In a span of nearly 90 years—from 1914 to 2003—Australia chose to go to war nine times.

In the 100 years from 1914, Australian military personnel were on active service for nearly half the time—47 years.

Finding that frequency ‘startling’, one of the greats of Australian military history, David Horner, an emeritus professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, has penned a book on how and why Australia keeps going to war.

The war game: Australian war leadership from Gallipoli to Iraq starts with a quote from Jonathan Swift: ‘War! That mad game the world so loves to play.’ Then Horner examines the deadly way Australia plays: ‘Warfare certainly has elements of a game: there are two, sometimes several opponents; there are rules, although these are sometimes broken; there are winners and losers; and it becomes addictive.’

What explains the addiction? Why did a nation with its own continent—‘largely remote from countries that might pose a major threat’—go out to fight?

Horner seeks the themes in the nine conflicts: the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Confrontation (when Indonesia sought to prevent the formation of the new nation of Malaysia), the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War.

He offers this judgement about the constants that connect the fights:

Australia has always gone to war as a junior partner in an allied coalition. Its leaders have had little scope to influence allied strategy and their decisions have been unlikely to affect the outcome of the war. The main decisions of Australia’s leaders have been whether Australia should go to war, and the level of commitment to the war.

One big change after World War II is that Australia fights not to decide a war, but to buttress an alliance.

The purpose is to get credit without too many casualties. In the seven conflicts since 1945, Australia’s eyes were on political ends. Our weight was not decisive, since the level of our military commitment was not critical to victory.

Alliance politics shape and drive Australian strategy. The war decision is a culmination, not the start. What Australia did in Vietnam echoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘Like the commitment in Vietnam,’ Horner notes, ‘Australia’s military involvement in the Middle East had grown over the previous dozen years to a point that made it difficult to avoid continuing once the Americans sought further assistance.’

The lesson to draw from Iraq, he writes, is that ‘the US process for going to war was deeply flawed and Australia would be wise to treat any US plan for war with deep suspicion; and Australia should not smugly assume that it might not engage in the same faulty process in the future’.

The calculations in Australia’s war game involve a ruthless realism.

Our leaders sent the military off to what became the failures of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia’s military performed well, as failure took a long time to arrive. The alliance prospered.

The voters of Australia have often blessed the alliance politics of their leaders. The commitments are embraced. The failures are regretted and the losses mourned, but the game is repeated.

Here’s my interview with David Horner on Australia’s way of war.

On 13 July, US Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the 51st Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting by video link. Harris’s speech was unexpected and unprecedented, since the US is a forum dialogue partner rather than a member. Pacific leaders had opted this year not to hold the traditional post-forum partners’ dialogue, at which partner states (including the US and China) meet with forum leaders after their leaders’ meeting. Pacific leaders wanted to ensure that there was ‘space’ to resolve issues and determine priorities without having to manage the demands and expectations of external partners.

The decision not to hold the post-forum dialogue was in part due to Pacific leaders’ frustration about strategic competition overshadowing and undermining Pacific priorities and agendas. Last month it emerged that China had invited the 10 Pacific island states it has diplomatic relations with to a virtual meeting with Foreign Minister Wang Yi on 14 July, coinciding with the leaders’ retreat.

By having Harris deliver her speech at the forum, the US disturbed the equilibrium that Pacific leaders had achieved on geopolitical matters. But for at least some Pacific leaders, that disturbance was convenient: it sent a pointed message both to China and to those Pacific countries that have recently moved closer to it.

During her speech, Harris declared: ‘We recognise that in recent years, the Pacific islands may not have received the diplomatic attention and support that you deserve. So today I am here to tell you directly: we are going to change that.’ She announced seven commitments to ‘strengthen the US partnership with the Pacific islands’ including two ‘firsts’—the appointment of a US envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum and the adoption of a US national strategy on the Pacific islands nested under its Indo-Pacific strategy.

Several of the US initiatives are bound in caveats. The US$600 million over 10 years for economic development and ocean governance is dependent on annual congressional approval, and the opening of embassies in Kiribati and Tonga and the USAID hub in Fiji are dependent on congressional notification. The return of the Peace Corps to the Pacific is not a new initiative.

The declared commitments follow a speech by Kurt Campbell, the US National Security Council’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 23 June. In that speech, Campbell emphasised the need for American ‘humility’ and repeated the mantra, ‘nothing in the Pacific without the Pacific’.

On 24 June, the Partners in the Blue Pacific (PBP) initiative, involving the Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and the US, was launched. This informal mechanism is intended to ‘support prosperity, resilience, and security in the Pacific’ with the aims of delivering results more effectively and efficiently, bolstering ‘Pacific regionalism’ and expanding opportunities for cooperation between the Pacific and the rest of the world.

But there are questions about what is driving America’s renewed attention to the Pacific islands and the ways it is seeking to engage. The islands have undergone significant change over the past two decades. As a ‘great power’, the US has much to learn about how to engage much smaller Pacific states and to navigate Pacific statecraft.

Harris’s emphasis on ‘partnership, friendship and respect’ and Campbell’s calls for the US to be ‘humble’ were well intentioned and appealing to Pacific audiences, and they were well received. Following the vice president’s speech, Bainimarama declared that the US was to ‘become a Pacific partner like never before’ and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna said the US announcement showed the ‘deep substance’ underpinning its commitment to the region.

But will the US be able to deliver? The gaps between announcements of US initiatives and their actual implementation are notorious in the Pacific, with many prior funding announcements failing to get through Congress. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended the forum in 2012, she also made a raft of promises—many of which were not delivered.

This highlights the pattern of inconsistency in US policy towards the Pacific islands since the Cold War and raises the question of whether the region can rely on the renewed US focus lasting beyond a change of government (potentially in two years’ time). The window to embed policies that bring about long-term engagement could be narrow.

If American engagement in the Pacific does ramp up significantly, how many island states and territories will have the capacity to absorb the new expenditure and programs? Most Pacific bureaucracies are small, and even hosting the increasing number of government officials visiting from the US and other partner countries imposes a serious burden. There’s a risk that ineffective engagement will squander resources and relationships.

Coordinating the new US programs and activities with other partners will be key. While the PBP initiative includes this as a priority, past form suggests that even the closest allies, such as the US and Australia, can have difficulty moving beyond bilateralism. While the PBP initiative may expand, it is also notable that France was not included in the initial list of participants, despite possessing several territories in the region and being a treaty ally, or partner, of the US and other members.

Pacific leaders have long called for improved donor coordination. The Cairns Compact that Pacific Islands Forum leaders adopted in 2009 seeks to do just that. The US, Australia and other partners (although notably not China) signed up to the compact, but the PBP makes no reference to it. This raises the questions of how the PBP initiative will align with the existing regional architecture and whether new mechanisms are needed when existing Pacific-created ones are underutilised.

Concerns have already been expressed that the PBP initiative co-opts the language of the ‘Blue Pacific’, which forum leaders use to describe the interconnectedness and collaborative approach of the region. But beyond rhetorical emphasis on forum centrality and Pacific priorities, the PBP initiative appears to sideline the forum in practical terms. Indeed, the US intends to convene the PBP partners’ foreign ministers at the end of the year to review ‘our progress’. Why are forum members not being asked to measure the effectiveness of the PBP, or at least to participate in that meeting?

This contains echoes of a longstanding dynamic of US engagement in the Pacific islands: asking Australians and New Zealanders to speak for the Pacific in Washington. Indeed, Campbell stressed that the US would listen to Australia and New Zealand, its two partners with the most significant engagement in the Pacific islands. Allies and partners can make important soft-power and practical contributions to alliance burdens beyond military power but, while Australia and New Zealand have much expertise and experience to offer, their advice should always be secondary to what Pacific states are themselves saying.

Deep knowledge and understanding of the Pacific, built on enduring relationships with Pacific leaders, officials and civil society, is critical to ensuring that US initiatives are appropriately designed and targeted.

It’s promising that Harris and Campbell emphasised listening to Pacific leaders about their priorities. But that will require some logistical investments. Proximity matters in Washington, and few Pacific island states can afford to maintain a diplomatic presence both in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. Most favour the latter. Facilitating their travel to Washington for regular consultations would be a big help.

And Pacific knowledge in Washington is scant. There are hubs of Pacific experts in Hawaii and Guam, as well as a large Pacific diaspora in the US, yet they appear to be given few opportunities to inform US government policy. There’s an opportunity for Washington-based think tanks to deepen their networks by drawing on Pacific experts and scholars beyond the beltway.

Indeed, Campbell’s comment at CSIS that the US ‘can’t really get away with saying we’re part of the Pacific, but we kind of are’ reveals a blind spot in the American strategic imagination. While Hawaii is a US state and Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands are US territories, the ‘freely associated states’ of Micronesia, Palau and Marshall Islands are ‘managed’ by the US Department of the Interior. Overlooking US relationships with these Pacific territories and states might stem in part from the fact that the US hasn’t yet come to terms with its history in the region. The scars of US colonialism, militarism and nuclear testing remain visible—as do the long-term health, environmental, economic and social effects.

While Harris’s speech was warmly received by several forum leaders, Pacific buy-in to the US’s efforts and the PBP initiative cannot be taken for granted. Pacific island states have long demonstrated their agency in dealing with more powerful partners and are well aware of the challenges they face and the best ways to tackle them. Unless they are equal partners in any negotiations related to how the US and its partners conduct their activities in the region, the island states are unlikely to support these overtures—and China’s presence means that they have other options.

The US will therefore need to ensure that its enhanced engagement with the Pacific islands is framed as being driven by genuine and sustained interest in the region. The new emphasis on building an American presence—diplomats, aid workers and the Peace Corps—is overdue. But the US will quickly learn that presence doesn’t necessarily equate to partnership—let alone influence. Instead, building relationships and trust takes time, patience and, yes, humility.

Pacific island countries may halt the use of Australian-donated patrol boats with defects including cracking in the coupling between the engine and the gearbox, and a fault in the vessels’ exhaust system. It’s a blow to the $2.1 billion maritime program that’s the centrepiece of our security assistance to the region. In fairness, all vessels have teething issues. It would be remarkable if there weren’t any problems with the Guardian-class boats.

Despite this setback, we judge that there’s now more grounds for optimism that Australia can at least slow China’s expansion in our near abroad. The new foreign minister, Penny Wong, deserves much of the credit; in just four weeks she has visited Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Solomon Islands. Australia has recently joined with the US, UK, New Zealand and Japan to create Partners in the Blue Pacific to provide assistance to the small islands and step up coordinated efforts to counter Chinese initiatives.

The previous government largely left engagement with the region to a junior minister. That was a source of irritation, especially in the most powerful regional countries, Papua New Guinea and Fiji. It’s not insignificant that the lion’s share of China’s engagement with the Pacific is undertaken by its foreign minister, Wang Yi.

It’s inevitable that Wong will allocate some of her responsibility for regional engagement to Pacific and International Development Minister Pat Conroy. But it won’t have escaped her notice, or that of the prime minister, that she’s been extremely well received by Pacific island leaders. She’s shown them a level of respect that wasn’t evident in recent years.

The Albanese government is now developing a series of policies that should appeal to our Pacific neighbours; the focus appears to be shifting more to working with the region to shape global discussions on climate change and greater people engagement.

One area that offers opportunities to greatly enhance our people engagement in a way that China can’t hope to match is sport. It’s true that China is active in building sporting infrastructure in the region, most prominently Solomon Islands’ 2023 Pacific Games stadium. But we should be investing more heavily to strengthen existing programs in elite sporting partnerships and community sport in the Pacific.

Another area to develop, largely neglected by the former government, is engaging with the Christian churches in the region. Christian church membership in Australia is in serious decline. But Christianity is flourishing in most island countries, especially the Pentecostal churches. Most of our regional neighbours lack serious capacity in healthcare, school education and vocational training. A number of Australian churches already have a strong presence in these sectors in the region. But with Australian government support they could do much more.

There needs to be a higher priority given to Australian business through support to industry groups such as the Australia–Papua New Guinea Business Council. China has capitalised very effectively on the decline in Australian business activity in the Pacific in some key sectors.

With Australian banks withdrawing or downsizing in the Pacific, Chinese banks and financial institutions are doing the very opposite, including through significant loan support for the island states’ small-business sectors. Many Pacific island countries are successfully growing small business in both urban and rural communities. But they’re going to need greater access to finance and training, and Australia is better placed than China to provide both.

Finally, Australia’s defence investment program will require 20,000 more uniformed personnel to operate the capabilities being acquired. With the Australian Defence Force averaging net annual growth of only 300 people, the ADF has just put out an urgent call to recruit young Australians. We should be inviting Pacific islanders into our military for a three- to four-year period. The concept would be hugely popular in the islands and develop powerful people-to-people links with our military that would last a lifetime.

There’s no greater bonding exper­ience than a recruit course ­followed by active military service. Citizenship might even be offer­ed on completion of service. Having Pacific islanders being part of the delivery of Australian programs to the island states, whether training, aid or disaster relief, will make that engagement much more effective for us all. Military service is a unique offer we can make that China can’t and won’t.

There’s a paradox at the heart of Australia’s security cooperation with its Pacific island neighbours. On the one hand, the Pacific will always be an area of great strategic significance for Australia, meaning that Australia will give prominence to the security interests it wants to pursue. At the same time, if Australia is perceived as prioritising its own self-interest in relations, trust will be undermined. Where Australia privileges its own institutional requirements and solutions above local agency and local solutions, this can feed negative perceptions about Australia’s intent.

To ensure that Australia isn’t imposing its concept of security on the Pacific, and Pacific island states make informed decisions on their own security free of coercive influences, Australia needs to anchor its activities to meaningful, coordinated and sustainable plans via activities and outcomes prioritised by Pacific countries themselves.

National security strategies can anchor how Australia and like-minded countries support the Pacific on security agendas that are set locally and regionally rather than paternalistically.

Security includes a multiplicity of actors—not just state actors, but also the private sector, civil society, women’s rights organisations and local leadership such as chiefly systems and subnational and non-state groups. Governance must therefore be inclusive, avoiding overly centralised systems that may exacerbate local conflicts, and efforts must be directed accordingly.

This deep contextual knowledge includes, for example, recognition of the gendered nature of security and the need to ensure women’s participation and leadership in security. It also acknowledges diversity and social inclusion, such as the large youth populations in the Pacific and the need to respond to their economic and political imperatives. National security strategies provide an anchor and set a framework against which Australia and like-minded countries can coordinate and deliver cross-sectoral efforts.

So far, four Pacific island countries—Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands—have completed national security strategies with funding and technical assistance from Australia. These strategies differ across countries. While many threats are common to all, each strategy has a context-specific analysis of the security environment, local capabilities and gaps, and actions needed. The strategies give governments and partners tools to prioritise and deliver actions and work more cohesively, with a whole-of-government approach, to allocate resources.

National security strategies are an example of how Australia can support the sovereign decisions of Pacific island countries to identify security threats and concerns and enable appropriate responses. These strategies have become even more important as Pacific countries grapple with Covid-19 health, crime, economic and other security impacts.

The majority of Pacific island countries have yet to draft or ratify national security strategies—including Australia itself. As a priority, Australia or international partners must ensure that Pacific countries continue to have the assistance needed to create individual strategies to bring to life their commitments under the Boe Declaration. In the absence of these, there are policies and strategies that can set the priorities for aid and technical support. It is in Australia’s national interest to maintain good relationships with Pacific island countries by aligning with the priorities outlined in these Pacific strategies.

Partnered multi-agency efforts that deliver the pillars of national security strategies can provide an effective, coordinated and accountable pathway to delivering priority outcomes for Pacific countries. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, which ran from 2003 to 2017, and the Vanuatu–Australia Police and Justice Program, which began in 2017, provide contemporary examples of how multilateral missions work in a policing, justice and defence context. While there is always the opportunity to improve the design, a similar model with broader cross-sectoral representation, yet remaining under a unified command, would allow partners from like-minded countries and across agencies to leverage their own interests through their participation and the provision of relevant capability or financial support. This is a big idea that would significantly reduce duplication of effort and respond better to security issues—but it would require challenging prevailing thinking on program planning, delivery and funding.

Adopting a different approach doesn’t mean that Australia subsumes its own interests. Working with Pacific island countries’ national security strategies ensures that Australia has a clear understanding of Pacific peace and security at the local and regional levels, both now and into the future. This model ensures that assistance to Pacific island countries is aligned to the priorities of their individual national security strategies and respects their sovereignty and local agendas.

Most importantly, it positions Australia and its partners as true allies focused on delivering strategies envisaged by the Pacific for the Pacific.

In March, shortly before federal election, the Coalition government released a defence budget that continued its record of delivering the funding it promised in the 2016 defence white paper and 2020 defence strategic update.

For 2022–23, the consolidated defence funding line (including both the Department of Defence and the Australian Signals Directorate) is $48.6 billion, which is 2.11% of GDP based on the budget papers’ estimates of GDP. That funding represents a very substantial nominal growth of 7.4% compared with 2021–22. It’s the 10th straight year of real growth, but with inflation running hot, it’s hard to determine a precise percentage. We’ve estimated it at 3.8% based on the budget papers, but if inflation stays around 5%, the real growth figure will be less. That will hurt Defence. Just as inflation eats into Australian families’ budgets, it’s eroding Defence’s buying power.

As I explain in The cost of Defence: ASPI defence budget brief 2022–2023, released today, despite disruptions to supply chains, Defence and its industry partners have achieved significant increases in acquisition spending. While Defence may have fallen short of its acquisition spending target in 2021–22, it still achieved a $2.1 billion increase on the previous year, which was itself a $1.5 billion increase on the prior year. That’s translating into growing local spending, in both absolute and relative terms compared to overseas spending. I’ve written previously that the Australian defence industry will need to eat a very large elephant as Defence’s acquisition and sustainment budgets grow. So far, it’s demonstrating that it has the appetite to do that.

Capability continues to be delivered across all domains. There’s no doubt that the Australian Defence Force is getting better. But we’re seeing the realisation of risks inherent in an acquisition program built around megaprojects. Such projects take years or decades to design and deliver, while spending huge sums for little benefit in the short term. When they encounter problems, those problems are big.

The cancelled Attack-class submarine program has cost more than $4 billion and delivered nothing. The Hunter frigate program continues to experience delays and won’t get a vessel into service for over a decade. The Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicle project has spent close to $2 billion, but only 25 training vehicles have so far been delivered. While the nuclear-powered attack submarine program has the potential to deliver a huge step-up in undersea warfare capability, it’s the mother of all megaprojects and has a risk profile to match.

As the megaprojects ramp up (with more than $20 billion in infantry fighting vehicles potentially added to the list of committed funds), their cashflow requirement will increase, tying the government’s hands at a time of rapidly growing strategic uncertainty and evaporating warning time.

The new government will have some significant issues to address. Perhaps the biggest one is the size of the defence budget. The incoming government has said that it supports the current level of funding. While that continues to grow in real terms, it was originally developed in 2015 and hasn’t changed since then, despite the significant worsening of our strategic circumstances. Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that war has not gone away and remains a tool of authoritarian states. China’s influence in our near region is growing and could result in a permanent Chinese military presence. The US is looking to its allies and partners to do more, as they must.

As always, the government will need to adjudicate between competing priorities for funding. At a time when Australians are dealing with the rising cost of living, spikes in energy prices and the grinding pressure of housing affordability, it may be tempting to reduce defence spending. However, the government should be aware of the results of doing so.

The budget is already full, with no pots of unallocated cash. Any short-term windfall delivered by the cancellation of the Attack-class submarine is already gone—as the cancellation of the SkyGuardian armed uncrewed aerial vehicle to help deliver a $9.9 billion offset for the REDSPICE cyber program reveals. So even holding the defence budget strictly at 2% of GDP will result in substantial, multibillion-dollar reductions to the funding line in the 2020 defence strategic update, inevitably leading to cuts in capability.

It’s not clear that the strategic update’s funding line is even sufficient to deliver the current investment plan. That program includes platforms far larger or more numerous than those they’re replacing as well as entirely new capabilities, all requiring a much larger workforce. Many capabilities have ended up costing more than was originally budgeted for in Defence’s investment plan. The nuclear-powered submarine program will cost significantly more than the Attack class; it’s anybody’s guess how much more. So the first order of business should be for the government to understand the affordability of the current plan.

Then it will need to assure itself that the planned force structure is aligned with what the government thinks the ADF should be doing. It’s easy to make a case for the tactical utility of any capability, but how does it fit into the overall strategy? The government will need to make decisions about which sovereign capabilities it needs to hold and which capabilities it can rely on allies and partners. And the nub of our current security challenge is that the former are growing while the latter are shrinking.

A further challenge that the government will need to consider is Defence’s people problem. The number of contractors in Defence’s external workforce continues to grow at significant cost, but Defence can’t deliver its ambitious capability program without them. Is that growth the best option available to Defence or simply the only one? Moreover, the investment program will require 20,000 more uniformed personnel to operate the capabilities Defence is acquiring. With the ADF averaging net annual growth of only 300 people, is that target attainable? And, if it’s not, is the future force structure viable?

In these testing times, the government needs to seize every opportunity available to it to increase capability rapidly, even if that means overruling Defence’s long-term vision for the future force. That means doing more with what we’re already getting, such as increasing the lethality of the offshore patrol vessels that are soon to enter service.

There are encouraging signs that Defence is engaging more actively with ‘the small, the smart and the many’; that is, cheaper, disposable, highly autonomous systems that can be produced rapidly by Australian industry. Investing more heavily in such systems is a crucial hedging strategy against the risk inherent in the megaprojects; plus, such systems will figure heavily in future warfare, whatever may become of the megaprojects.

Similarly, the new AUKUS partnership’s advanced technologies programs and the sovereign guided weapons enterprise offer the prospect of delivering meaningful capabilities soon. Yet we’re two years into the guided weapons enterprise and still have heard nothing about which weapons will be produced and how it will be done. We can’t apply the kinds of timelines and processes that have been features of the megaprojects to these lines of effort.

Overall, the government has its work cut out for it. Whatever path it chooses, it will need to bring the Australian public along on the journey. To do that, the government will need to reset the conversation about the defence budget and how it’s spent. That will require a commitment to transparency, accountability and sharing information. That means accepting the risk that bad news will get out along with the good, but an informed public is fundamental to democracy.