The prospect of the Royal Australian Navy’s promised nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) being built in Australia is firming up, along with a determination that they will be of a design shared with the United States or the United Kingdom and not a uniquely Australian ‘orphan’.

Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles has left no doubt that the government strongly backs the submarine project—including development of the massive industrial base and highly trained workforce required—and the need for Australia to have potent military capabilities.

‘We need a highly capable defence force which has the rest of the world take us seriously and enables us to do all the normal peaceful activities that are so important for our economy,’ Marles said while briefing journalists on the progress of the AUKUS program launched a year ago by Australia, the UK and the US.

A flow of goods was fundamental to an island trading nation, he said, so ensuring freedom of navigation of the seas and of the air above them was central to the economy.

The 300-strong taskforce examining how Australia will acquire its submarines is to make its recommendations to the government in March next year.

That will include what submarine design should be chosen and how these complex boats will be crewed and maintained.

Options include the US Virginia-class and British Astute-class boats. But The Strategist understands that planned new generation of submarines, the American SSN(X) and the British SSN(R), will be considered.

ASPI has released its second update on the AUKUS defence and technology-sharing agreement and makes the case that its focus should be on developing new capabilities that can be acquired rapidly and will significantly boost deterrence. It stresses that need is more pressing even than 12 months ago given the steady deterioration in the strategic environment illustrated by the behaviour of Moscow and Beijing.

It states that while much of the focus has been on the development of SSNs, the other areas of technology cooperation, such as cyber, hypersonics, undersea capabilities, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies, will be vital in the coming years.

‘Beyond the SSNs, the immediate priority should be long-range strike and deploying critical and emerging technologies to counter Beijing’s own rapidly developing capabilities. Achieving that may require making some difficult choices and trade-offs in the Defence Strategic Review in March,’ the ASPI report says.

It concludes that while innovation and information-sharing as stated areas of technology collaboration sound hackneyed, they are in fact critical for overturning traditional Defence mindsets about research and procurement in order to obtain much-needed capabilities more quickly—an issue that has been identified particularly acutely in Australia.

At his media briefing, Marles said the work of the SSN taskforce task was on track for an announcement early next year and ‘there is a power of work being done to meet that timeframe’.

The optimal pathway was taking shape, Marles said. ‘We can now begin to see it.’

The minister made it clear that Australia is unlikely to end up with a unique SSN design of its own. ‘It’s obviously much better if you are operating a platform which other countries operate as there is a shared experience and a shared industrial base to sustain it.’

And he said all three nations in the partnership are likely to be involved. ‘While the outcome it is yet to be determined, it would be better if we’re in a position where what we’re doing is genuinely a trilateral effort.’

Marles stressed that there was much more to AUKUS and the advanced technology it could produce than submarines. ‘With AUKUS there’s a really huge opportunity beyond submarines of pursuing a greater and more ambitious agenda. This is a large part of what I did in July when I was in the US and subsequently when I was in the UK. We’re very hopeful about the potential that AUKUS represents in respect of that.’

On the issue of how Australia produces the expertise to build, sustain and crew the submarines, Marles said that would involve creating pathways to a workforce with those skills.

‘To that end, it’s really clear that we will have to develop the capacity in Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. Sovereign capability is part of the story, but so is building up our workforce and industrial base.’

To rely solely on the US and the UK for this work would delay the submarines’ arrival, he said, and he conceded that it would ‘be a while before we get them’.

‘That is why, in terms of getting these submarines sooner, we need to develop our own contribution to an industrial base here at home.’ That would mean the RAN would get its submarines sooner, and it would also provide economic benefits in terms of workforce and productivity.

‘A significant industrial base is going to need to be built here, skills need to be acquired, and so there’s a human dimension to all of that and a workforce which needs to be built up.’

Marles said the goal would be for AUKUS to help develop a genuinely seamless defence industrial base across the US, the UK and Australia.

He said AUKUS would not only deliver SSNs for Australia, but also guide the development of trilateral initiatives where they would have most impact—both for deterrence and operational effectiveness.

‘AUKUS partners are working together to pursue near- and longer-term initiatives that will align our respective priorities and amplify our collective strength, to support a safe and secure Indo-Pacific region.’

In addition to the previously announced AUKUS quantum arrangements and the undersea robotics autonomous systems project, Marles said efforts were focused on artificial intelligence and autonomy, advanced cyber, hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare. ‘These efforts are being augmented with work on information sharing and innovation to significantly enhance pathways for joint capability development by AUKUS partners.’

Taskforce chief Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead said that in the 12 months since the AUKUS announcement, the resolve of Australia, the UK and the US had strengthened as the strategic environment continued to deteriorate.

‘This is truly a trilateral partnership. We have a shared mission, further confirmed by a very significant delegation here in Australia this week from the UK and US,’ Mead said. ‘We continue our work together towards the decisions that need to be made as part of the optimal pathway for the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines.’

AUKUS partners were not just focusing on the submarine, he said. ‘Our work to identify the optimal pathway includes many elements that all need to come together to deliver the capability needed to protect Australia and the sea lanes our economy relies so heavily upon.’

Mead said the taskforce was addressing workforce needs from an already strong base because Australia had been operating conventional submarines since the 1960s. ‘Our partners are helping us to understand the discrete skills and workforce numbers required to build, operate, sustain, regulate and safely steward nuclear-powered submarines.’

That will involve developing career pathways for Australia’s submariners that include attendance at UK and US nuclear schools, experience operating UK and US nuclear-powered submarines and secondments in UK and US nuclear agencies.

‘The exchange of these personnel will be both ways and won’t just involve our submariners. Exchanges will also include personnel in headquarters, technical labs, shipyards and sustainment sheds,’ Mead said.

A key task for those carrying out the government’s defence strategic review is to consider the ability of the Australian Defence Force to engage in a high-intensity, state-on-state conflict in our region. Such a conflict would leave Australia no choice but to fight. It could reset the balance of power and potentially change the strategic alliance framework that has guaranteed Australia’s security for 70 years.

The review is intended to inform the Defence planners who must ensure that the ADF’s posture and force structure is relevant, capable and optimised to meet the range of security challenges facing the nation.

It might be enticing to attempt to predict the precise nature of future conflict but history shows that this is seldom achieved. The only certainty about such a war is that it will be characterised by uncertainty, and that nations are poor at predicting what is required. In February 2011, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously told West Point cadets: ‘When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right’. Determining the military capabilities required to succeed in future conflict means understanding what will be needed to resolve a conflict regardless of its character—what will bring victory, and what will lead to defeat.

Much of the recent analysis of the ADF’s force structure requirements focuses on high-end air, maritime and long-range strike capabilities to maximise the advantage afforded by Australia’s geography. These capabilities are essential to deter a potential adversary. Integrated with effects from space and cyber, they will help the ADF hold an enemy at risk from afar and, if necessary, degrade that adversary’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) envelope. While essential, these capabilities are incomplete and lack the capacity to compel an adversary to submit. Relying on high-end technologies where adversaries exchange destructive weapons from afar would be no more than attrition warfare by more modern means.

The trap for force structure planners is to be enticed by the concept that future conflict can be won by focusing on technologies that provide the opportunity to empty the battlespace, negating the requirement for forces to manoeuvre so that they can close with and destroy an enemy. History reminds us that to succeed in conflict it’s essential to apply land power to be able to threaten or, if required, destroy an adversary. During the first Gulf War, the overwhelming superiority in stand-off weapons was insufficient to force Iraqi forces to withdraw from Kuwait. It was only when the US-led coalition was able to manoeuvre a ground force to close with and engage in joint land combat that Iraqi forces were evicted from Kuwait. Conversely, the conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrated that superiority in technology and firepower cannot guarantee victory against an enemy that is afforded a haven away from ground combat, where it can regenerate despite aerial bombardment and attacks with stand-off weapons.

Some commentators argue that the lethality of A2/AD capabilities makes the manoeuvre of land forces, especially heavy armoured vehicles, through our region impossible. Critics of armoured land forces also argue these capabilities are no longer relevant due to their vulnerability to advanced anti-armour capabilities and unmanned aerial platforms, as evidenced during the Azerbaijan–Armenia conflict of 2020 and the Russian experience in Ukraine. A detailed analysis of these conflicts reveals that these vulnerabilities result from poor tactical employment and training, and not inherent capability deficiencies.

Conflicts must be seen as evolving campaigns with different mixes of capabilities required at different times. As in the past, future conflict will evolve based on the changing fortunes of the belligerents. Force structure planners must consider the requirements of the ADF through a broad campaigning construct that will evolve over time. The ADF must be able to operate effectively in all domains, adjusting its mix of force as the nature of the campaign evolves. It must maintain and enhance its ability to manoeuvre through the sea, air and land gap to Australia’s north. While this will require continued investment in capabilities to engage adversaries at extended range, conflict has always been, and will always remain, a contest of human will inevitably requiring forces to close and engage in violent and brutal land combat. Accordingly, the ADF will require the capacity to tactically manoeuvre land combat power to close with and destroy the adversary or defend against an adversary’s manoeuvre.

With this understanding, the ADF must continue to invest in land forces. An ADF with ready land combat forces ensures it can meet a key principle of war, flexibility. This will enable it to respond with credible military force to a range of challenges as a military campaign evolves. Given the emerging security environment, now is not the time to limit Australia’s force structure options. Whatever the character of future conflict and however it may unfold, it will only be resolved by people. To compel an adversary into submission, the ADF must develop the capacity to manoeuvre a truly integrated joint force, including lethal, protected, mobile and connected land forces, capable of fighting aggressively and winning conclusively in joint land combat.

Australia’s parliament has little chance to place legal limits on the profound prerogative of the prime minister and the executive to take the country to war.

Instead of pushing against the constitution, look to build new conventions into the Australian way to war. Seek to ‘parliamentarise’ the war powers.

Aim for a checklist if not a legal check when war is launched. And use the checklist for greater parliamentary oversight of the way war is waged.

Stronger conventions in the House of Representatives can offer more detailed benchmarks at the threshold moment when the prime minister and cabinet mobilise the Australian Defence Force. Benchmarks can then be used by both houses of parliament, especially the Senate, to monitor and review the course of military action.

Over the past two decades, prime ministers as diverse as John Howard, Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard have offered footholds on which parliament could build conventions.

To use those footholds, parliament must edge closer to the strategic and diplomatic space dominated by the prime minister and cabinet.

What’s needed is more ‘creative tension’ between the executive and parliament, the phrase used by former Liberal senator and international relations scholar Russell Trood and ASPI’s Anthony Bergin in their 2015 paper. It was also at the conceptual heart of the Senate lecture on parliament and national security Bergin delivered in 2017 after Trood’s death.

To get closer to the profound prerogative, parliament has to build more day-to-day muscle. Move the needle in the direction of change, Trood and Bergin argued, to:

• enhance respect for parliament as the forum for consideration of national security issues
• develop parliamentarians’ education in national security by providing a new members’ orientation program focused on national security
• examine parliament’s exercise of war powers
• encourage ‘parliamentary diplomacy’
• increase the cash and cachet (more human and financial resources) of parliament’s national security committees
• examine the way parliament does intelligence oversight.

Trood and Bergin argued that parliament has never thoroughly examined how to extend its authority over the overseas deployment of the ADF. They were cautious, though, about the idea that parliament should be responsible for declaring war, doubting that it’d improve the way Australia makes policy:

Governments are elected to govern, and that authority extends to making difficult decisions about the appropriate use of military force. Other salient factors are the need for timeliness in decision-making, the unique knowledge that governments possess about often complex foreign affairs issues and the challenges in securing an appropriate resolution from a possibly fractious legislature.

Rather than a futile frontal attack on executive prerogative, dial up what parliament can rightfully expect—and properly do.

Existing precedents and habits can be made conventions in the House of Representatives. Strengthened habits in the Senate could feed the powers of review it already holds (and inform the way it grills defence leadership in regular estimates hearings).

In the House of Representatives, use the existing prime ministerial footholds. Build on the ANZUS precedent set by Howard with his parliamentary resolution after the September 11 attacks on the US; Howard’s Iraq war resolution; Abbott’s criteria as the basis for future resolutions on war; and the Afghanistan conventions established by Gillard.

The ANZUS precedent is the eight-point motion that Howard moved in the House on 17 September 2001, invoking the ANZUS Treaty following the 9/11 attacks on the US.

The motion didn’t go to the military actions that followed, but set out fundamental arguments for why Australia would act. That’s the place to start for all future motions on military action.

A resolution for war should be considered by the House even if—as happened with Iraq—the government has already sent Australia’s military to fight. Australian troops were in action in Iraq on 20 March 2003, when the House voted to approve the Iraq motion moved by Howard (and defeat Labor’s rival motion). Howard’s resolution was a damnation of Iraq as a rogue state and an assertion that Australia was acting under clear authority of the United Nations. Labor’s opposition motion argued that Australia didn’t have UN authority to commit troops.

Viewed today, the two resolutions frame Australia’s Iraq argument—and failure.

In the debate on the Iraq resolution, Howard said Australia’s forces would be part of the US-led coalition but operate under separate national command with separate rules of engagement and separate targeting policies.

After the war, in ‘the post-conflict stage, the phase 4 stage,’ Howard said, there could be a role for parliament’s ‘Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in relation to oversighting the Australian involvement in the phase 4 process’. The committee never played such a detailed role in Australia’s Iraq experience, but the ‘oversight’ thought is a parliamentary foothold for all stages of future wars.

The ANZUS and Iraq resolutions are starting points for future war resolutions that seek more detail about war aims. The House should seek a motion that offers answers to the fundamental questions posed by Abbott on 1 September 2014.

In a statement to parliament on the threat that ‘the death cult’ Islamic State posed to Iraq and Syria, Abbott said that if a request for Australian military help in Iraq came from the US and the Iraqi government, it’d be considered against these criteria:

Is there a clear and achievable overall objective? Is there a clear and proportionate role for Australian forces? Have all the risks been properly assessed? And is there an overall humanitarian objective in accordance with Australia’s national interests?

For a war against another nation, rather than terrorists, other big questions could be added to the Abbott criteria: What should the scope of the commitment be and what are the aims? What forces are needed? What would victory would look like, or what is the desired end? What should the exit strategy be?

The resolution that goes to the House, even if the government has already ordered war, should address those fundamental issues—of aims, means and ends. The executive has the power to give the order, but it isn’t asking too much that it give parliament and the people a clear account of what’s to be done.

If those precedents become conventions, we would see a House of Representatives resolution on committing Australian forces overseas that sets out the objectives and conditions of the deployment. That resolution should declare the mission, the aims (Abbott’s clear and achievable objectives), the forces that could be used, and the end point and anticipated exit strategy.

The initial resolution and all the regular government statements that must follow should draw on Gillard’s Afghanistan speech on 19 October 2010. She told parliament that she would ‘answer five questions Australians are asking about the war’:

– why Australia is involved in Afghanistan;
– what the international community is seeking to achieve and how;
– what Australia’s contribution is to this international effort—our mission;
– what progress is being made; and
– what the future is of our commitment in Afghanistan.

A significant Gillard marker was her promise of regular formal statements to parliament: ‘[T]oday I announce as Prime Minister that I will make a statement like this one to the House each year that our Afghanistan involvement continues. This will be in addition to the continuing ministerial statements by the Minister for Defence in each session of the parliament.’

Using those benchmarks, there should be a standing reference to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence whenever Australian forces are deployed. At the least, the committee should hold hearings once a year in which it calls the secretary of defence and the chief of the defence force to give evidence on the deployment or conflict and to testify how the terms of the mission resolution are being met.

With such a framework in place, the regular Senate estimates hearings could become the venue to review progress against the stated aims. Parliament would be doing some of the heavy lifting on behalf of the people. ​

In building stronger conventions on war, parliament should be guided by the final words of Peter Edwards’s official history of the Vietnam War.

In committing to future wars, Edwards wrote, Australians should hope ‘both the government of the day and any who opposed it might display greater political maturity, social responsibility and diplomatic awareness than did some of their predecessors between 1965 and 1975’.

That sounds like a job for the House and Senate. Build parliamentary habits to hold the hubris and help Australia understand its way to war.

According to media reporting, the Australian defence company DefendTex will provide Ukraine with 300 of its Drone40 small uncrewed aerial vehicles. The specification sheet for the D40 says it has a range of 20 kilometres and a maximum flight time of 30 to 60 minutes. The D40 has a variant that carries a 40-millimetre grenade and functions as a loitering munition, or ‘kamikaze drone’ in common parlance, but it’s also capable of carrying other payloads such as sensors and electronic warfare options. Its small size means it can be easily carried by dismounted soldiers and can be launched either from a 40-millimetre grenade launcher or simply thrown into the air.

Coming on top of the most recent announcements of further high-tech US military aid, it’s good news for Ukraine. It’s increasingly clear that the war there is a struggle between 20th-century industrial-age warfare and 21st-century digital- and information-age warfare, with Ukraine’s supporters in liberal democracies providing it with the systems needed to successfully conduct the latter. While Russia’s industrial-age model may initially have had the advantage, that was largely due to the legacy of years of industrial production of weapons and munitions, which are now being rapidly consumed on the battlefield. But the technological pendulum is increasingly swinging in Ukraine’s favour in ways that Russia can’t hope to match, particularly while it is suffering from sanctions on high-tech components such as computer chips.

The export success is also good news for DefendTex, an Australian-owned company with a history of innovation in the defence and security sector. But the sale does raise some issues. The first is, when will the Australian Department of Defence acquire the D40 in commercial quantities? The system, developed with funding support from the Defence Innovation Hub, is now mature. It’s been acquired by the British Army and trialled by the US Marine Corps. In fact, after trialling it, British soldiers insisted on taking it with them on their deployment to Mali.

We’ve seen a proliferation of small drones in the war in Ukraine, both military and commercial. Any conflict Australian troops deploy to will be no different. But do we really want to see Australian troops having to improvise solutions on the battlefield—as the Ukrainians have been forced to do, such as by using 3D printers to attach legacy mortar rounds to small consumer drones and turn them into mini-bombers—when Australian industry already has the ability to provide them with world-leading equipment?

Defence’s innovation programs are a microcosm of the broader Australian research and development effort—we create innovative products but can’t seem to commercialise them at home. The D40’s development was funded by Defence grants—but one has to ask why Defence is funding innovative technologies if it’s not going to acquire them once they’re demonstrated to work. It’s a common refrain from Australian small and medium-sized enterprises. In other countries, sales to the local defence force spur exports; here, Defence often won’t buy local products until they’ve been sold overseas, and even then it’s no sure thing.

The bigger issue is what this sale tells us about Australia’s industrial capability. Australian industry can develop precise, lethal capabilities, and it can do it fast. And it doesn’t need overseas intellectual property to do it.

This is relevant in the context of the sovereign guided weapons enterprise announced by the previous government to provide secure supply chains for the munitions that are essential for modern warfighting. But so far, there seem to be two answers to the question of how we make anti-tank missiles here. The first, based on the experience of the Israeli Spike missile, is we don’t. Four years after the government announced Spike missiles would be built in Australia, Defence still hasn’t started, apparently due to certification issues.

The second answer, based on the trajectory of the sovereign guided weapons enterprise over the past two years, is to establish some kind of partnership with a large US prime contractor, then spend years negotiating around the strictures of the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations, overcoming Congress’s qualms about outsourcing US jobs, setting up a production line, sourcing hundreds of components from supply chains around the world and finally, at some point down the track, producing a missile.

However, if we turn the question around and ask how we can quickly develop ways to destroy armoured vehicles, we don’t have to default to the answer being ‘Build anti-tank missiles.’ If we leverage the innovation and technologies of the commercial sector it can be done quickly. In short, it’s a lot easier to precisely move high explosives from one point to another 10 kilometres away using existing commercial technologies such as small rotary-wing motors than it is to design and build rocket motors and put missiles around them. DefendTex has demonstrated that, but there are other small Australian companies that have adopted that approach to deliver the ‘small, the smart and the many’ in the form of cheap but precise loitering munitions.

By all means, let’s build US missiles here, but we also need to pursue other lines effort as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, if we have to wait for Defence to certify everything using its existing processes and standards, it seems we’ll be waiting a long time for capability. Of course, the Ukrainians don’t seem to be too concerned about certification of the weapons they’re pressing into service.

The basic fact is that Defence is an artificially protected monopoly. Monopolies simply can’t innovate rapidly. The reason our electricity sector has managed to move down the path of renewables as far as it has despite the stonewalling of the previous federal government and the incumbent major players is that many other players have gained entry, creating competition and driving innovation. There are ways in which Defence should enjoy a natural monopoly; we don’t advocate for mercenaries. But when Defence is both a monopoly provider of security services to the government and a monopsony consumer of security goods and services from industry, it is a recipe for stagnation. Sometimes Defence needs firm external direction—it’s the role of the new government and the defence strategic review to provide that.

Developing Australian companies’ ability to produce small guided weapons at scale won’t just benefit our defence force. We’ve recently seen the prospects for conflict over Taiwan intensify, provoking greater debate in Australia about what we would do if Beijing ordered an assault. Providing Taiwan with tens of thousands of small kamikaze drones that can sinking landing craft and destroy armoured vehicles will make a tangible difference to its prospects of resisting invasion—perhaps even more of a difference than sending a small number of high-value Australian Defence Force assets and their crews.

By leveraging the benefits of Industry 4.0, Australia can become a key part of the arsenal of democracy.

The Labor government’s defence strategic review will explore how the Australian military is positioned and enabled to operate in our region as the security environment requires.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the review on 3 August and it’s to report by March 2023. That’s so that the government can make decisions at the same time as it decides on the path to give Australia eight nuclear-powered submarines within an AUKUS partnership that makes them safe and effective.

The independent heads of the review, former foreign and defence minister Stephen Smith and former Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, have an enormous amount to do and almost no time to do it.

Before they even get to thinking about what their task requires—‘to ensure Defence has the right capabilities to meet our growing strategic needs’—Smith and Houston will need to confront the ugly fact that Defence’s current plans are already unaffordable despite the large and growing defence budget the Albanese government has committed to.

Nasty choices and suboptimal trade-offs are needed before any new ideas that take money are even put forward; and the only megaproject not yet agreed that can provide potential savings is the $20–27 billion army plan to buy an additional 450 heavily armoured vehicles for purposes that aren’t clearly connected to Australia’s needs in our region. These purposes must now be made clear if this project is to proceed, in whatever form.

But even that multibillion-dollar megaproject is a distraction to the real work. As my new Strategic Insight paper says, the review must give Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles what he needs to provide practical, urgent direction to Defence in four big areas:

• climate change and the ADF’s inescapable, but unwanted, role
• China’s direct security challenge in Australia’s near region—which makes our strategic environment uncomfortably clear, not complex as we like to tell ourselves
• new ways to increase Australian military capability quickly—because no taxpayer is going to give Defence more funding if it can’t show it has different, faster ways to increase the ADF’s military power
• the danger of prioritising ‘integration’ in all things in pursuit of the military nirvana of ‘every sensor a shooter and every shooter a sensor’—because that highly aspirational goal is the enemy of getting capabilities into the hands of our military fast.

Since 2016, and even since the Morrison government’s 2020 defence strategic update, we’ve experienced a rolling maul of confronting developments for our security and for the collective security of our close allies and partners.

They include the return of war to Europe with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the nasty realisation that the strategic partnership between Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China is only strengthening as that war proceeds, and the demonstration of Xi’s willingness to use China’s military in increasingly belligerent and aggressive ways in the South China Sea, around Taiwan and near Japan.

Add in the now present effects of climate change domestically and in our region and the disasters and dislocation that it’s already causing. Then there’s the shattering of confidence in the reliability of what, in the world of Covid-19, coercive trade measures and the fracturing effects of Putin’s war, seem now to be quaintly called ‘global supply chains’ and global markets. That matters to Australia, and in particular to our defence organisation, because global—or at least extended international—supply chains are the basis for most of Defence’s support arrangements.

But, on top of all that, the most disturbing and dangerous development for Australia’s security is China’s now open strategic intent to play a direct and growing role in our near region, made concrete by the security pact Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare signed with Beijing earlier this year.

In the light of these changes, it’s now obvious that, whatever security assistance Australia will get from the US and other partners in times of crisis, like Ukraine, we’ll need our own means to act in our own defence as a precondition for assistance from others.

That’s true whether it’s our key ally, the US, our other trusted partners such as the Quad’s Japan and India, or our other AUKUS partner, the UK. So, the defence strategic review must set out the decisions for the government to make that will put real substance on the notion of ‘self-reliance within an alliance construct’. That hasn’t been done seriously since the Dibb review in the late 1980s.

Debates about whether or not to spend 2% of GDP on defence are already overtaken by events. The defence budget line committed to by the new government has the budget growing to well over 2% by 2030. That was calculated using much rosier predictions for Australia’s rate of economic growth between now and 2030 than look likely in the darker international economic times we’re already in. It was also calculated using much lower inflationary expectations than we’re experiencing now.

So, just to mark time and maintain real purchasing power, the defence budget needs to be increased.

But Defence can’t expect public support for an increased budget without showing that it will use new ways to increase the power of the ADF fast enough to matter.

And the reviewers themselves have some rethinking to do. Each had his most intense exposure to the strategic situation, and to the arcane issues in our defence organisation, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. That’s when the force structure plans that Defence is still implementing and still deeply attached to were made. That was also a time when China’s aggressive trajectory was much less obvious, and before the fragility of global supply chains was revealed.

Escaping from some of what they think they know from that earlier time is possible—and essential if the review is to help the government and Defence make the changes our strategic environment demands. It’s a case of channelling that line attributed to Winston Churchill when he was accused of hypocrisy: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind.’

Repacking the exploding suitcase that is the defence budget and wrapping all this up by March 2023 means the review is time poor. On this, the review reflects Australia’s security situation: time is a precious resource to be used wisely in ways that rapidly increase our security and help to deter others from thinking that conflict is a smart choice.