced Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is a strategic imperative. The vastly experienced and capable Penny Wong will be influential in cabinet to make that happen. Tone may help, but policy substance still needs to deal with structural realities.

The new government also needs to free up and encourage the ADF to play a much greater role in informing the public about the strategic threats posed by climate change with the strong possibility of competition for resources such as food and water and the likelihood of mass international people movements from areas that become inundated or otherwise uninhabitable. That’s the practical, security side to the new government’s climate agenda.

Difficult decisions which will shape the ADF for decades need to be made soon on armoured vehicles and the future of special forces.

On integrity and accountability, the new government gets the chance to deliver what the overwhelming majority of Australia’s serving military personnel want—accountability for any among them who are proven to have committed unlawful killings in Afghanistan as well as changes to the command chain and the way allegations of misconduct on operations are investigated and handled in the future.

A previous defence minister, Linda Reynolds, undertook to inform the Australian public, through statements to parliament, about the implementation of the Brereton inquiry’s forensic investigation and recommendations. That has not happened. Now those processes can be pursued more publicly with the full backing of the new government, both through the Office of the Special Investigator outside Defence, and through Defence’s internal disciplinary and administrative systems.

This will align Defence with steps to increase integrity and government transparency that look like being a key part of the new parliamentary program of Labor and the independents.

It’ll be symbolic here to have the new defence minister do what Brereton recommended and give periodic statements in parliament updating on progress with implementation and change.

So, inheriting bipartisan structural policy settings and a growing defence budget is a foundation. The next three years, though, will be busy time of delivery and decision for Albanese and his national security committee colleagues.

Understanding the military’s role in space

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The establishment of defence space organisations among space-faring nations means they must explain their purpose and rationale alongside well-established branches of militaries. Three distinct camps have emerged in the attempt to characterise the role of defence space organisations. The first group argues that the space domain should not be militarised and warns that even using language describing it as a contested environment will turn space into a warfighting domain.

The second group argues that space is an operational domain and cautions that any other language would make war in space inevitable.

The final group argues that space has been a warfighting domain since the beginning of the space age. They say that adversary counterspace developments suggest that space as an operational domain will quickly become a warfighting domain.

Viewing space in such stark terms, however, ignores reality while creating a belief that states can identify and control the strategies of malign actors. The fact is that space has become another area in which humans interact to trade and grow prosperous. And where there are human interactions, war is an ever-present danger. Such is the human condition.

Attempting to frame the space domain through binary concepts such ‘operational and warfighting’ hinder the effectiveness of defence space organisations’ ability to foresee crises and avoid wars.

The 19th century US maritime thinker and writer Alfred Thayer Mahan’s answer to the question ‘Why do we need a navy?’ was that access to the sea was a nation’s path to long-term prosperity obtained through the interrelations between trade, wealth and power. In his view, the aim of naval power was to create political leverage to achieve the advantage at sea by applying economic pressure to an adversary. Participating in battles was secondary to that objective. Through this lens, Mahan was able to articulate the importance of maritime power to his country.

Mahan’s nuanced argument is important for modern space organisations, including the military, because it allows them to convey the importance of having access to and the ability to operate in the space domain. For instance, space-based technologies, such as global navigation satellite systems, are critical in today’s society. The UK government estimates that the loss of access to global positioning, navigation and timing services for just five days could lead to an economic loss of £5.2 billion ($9.2 billion).

The fact that most space assets are dual-purpose and owned and operated by civilians and military alike highlights that it’s virtually impossible to separate the two uses. This is because the security and prosperity of the state and its people are not mutually exclusive. Improved technology and innovative approaches have reduced costs while democratising access to space and creating challenges and opportunities. These developments have also increased congestion and competition in space.

For democratic states, military space organisations exist to enable the continued friendly growth of the space sector, deter malign actors through credible capabilities and respond with clear strategic aims when required. To do that, they need to be able to operate and generate effects in, through and from space. And they need to develop the capabilities to achieve these outcomes as individual organisations rather than being viewed as providers of enabling functions.

But it is also paramount that they support the development of agreed rules for responsible space behaviour. The laws of armed conflict for the terrestrial domains evolved over many centuries, but that’s a luxury we don’t have in developing equivalent frameworks for space. Settling these issues will remove any ambiguities on the role of defence space organisations up front. And it will allow the argument to be framed by what nations seek to achieve rather than the means available to do so.

Two key tasks of military space organisations are to assure defence forces’ access to it by establishing resilient space capabilities and to deter or prevent an adversary from using counterspace capabilities to deny access to space systems.

For Australia’s Defence Space Command, situated within the Royal Australian Air Force, these two tasks are vital to the Australian Defence Force’s ability to support national policy through the application of military force. In the first task—assured access—the command oversees space policy, strategy and doctrine, which in turn drives capability choices to meet ADF operational and tactical needs. This is about developing space architecture, including through the commercial sector, to support space operations and provide upstream elements such as satellites and launch capabilities. It also requires developing conceptual, doctrinal and strategic thinking. Capability decisions don’t emerge from an intellectual vacuum and must be based on a realistic understanding of the operational domain. It can’t be based on the hope that all actors will observe norms of behaviour under all conditions.

This reality leads to the essential space deterrence role, which is linked to developing assured access and encapsulates the space control mission. It is this mission—which the 2022 Defence space power manual describes as ‘offensive and defensive operations to ensure freedom of action in space by defeating efforts to interfere with or attack Australian or allied space systems and, when directed, deny space services to a competitor’—that has the potential to generate controversy when considering the rationale for a defence space organisation.

For Australia, it’s important to adopt a clear-headed perspective on the emerging nature of the space domain. Adversary development of counterspace capabilities and doctrine suggests that space is likely to quickly become weaponised, and quickly evolve into a warfighting domain, prior to or at the outset of a military conflict.

With this reality in mind, it’s important that Australia sustain the development of defence space capabilities, including for space control. This doesn’t preclude continued efforts in diplomacy through the United Nations open-ended working group on norms of responsible behaviour in space. There needs to be a dual-path approach, combining legal and diplomatic efforts with the establishment of credible space control and assured space access, both of which recognise the nature of a contested and congested space domain. It would be wise, however, not to build any expectation that major-power adversaries will honour any norms of responsible behaviour or show restraint in the development of sophisticated counterspace capabilities.

Russia’s Ukraine invasion must be Australia’s clarion call

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As Ukraine slowly turns the tide on Russia’s assault, Australian leaders must quickly heed the warning of their resistance. War between major powers is no longer a remote possibility in the 21st century. But Canberra isn’t moving fast enough to prepare for a future in which our sovereignty and strategic interests are directly challenged by a hostile great power.

Right across the Indo-Pacific, China’s growing military presence and aggressive grey-zone coercion are threatening the regional order, undermining Australia’s security from the South China Sea to Solomon Islands. Faced with the most dangerous strategic environment since 1942, Australia urgently needs a more robust and imaginative statecraft.

Regardless of who wins the 21 May federal election, at least five things are needed to chart a more decisive regional strategy.

First, Canberra should follow Berlin’s lead and establish a one-off, multibillion-dollar fund to build a stronger Australian Defence Force for the 2020s.

Today’s ADF lacks the range and depth to pose dilemmas for a highly capable adversary in Australia’s immediate region. Although Defence has dismissed its longstanding assumption that Australia would have a 10 years’ strategic warning in advance of conflict, too many of its planned military investments are set to deliver in the never-never of the 2030s and 2040s.

More diversified capabilities are needed now—purchased off the shelf—to expand the options available to future governments. This includes large stocks of long-range missiles for deterrent effect, enabled by larger investments in mobility, theatre-level logistics and forward basing.

The ADF should buy the US Army’s long-range hypersonic weapon, further expand its electronic warfare portfolio, rapidly field lethal autonomous platforms, and develop more counter-space means. Expanding the Australian Signals Directorate’s offensive cyber and signals intelligence capabilities is a welcome start. But new unorthodox manoeuvre and intelligence options are also needed for the ADF to pose its own grey-zone challenges—going beyond the window-dressing reforms in the wake of the Brereton inquiry into special forces.

Second, the ADF’s force structure, size and operational fighting concepts must be critically reviewed against the principal adversary that Australia faces: China.

This review should be conducted externally, akin to Paul Dibb’s seminal mid-1980s work, and occur early in the new term of government. While the 2020 defence strategic update brought a sober and clear-headed strategy, the accompanying force structure plan was a misfire.

The ADF can’t afford to perpetuate a legacy ‘balanced force’ in which all services are made to feel special. Instead, hard choices must be made to design a force and way of fighting tailored to Australia’s strategic geography.

ADF personnel growth needs to be a quick march to a minimum 80,000 this decade, not a ‘strollout’ by 2040. Crucially, if spending 3% of GDP on defence is to be fiscally credible, Canberra must stop wasting billions on non-performing or irrelevant capabilities like heavy armoured vehicles and a $45-billion Hunter-class frigate program that won’t deliver its first ship until 2033, with the last to arrive in 2047.

Third, Australia must expand its value proposition as a ‘partner of choice’ to deepen and diversify its defence partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.

While progress is being made with established partners like Japan and Singapore, it’s far too slow and, in key aspects, continues to favour form over substance. Australia must pick up the pace to transform these relationships into vehicles for coordinated regional strategy, both bilaterally and with the US and other partners.

Elsewhere, Australia must be humble and strive to build deeper defence ties with Indonesia, India, Vietnam and the Philippines. This means providing more of the direct and tangible collaboration these nations want, such as expanding military intelligence sharing, routinely conducting combined operational activities and increasing the sophistication of exercises. Buying Australian military hardware and supplies also needs to be made easier.

Realising two-way trust in this process will be hard and require more discipline. But it’s only by offering practical cooperation that exceeds expectations that Canberra can build the robust alignments essential for defending and preserving a resilient Indo-Pacific order.

Fourth, Australia must pursue a more ambitious diplomacy and bolster its capacity to wield regional influence and foster meaningful engagement.

Diplomacy needs to be valued as a national capability, like military and intelligence means, led by seasoned professionals and funded accordingly. But the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been under-resourced for too long.

Dismantling AusAID, the Australia Network and Radio Australia during the Abbott era was an own goal that squandered established advantages, especially in the Pacific. While infrastructure financing initiatives have delivered some results, the Solomons Islands’ security pact with China highlights the limits of this tool in the absence of a comprehensive Australian statecraft.

A regional influence agency should be considered to synchronise Australia’s public narrative, broadcasting, financing, humanitarian aid and disaster recovery efforts. Here, business, cultural and sporting bodies are Canberra’s best tools. But Australia’s regional interests demand a hybrid approach that brings the nation’s mandarins and non-government leaders under one roof.

A larger civil crisis capability is also needed, beyond the ADF, that can be deployed quickly and sustained overseas for longer. So long as global temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, the incidence and severity of climate-related disasters impacting our Pacific neighbours will increase—and Australia has a moral and strategic responsibility to do more.

Finally, the bipartisan Advisory War Council mechanism that guided Australia’s World War II effort should be reprised and adapted for today’s challenges.

By bringing together the cabinet’s National Security Committee with two or three opposition representatives, Australia could pursue an integrated, long-term strategy more effectively. A new national security council–like organ should enable this approach, organising Australian statecraft at a whole-of-nation level. To be effective, it must have a flat structure, be small in size and have a top-down mandate for conducting net assessments and grand strategy. Like its international peers, it should be staffed with leading talent from across politics, government, think tanks, business, the sciences and academia, bringing foresight and direction to what is currently an unimaginative interagency process for driving Australia’s regional strategy.

These aren’t the only answers. But they will help Canberra accelerate preparations for a more perilous future. Australia must leverage its strengths, exploit its asymmetries and genuinely invest in its Indo-Pacific neighbourhood.

If Ukraine’s resistance teaches Australia anything, it’s that now is the moment to get ready for great-power competition in our region. This is a race, and time is against us.

Designing an Australian DARPA

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In The Strategist in July, we outlined our concept for an Australian equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), mooted by ASPI. We envisaged this Australian version of DARPA filling the ‘valley of death’ between lab testing and demonstration of a prototype (that is, between technology readiness levels 4 and 7). It would utilise private as well as public funding, and it would provide a sovereign approach to development.

This new organisation was envisaged as working quickly, taking risks and focusing on developing the asymmetric capabilities that will be critical in any future conflict.

The importance of a new approach to Australian innovation, particularly for defence-relevant technologies, was acknowledged earlier this month in the government’s announcement of a ‘comprehensive review of Defence innovation, science and technology to help ensure the Australian Defence Force has access to the most cutting-edge capability in the world’.

But the track record of bringing Australian defence innovation into being isn’t great, with byzantine processes hindering both speed and risk taking. And the situation will worsen when we concern ourselves with software-based technologies rather than pure domain-specific hardware.

Technology advances rarely take hold in isolation and are unlikely to develop in a slow, steady and predictable fashion. They expand via the convergence of a few different technical improvements and enjoy tailwinds and feedback loops from adjacent and new products and markets.

New technologies are rarely a one-to-one replacement. Innovation opens new horizons and new capabilities and properties with new uses.

Australia also faces the economic challenges of developing systems within small markets, which means that efforts for innovation should also have dual uses in mind, not just defence.

As an example, the context for electric vehicle development was consumer electronics, mobile phones, power tools and the years of technical and economic development of lithium–ion batteries in those markets.

Would we expect the best-of-breed LiDAR-enhanced autonomous drones to be developed in isolation without ancillary-use cases and feeder markets for parts of the technology stack? Do we think cybersecurity is simply staying on top of the game of classified systems access?

The announcement of the AUKUS security partnership with an initial focus on cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and undersea capabilities provides an opportunity for change.

So, how might an Australian DARPA work?

First, technological or operational areas of interest would be advanced from the myriad organisations doing research in Australia. Research from these areas would be filtered by an independent board to identify technologies to be pursued. The agency’s role would be to take calculated risks and embrace the approach that projects don’t really fail—they provide lessons to build future success on.

Since the DARPA would develop technologies and systems with game-changing potential, the board would need the engineering, commercial and financial skills and experience to navigate technology industrialisation through the valley of death. Board members would network widely across industry and academia; they should not just be retired military officers or political appointees.

The Australian DARPA would go to industry with calls to address the selected topics, receive and evaluate proposals, and manage the development. Staff would not be public servants but would be experienced people with industry backgrounds and would be appointed for no more than five years. This staffing arrangement, based on the US DARPA practice, is extremely important to ensure that the agency is consistently refreshed with dynamic people and fresh ideas.

The director would be a respected industry person experienced in developing novel technologies and would on a time-limited tenure. The director would report to the independent board, which in turn would report directly to the minister for defence, or a delegated junior minister.

A key part of the Australian DARPA will be funding, particularly the way in which the private and the public funding streams combine. In one sense, the public funding is easy. There’s a budget allocation from government through the minister’s office and the DARPA accounts for the expenditure back through the same channel.

Private funding can play a critical role in both the provision of capital and direct industry engagement. According to Goldman Sachs, there have been 770 private international deals so far in 2021 by hedge funds with a valuation of $153 billion, and early-stage venture capital investments account for nearly three-quarters of that sum.

Private funding would be sought on a case-by-case basis depending on the technology under consideration and the potential for generating a commercial return, based on secondary (non-defence) use and the ability for licensing of that technology in several commercial subsectors. The specific opportunity to receive such licence fees—negotiated on a case-by-case basis­—would be the incentive for specific private-sector funding.

The geostrategic situation is deteriorating. Australia’s challenges are growing and coming closer. While new security arrangements may be useful, they are not the only answer. Australia needs to be able to move quickly to address technological opportunities and operational imperatives. To do this, we need a dynamic innovation organisation that’s able to utilise Australia’s substantial private investor pool and that’s willing to take risks and to move decisively.

An Australian DARPA would build national industry. It would build and retain important capabilities and skills. It would build national resilience. And it would contribute to the national economy by retaining important technologies domestically.

It’s time for an Australian DARPA.

ASPI’s decades: Leaving Afghanistan

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ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

In October 2013, seven weeks after Australia’s federal election, the new prime minister and new opposition leader stood together in Afghanistan to declare the end to Australia’s longest war. The message from Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten as the Australians left Uruzgan was of a job nobly performed.

There was no claim of victory after 12 years of military effort, and the mission-well-done language was marked by its hesitancy. Duty had been done, the troops were told, and at that point the rhetoric meter started to falter.

Abbott captured both the tone and the balance with his opening words at the ‘recognition ceremony’ at Tarin Kowt: ‘Australia’s longest war is ending, not with victory, not with defeat, but with, we hope, an Afghanistan that’s better for our presence here.’

Neither victory nor defeat was the most provisional of political epitaphs; the military summing up extolled the ‘professionalism and work ethic’ of the Australian Defence Force.

One political judgement was definitive: the bipartisan unanimity of every stage of the Afghanistan saga. The cross-party consensus was remarkable for showing few cracks and never publicly wavering.

Afghanistan joins World War II and Korea as conflicts that did not see Australia’s political parties at war over the war. Afghanistan, indeed, brought broad unity in Canberra on how the war should be fought, as well as the agreement that it was a war worth fighting. That distinguished Afghanistan from World War I, when the agreement on purpose was deeply shaken by the fight over conscription.

The unusual joint visit by Abbott and Shorten expressed the political reality that Labor and the Coalition had both supported an Australian role in the Afghanistan conflict all the way through. Both sides owned the war in government and neither deviated when in opposition.

During our longest war—as anything that looked like victory faded to invisibility—that bipartisan unity persisted; the consensus held even as the nature of the war changed and evolved, Australian casualties rose and popular Australian support fell away.

Unlike in any previous war, Australia’s leaders went to the funerals of those who died serving in Afghanistan, joining with families in mourning while giving assurance on the worth of the mission.

The centrality of the US alliance explains much—probably most—about the unbroken consensus of the Australian polity, as expressed by the four different prime ministers—two Liberal and two Labor—who owned the commitment to Afghanistan: John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Abbott.

Howard, in Washington on the day of the September 11 attacks, never wavered from going along with the US. Rudd performed the difficult balancing act of withdrawing from Iraq while hanging on to the US alliance; a central element in that was the turn back to Afghanistan as the ‘good war’. Whatever elements of the Rudd legacy Gillard disowned, Afghanistan was a mission she embraced as strongly as did either Howard or Rudd.

Beyond the US alliance, what sustained that unanimity? How were Australia’s politicians able to stay committed to Afghanistan when opinion polls showed that the great majority of Australians opposed the war?

One answer is that the Australian people supported the alliance while also being deeply doubtful about the war. And, while the voters expressed their rejection of the Afghanistan war when talking to pollsters, the national mourning at the return of the bodies of Australia’s fallen sons didn’t translate into any political action or activism; only the Greens stood against the Liberal–Labor consensus.

The bipartisan backing for Afghanistan rested on the US alliance, but it drew strength from the professional nature of the ADF. Liberal and Labor leaders were sending volunteers, not conscripts.

That three-way relationship between the people, a professional military and Australia’s politicians was the dynamic that allowed a series of governments to uphold the mission. The true cost was carried by the ADF. What the long mission did to Australia’s soldiers is a reality that is becoming clearer long after the withdrawal from Uruzgan.

Marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between Australia and Afghanistan in 2019, William Maley judged that what ultimately bound the countries was Australia’s strong interest in Afghanistan’s progress down the broad path set in 2001. This was a complex mixture of state-building, institutional development, economic change, civil-society activism, and enhancement of human rights and freedoms. A failure in Afghanistan, Maley wrote, would be catastrophic for regional and global security:

To start with, such a failure would undoubtedly fuel a narrative similar to the one that appeared following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989: that radical religion is a force multiplier that can defeat even a superpower. This would likely have the effect of stimulating the growth of radicalism all the way from the Arab Middle East to the Indonesian archipelago, undermining years of effort directed at countering violent extremism in Australia’s neighbourhood and beyond. A failure in Afghanistan could also trigger very large new flows of Afghan refugees.

In November 2020, after a four-year-long investigation into allegations that members of Australian special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan, 25 soldiers stood accused of murdering 39 unarmed Afghan civilians or prisoners and cruelly treating two others.

The inquiry, led by New South Wales Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton, a major general in the Army Reserve, found credible information about 23 incidents in which one or more non-combatants or prisoners were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian soldiers in circumstances which, if accepted by a jury, would be the war crime of murder. Some of these incidents involved a single victim, and some multiple victims. None of these incidents occurred under pressure in the heat of battle, the report said.

The chief of the ADF, General Angus Campbell, said the report detailed credible information regarding deeply disturbing allegations of unlawful killings: ‘To the people of Afghanistan, on behalf of the Australian Defence Force, I sincerely and unreservedly apologise for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers.’

The executive editor of The Strategist, Brendan Nicholson, made repeated visits to Afghanistan as a correspondent. He penned a piece, from both the heart and head, in response to the Brereton report’s finding:

The war in Afghanistan has profoundly changed the Australian Army and had a significant impact on the whole defence force. Around 30,000 ADF personnel served in Afghanistan and 41 died there. The vast majority of them fought and worked with great courage and decency, many living in small, isolated patrol bases in remote valleys with the Afghan soldiers they mentored.

They did not just teach the Afghans to shoot and then send them on their way; they fought, and some of them died, with those Afghan soldiers.

At the same time, Nicholson wrote, there was another war going on in the mountains and valleys a helicopter ride away. Australian and allied special forces battled through one dangerous operation after another in a conflict fought in darkness, out of sight of the media and the world at large. The special forces had become isolated from the rest of the army. A small minority of them got out of control:

This became a true corporal’s war in which junior NCOs had the authority of kings. On top of that, some officers were treated with contempt by a small number of NCOs who’d spent endless nights on dangerous operations and who undoubtedly did know more about fighting and surviving than those sent to command them. There was also a view by many in the regular army that they’d largely been marginalised through a determination to minimise casualties by using the special forces for just about everything.

When concerns were raised about possible unlawful killings, the army ordered its own investigations. What they uncovered was profoundly disturbing. Something had gone badly wrong on the Afghanistan missions—a deep-seated and distorted warrior ethos permeated parts of the SAS and an entrenched culture of impunity had taken hold there.

US President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021 was ‘an unseemly bolt for the exit’ and Biden’s ‘first big blunder in office’, Peter Jennings wrote: ‘Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump are on a unity ticket, locked onto a bizarre sabotage mission, negotiating, and now honouring, a “diplomatic agreement” with the Taliban, while deserting the very Afghans who have fought with our forces over the past two decades.’

Because of the ‘imminent international military withdrawal from Afghanistan’, Australia closed its embassy in Kabul on 28 May.

Amin Saikal wrote in June that Canberra must ponder whether it had pursued the right strategy, and if it had ever had an appropriate end game. Australia’s diplomatic and military operations had made a positive contribution, he said, especially to the reconstruction and security of Uruzgan:

Yet, most of the good work that Australian diggers and aid workers performed in Uruzgan is now in ruins, as the Taliban have regained control over much of the province.

The closure of the embassy ahead of total military withdrawal releases Australia from a very costly and unwinnable war. Yet, being the first country to disentangle itself from Afghanistan, basically cutting and running, is not a very good look.

And the closure is bound to hamper the investigation of the circumstances surrounding 39 Afghan civilians alleged to have been killed by Australian special forces and the justice that needs to be delivered in this respect. The initial justification of fighting terrorism rings hollow.

Australia served Afghanistan, standing with its US ally and with the ISAF, which delivered a tenuous stability to the country, kept reasonable regimes in power and the Taliban out of power, and helped to begin to build a better country.

The 2021 withdrawal tested the meaning and the resilience of those achievements. As the Taliban predicted, we had the clocks, but they had the time. Twenty years after being evicted, the Taliban retook Kabul.

In mid-2021, Australia’s spending on military operations was at its lowest level since before the ADF deployed to Timor-Leste in 1999.

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.