Tag Archive for: Australia

Seven lessons from Ukraine for Australia’s defence organisation

When the Russian military defeated the Ukrainians comprehensively in 2014 to seize the Donbas region, there seemed little doubt that the balance of power was moving more in Russia’s favour. But in 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian military have been showing us something quite different.

The Ukrainian military reinvented itself and learned from its defeat, with the result that it has inflicted major defeats and reverses on the much larger Russian military machine since President Vladimir Putin began his war.

There are key lessons for Australia from Ukraine.

You can reinvent your military in eight years

The unexpected success of Ukraine’s military has been driven by the sense of urgency for change after 2014’s defeat.

The obvious insight for Australia and our defence organisation is that while we have been good at describing our increasingly bleak strategic environment, we have failed to act with any urgency to improve our military capability.

Perhaps we don’t believe our own assessment about the growing risk of conflict, even with Putin’s example in front of us. Defence’s plans to spend its growing budget only start to deliver increased military power in the second half of the 2030s—13 years from now and then only slowly.

This week’s announcements on the AUKUS update and buying missiles earlier than planned don’t change much. We still don’t make a single missile for our forces here in Australia. That puts us at considerable risk during a conflict, given the huge numbers of missiles used in modern war—as we see in Ukraine—and our extended, slow supply chains.

It’s taken Defence from July 2020, when a plan to establish a local missile industry was announced in the strategic update, until now to select the two big US defence companies which already sell us most of our missiles as ‘initial industry partners’.

And this is under an ‘accelerated’ approach driven by the prime minister and defence minister. There’s still no timeline for when the first missile will come off an Australian production line.

Partners are important, but allies are essential

Zelensky and his military have relied on extensive materiel support from partners in the EU and NATO, as well as countries including Australia. The flow of anti-armour missiles and other supplies, along with intelligence, has helped Ukraine sustain the war and inflict defeats on Putin’s badly prepared and supported forces.

This materiel assistance has enabled the Ukrainians to roll back the Russians around Kyiv, but it has not prevented horrific mass killing and destruction by Putin’s forces. The Russian withdrawal in the north is likely about massing to reinforce their attacks around the Donbas region.

US President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders have agonised over what they will and won’t give to Ukraine for its defence and erred on the side of giving nothing that might anger Putin enough for him to escalate the conflict. These leaders have also been at pains to let Putin know that US and NATO forces will not set foot in Ukraine or fight Russian forces there because Ukraine is not a NATO ally.

This message has some narrowly encouraging aspects for Australia, Japan and even the Philippines, which are all US allies, but it’s disturbing for wider Indo-Pacific security, given the non-ally status of key partners like Vietnam, Indonesia and, of course, Taiwan.

The world helps those who help themselves

Before Putin’s war began, most external assessments were that Russia would gain a quick victory. There were few plans by the US and NATO or the EU to directly assist the Ukrainians, given it was expected to hopefully not happen at all or be over quickly.

Once it was obvious that the Ukrainian military had not just withstood the initial Russian attacks but inflicted stunning reverses (from the first day at Hostomel airport and against elite Russian forces trying to capture or kill Zelensky), the US, NATO and the EU were compelled to help Ukraine continue the fight. Their populations demanded it and continue to do so.

And every day Zelensky and his people succeed, they attract more support. Last week, the Australian government promised to airlift Bushmaster armoured vehicles to Ukraine.

The contrast with the rapid folding of the Afghan government and its well-equipped military, which turned out to be entirely dependent on foreign forces, is stark.

If the Ukraine invasion turns into a long war, a key factor will be whether materiel support to the Ukrainians is sufficient for them to sustain their operational success, or whether attrition will wear them down, handing an advantage to Putin.

The lesson for Australia is to have what we used to call ‘self-reliant’ defence forces, not just forces that plug into larger US plans and operations. That’s why domestic missile production is so important.

Plan for the fight you’re going to have

The Ukrainian forces have come a long way since 2014. Not only have they defeated elite airborne troops and ‘Spetsnaz’ special forces, they’ve defeated Russia’s modernised integrated military. This was possible because the Ukrainians developed new operating concepts and adopted new weapons.

Small mobile units with effective anti-armour weapons, who knew their terrain well, took advantage of their geography and ambushed traditional Russian formations and their extended, badly protected supply lines.

A ponderous, traditional adversary with poor planning faced agile, mobile, lethal forces. The morale of Russian fighting units has collapsed, while operational success has fed the Ukrainian military’s confidence and energy—despite Russia’s overwhelming numbers in personnel and equipment.

The Ukrainians are also using Starlink satellite communication systems provided by Elon Musk, smartphones and even Facebook pages to employ Turkish armed drones and anti-tank missiles like the Javelin and NLAW, innovating at the speed required by war.

The contrast between what the Ukrainians have shown is possible and the sluggish pace of Australia’s processes for integrating new concepts, technologies and systems into the ‘integrated joint force’ is embarrassing.

New concepts and weapons applied in the actual geography that the Australian Defence Force would operate in during a war in our region will be definitive for success or defeat. Yet, the ADF has not been clear about scenarios for conflict in our region. Without this as a starting point, the result is hypotheticals about the virtues of heavy armour, combined arms and multi-domain operations, resulting in a force with a little bit of everything and not much of anything.

War is a real and present danger

The term ‘post-war Europe’ is dead. NATO members that resented US presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden insisting they spend more on their defence have woken up to this nasty reality.

Australian government policy says major conflict involving our defence forces is credible within 10 years. This is a dramatic change in what, before the 2020 defence strategic update, had been the most stable fundamental planning assumption underpinning defence strategy, military capability, preparedness, and defence spending for more than 30 years.

However, actual plans for military capability that dictate how Australia’s growing defence budget ($48.6 billion in the March 2022 budget, on the way to $73.7 billion by 2030) is spent have not changed much. And not in any way that increases Australia’s military power before the mid-2030s and later.

The AUKUS nuclear submarine initiative is an example of where the new plans are even slower to deliver than before 2020, while the recently announced intent to grow the ADF by 18,500 personnel by 2040 is simply delivering the people to operate the force structure Defence convinced the government to agree to in the 2016 white paper.

Deterrence requires real military power

Before Putin began his attack in Ukraine, US and NATO leaders foreshadowed severe economic consequences for him and Russia. NATO leaders met and expressed resolution.

None of that mattered when Putin ordered the attack on 24 February and it has not mattered since.

The unexpected and very welcome unity of the EU, US and NATO, joined by other international partners, in imposing rapid, sweeping and deep economic and political sanctions has gone far beyond what Putin and his advisers would have contemplated. It has almost certainly gone much further than the EU, US NATO and others had considered before the war.

NATO members’ growing commitment to rearm urgently and to strengthen NATO power on Russia’s periphery is also welcome and may deter further Russian aggression, depending on how the Ukrainian war unfolds.

But Putin’s plan was to attack Ukraine, not NATO. He has done so and continues to do so despite all this deterrent activity. For all the triumphalism about unity and deterrence, we have all failed the moment. Setting ‘red lines’ around the use of chemical weapons simply says NATO is willing to accept any other actions, including mass deaths and destruction of entire cities through aerial, artillery and naval bombardment.

Arguably, all this sanctions unity and determination to increase Europe’s military power has been enabled by Ukraine’s defiance in the face of Russian forces. If its military had folded as expected (and Zelensky had accepted the US offer of a ride out, instead of staying and demanding ammunition), we may not have seen such international cooperation and resolve.

In that alternative future, we may have just seen more of the division and vacillation on display in European security discussions over the past decade, which would have empowered the aggressive autocrats in Moscow and Beijing even more than they are now.

The insight for Europe and for our own region is that real military power—and an understood will to use it if required—is essential to deterrence. Perhaps Putin’s underestimation of the military costs he would incur from his war will lead to some reappraisals in Beijing. But deterrence through economics alone looks a risky game.

Talk means nothing without action

Announcements without timeframes don’t increase your military power. The Ukrainians used their time since 2014 incredibly well, upending Russian and international expectations about what their forces could do.

Australia needs to do the same in the remaining eight years of this decade. When it comes to Australian military power, we have not spent the last two decades wisely.

Defence must secure northern Australia amid gravest risk since WWII

In the new cold war, Southeast Asia is becoming a contested zone where China, the US and its allies are fighting to sustain their access and influence.

This matters deeply to Australia because the superpower that dominates Southeast Asia controls our northern approaches.

The Obama administration dismissed Beijing’s island-building in the South China Sea as a third-order issue over claims to ‘rocks and shoals’.

It’s clearer now that these new, large, fortified airbases and ports extend China’s military power south to the Indonesian archipelago.

When, in February, Beijing sent two of its most modern navy vessels through the Torres Strait and down the east coast, the message was clear: the People’s Liberation Army intends to project force whenever and wherever it can.

Beijing signed an arrangement with Cambodia last week promoting closer military cooperation. Chinese work to expand a naval base at Ream will sustain a PLA presence in the Gulf of Thailand.

This sets the context for the disturbing discovery of a secret Chinese deal with Solomon Islands, offering a blank slate to ‘make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in and have stopover and transition in the Solomon Islands’.

China’s military planners are making a sustained drive to position forces around the Indo-Pacific. This damages everyone else, complicates American defence planning and forces smaller countries to either acquiesce or resist.

The outcome of the Philippines’ presidential elections in May could be crucial to the strategic balance in Southeast Asia. The outgoing president, Rodrigo Duterte, sought a closer relationship with Beijing, although more recently he has distanced himself from that stance, which is widely unpopular in his country.

Most of the Philippines’ presidential candidates are disavowing pro-China policies except for the frontrunner, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr, who promises a conciliatory approach to Beijing.

A Philippines that chooses to rebuild closer defence ties with the US would seriously complicate China’s plan to dominate the region. Beijing will be doing its best to shape the political outcome it wants in Manila.

Disturbingly, the outline of Chinese strategic thinking in the region is more observable than our own policy approaches. Defence Minister Peter Dutton is right to openly discuss Beijing’s malign behaviour, but what are Australia’s defence policy responses?

The Defence Department knows we face a strategic crisis of 1930s proportions, but its effort is overwhelmingly pitched to delivering a renewed force structure in the late 2030s.

Acquiring nuclear-propelled submarines and growing the Australian Defence Force by 20,000 people are good initiatives, but they will take two decades to deliver. Meantime, budget estimates hearings last week revealed that Defence is inexplicably cancelling a $1.3 billion project that would have delivered armed and remotely piloted MQ-9B Reaper drones in the mid-2020s.

This is, to use a strategic term, mind-bogglingly stupid. A rare Defence project that was going to deliver new combat capability in just a few years is shelved after a decade’s worth of planning and investment.

Defence’s description of this project was that it would ‘provide Defence with a persistent airborne intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electronic warfare and precision strike capability for the land and littoral environments’.

It would be hard to think of a more timely and relevant capability for the ADF when the PLA is sending more ships around our coast and potentially operating out of Honiara. Why was the project cancelled? I understand it was on a list of potential cost-saving ‘sacrifices’ put to government, but Defence thought no one would touch it.

The Reaper deal, moreover, had been approved by the US Congress. Our decision to cancel it at the last moment makes us look like clueless amateurs while we try to persuade Washington that we have the smarts to use their closely guarded nuclear-propulsion technology.

Ukraine has shown how much damage even simple armed drones can deliver to armoured vehicles. Everyone from Azerbaijan to the Yemeni Houthi rebels has adopted drones and shown how effective they can be, but the ADF has not a single armed drone in service and, with this cancellation, no plan to have one.

While Defence fixates on building the perfect ‘networked and integrated’ force structure for the 2030s, we are losing the opportunity to build a stronger ADF for the mid-2020s, the likely time of greatest strategic risk to the region since World War II.

When there’s no time left to change the structure of the military, the need is to look instead at force posture; that is, what we do with the equipment and units we have. There are clearly some big changes afoot concerning northern Australia.

In the budget papers is a plan for ‘$1.5 billion to build new port infrastructure, such as a wharf, an offloading facility and dredging of the shipping channel, to boost the region’s importing and exporting ability’.

While this is being discussed as an initiative to boost exports, the strongest use case for a new port in Darwin is military. There are some important dots to join here. In 2020 the government cancelled Defence plans for a roll-on, roll-off wharf in Darwin, saying it would be compensated for ‘with the US Force Posture Initiative commitments’.

In 2021 the AUSMIN communiqué agreed to ‘establish a combined logistics, sustainment, and maintenance enterprise to support high-end warfighting and combined military operations in the region’. The location wasn’t specified, but look at a map. It won’t be Hobart.

Just south of Darwin the US is installing a fuel farm planned by September 2023 to hold over 300 million litres of military jet fuel. Although the government is reluctant to say what is in prospect, it’s obvious the Americans are going to be here in much larger numbers soon.

This all points to a need for a radical rethink about Darwin’s role in the defence of Australia and what we need to do to rebuild our threadbare military infrastructure across the north. The PLA threat is pushing south, and we need a response to it.

I understand the prime minister doesn’t want a new defence white paper or a national security strategy. There’s a view that written policies constrain freewheeling decision-making. So be it, but something must be done to instil a disciplined focus around Defence’s strategic planning, jolting it away from its fantasies about the late 2030s and towards the tough realities of today.

Australia to send Bushmaster armoured vehicles to Ukraine

In a speech to Australia’s parliament last night, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky asked for ‘wonderful’ Bushmaster troop carriers, which he said could significantly help his country.

Nations such as Australia should help arm those fighting for freedom, Zelensky said. ‘For evil to lose and for Russia to seek peace, Ukraine must have everything it needs on the battlefield.

‘For example, you have wonderful Bushmaster armoured vehicles that can significantly help Ukraine. As well as other models of equipment and weapons that can strengthen our position. If you have the opportunity, Ukraine will be grateful to you.

‘Now in Ukraine they will definitely do more for our common freedom, for our common security than being covered with dust on your land. The Ukrainian people have already shown the world how sincerely we value freedom. How consistently we are ready to defend it.’

Today, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne, representing Defence Minister Peter Dutton in a Senate estimates hearing, indicated that Bushmasters would be sent to Ukraine.

So, what is a Bushmaster, and could it make a difference?

The policy seeds that ultimately produced the Australian-designed and -built Bushmaster armoured troop carrier were planted in the Hawke government’s 1987 defence white paper, The defence of Australia, which raised the possibility of small groups of foreign troops landing in the country’s north and identified the need for Australia’s ground forces to be given the mobility and speed to find and deal with them. That spurred the decision to obtain a large number of lightly armoured and versatile troop carriers.

It was assessed that such raiders would arrive lightly equipped and aim to capture materials to build bombs, which were later to become ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

The Bushmaster’s DNA contained echoes of wars past and campaigns on continents far away, drawing on South African and Rhodesian experiments with landmine-blast-deflecting V-shaped hulls.

Its development drew, too, on the experiences of Australian troops on peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and in nations such as Namibia and Cambodia who saw both the devastating impact of landmines on the occupants of soft-skinned vehicles like 4WDs and the effectiveness of vehicles designed to defend against them.

After decades of development and lessons learned in battle, the result, built by Thales Australia, was vastly more effective and better protected than the lightly armoured vehicle originally envisaged. Proof was delivered in Iraq and Afghanistan, where around 100 Bushmasters were blown up but not a single soldier died in one.

Each of the RAAF’s giant C-17 Globemaster II transport aircraft can carry four Bushmasters.

The Australian Defence Force has sufficient numbers to part with some—ADF land systems commander Major General Andrew Bottrell told Senate estimates the ADF had 946.

Last night, an international donors’ conference coordinating aid to Ukraine included Bushmasters in its discussion.

An air bridge using the C-17s could get a meaningful number to Europe within a matter of weeks. With relatively low-tech militaries like Fiji’s and Jamaica’s already operating Bushmasters, the resourceful Ukrainians could master their operation very quickly. Since the Netherlands already has nearly 100 Bushmasters, it’s a potential area for cooperation between two Western democracies eager to demonstrate their support for Ukraine. The Dutch, as Europe’s major Bushmaster operator, could potentially provide forward logistics and training support, for example.

In the role they were designed for, Bushmasters would be a useful, but not game-changing, capability for Ukraine. As protected mobility vehicles, they safeguard their occupants against mines, IEDs, small arms like machine guns, and artillery blast and fragmentation. They could move forces around rear areas, or potentially evacuate non-combatants from besieged cities.

They won’t protect against a direct hit from a tank, howitzer or anti-tank missile, all of which Russia has in abundance. So, while the Bushmaster proved itself against the threats it came up against in Afghanistan, it won’t be impervious to everything it might encounter in Ukraine.

The daily grind of war will take its toll on the vehicles. We’ll need to provide training in their maintenance and an ongoing, liberal supply of spares. How you sustain a logistics chain to Bushmasters scattered across Ukraine is anyone’s guess, but excellent techniques to maintain and upgrade them were developed in theatre in Afghanistan.

After bombings there, troops sent back technical reports and ‘tiger teams’ of engineers and scientists were dispatched to the war zone to examine the damage and find ways to strengthen the vehicle. Thales Australia was able to improve Bushmasters on the production line and in the operational area.

And the Ukrainians have shown themselves to be adept at putting all kinds of equipment from around the world into service.

If we do supply the vehicles to Ukraine, we need to accept that we may see footage of destroyed Bushmasters. And with both sides putting captured materiel into service, we might see them with the now infamous ‘Z’ painted on their sides. It was jarring to see the Taliban driving around Kabul in US Humvees originally provided to the Afghan army. It will be the same with captured Bushmasters (which would inevitably be accompanied by the information warfare and internet trolling that has become a feature of this conflict).

But the Australian Bushmasters will be a highly visible demonstration that the world is watching and supporting Ukraine. For Zelensky, that will be as important as any military capability they will provide.

More than 1,000 Bushmasters have been delivered to the Australian Army and to Royal Australian Air Force airfield defence guards. Other vehicles based on the troop carrier are being used by firefighters in South Australia. In all, 116 Bushmasters have been sold to the Netherlands. Thirty were sold to the UK for its Special Air Service Regiment and it used some of those in Syria and Iraq.

As of May 2021, 234 bushmasters had been sold overseas, 48 to New Zealand, 10 to Fiji for use in the Middle East on UN peacekeeping missions, four to Indonesia, eight to Japan and 18 to Jamaica. In 2018, Thales sent three Bushmaster Multi-Role 6 variants to the UK with a range of enhancements targeting the selection competition for the British Army’s multi-role protected vehicle. One was to be blast tested; the other two were an ambulance and a troop carrier. These vehicles are designated MR6 because there had been five previous production runs.

If providing Bushmasters to Ukraine proves successful, the next step could be to provide our Abrams tanks, as commentators quickly proposed in the wake of Zelensky’s speech to parliament. We haven’t deployed our tanks since the Vietnam War and, as Zelensky said, it’s better for equipment to be put into service against Russia than sit around in parks. Moreover, we have new Abrams tanks on order as replacements for our fleet of 59 older-generation Abrams. Certainly, providing a tank capability would be a major step up in terms of training and logistics requirements compared to Bushmasters and would need careful planning. So, rather than sending them straight to Ukraine, providing them to Poland (which has also ordered Abrams from the US) to free up its Soviet-era tanks for the Ukraine could be an option.

It’s time to talk to, not at, the Pacific

When the draft security agreement between Solomon Islands and China landed in the news cycle on Thursday, we shared a sense of dread. Initial analysis of the agreement in the Australian media was typically narrow and, at times, downright unhelpful.

The most outlandish claim was that Australia should be prepared to ‘invade’ Solomon Islands and ‘topple its government’. Apart from being illegal and impracticable, recommendations like this undermine both Solomon Islands’ and Australia’s security. They can be used both to bolster complex domestic power struggles in Solomon Islands and to fuel narratives of Australian militarisation and neo-colonialism, undermining Canberra’s relationships in the Pacific and raising suspicions of its motives.

Other Australian media responses were more measured. But they viewed the agreement primarily through a geopolitical lens. Although the leaked draft didn’t specifically mention it, all assumed that it would inevitably lead to a Chinese ‘military base’ in Solomon Islands. And they all focused on shoring up Australian leadership in the region. Recommendations ranged from Australia building a naval base in Solomon Islands to pursuing a regionwide agreement to ban non-resident powers from basing or deploying military personnel in the Pacific region. Other suggestions included expanding access to the seasonal worker program and increasing educational scholarships.

Largely missing were nuanced analyses that acknowledged the primacy of domestic Solomon Islands politics and the complexity of its geopolitical relationships. This was mostly because few Solomon Islander voices were heard in the initial Australian media storm.

Australian understandings of the Pacific will always be partial unless more space is provided for Pacific voices to participate in robust and nuanced public—and private—debate.

This suggests an urgent need for opportunities for deepening mutual understanding, building relationships and elevating the profiles of Pacific thinkers in Australia and elsewhere. Creating opportunities for Australians and their Pacific counterparts to engage in private discussion is essential to widening and deepening knowledge and relationships.

Track 1.5 dialogues offer one (although not the only) way to provide these opportunities.

Track 1.5 dialogues are informal conversations that include government officials and non-governmental experts all sitting around the same table. In Asia, they are an accepted—and, in the case of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue defence summit, institutionalised—part of the region’s multilateral framework.

But track 1.5 security dialogues comprising Australian, New Zealand and Pacific island officials and non-governmental experts are underutilised. This is despite the fact that they could provide critical opportunities for open and frank closed-door conversations to deepen understanding of the issues at stake and the perspectives of other actors.

We frequently participate in track 1.5 regional security dialogues with Australia’s and New Zealand’s major partners at which Pacific issues are discussed. They are rich and valuable experiences. But Pacific participants are seldom involved. Notably, when Australia asked China to revive a dialogue on the Pacific earlier this month, the proposal didn’t include participation by any Pacific state.

One notable exception was in 2020, when one of us co-hosted the Track 1.5 Pacific Security Dialogue held to inform the Australia–New Zealand–United States Pacific Security Cooperation Dialogue. It was deliberately set up to ensure that the majority of speakers and participants were from the Pacific, which was partly enabled by its being held online due to Covid-19 travel restrictions.

Post-dialogue feedback reflected the value of providing a platform for Pacific voices. Participants appreciated the opportunity to hear from, and exchange views with, Pacific participants. Australian, New Zealand and American participants commented that they hadn’t been aware of the depth of Pacific expertise before the dialogue.

There are several contexts in which track 1.5 dialogues could be held in the Pacific.

Universities could be engaged to facilitate dialogues. For example, later this year, funded by a Defence strategic policy grant, our universities and the Australian National University will host a track 1.5 dialogue between Australian, New Zealand, American, Japanese and Pacific officials and academics on enhancing security cooperation in the Pacific.

In the region, the Pacific Islands Forum has considerable convening authority and could partner with, for example, the University of the South Pacific. The forum’s draft 2050 strategy for the Blue Pacific, which aims to design an effective regional architecture to respond to security and political challenges, provides the imperative. Establishing a Suva dialogue, for example, would embed multitrack diplomacy in both regional security practice and architecture.

Institutionalising a program of track 1.5 dialogues between officials and non-government experts from Australia, New Zealand, other partners and the Pacific would build understanding of the region, enhance relationships, deepen trust and provide a platform for Pacific voices and perspectives. It would provide a forum for uncomfortable conversations and for solutions to be offered to the challenges facing the Pacific and its partners. It would require genuine investment and commitment.

The ‘success’ of these dialogues would probably be difficult to define or identify in the short term. Dialogues don’t carry the same weight at the ballot box or catch as much media attention as rumours of military bases, but the dividends of track 1.5 diplomacy—such as open communication during times of crisis—would be invaluable.

To stop Chinese bases, Australia must lead in the Pacific

Beijing’s interest in Pacific military bases is to make it harder for the United States to move forces across the sea and closer to the Chinese mainland.

This is a modern version of Japan’s wartime strategy: protect the homeland by dispersing your own forces and hit the enemy’s supply lines as they try to get closer.

A bonus for China is that a military base in Solomon Islands would complicate Australia’s defence. The Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942 is remembered as the first major fight between aircraft carriers, but it was fought in an unsuccessful attempt to stop Japanese forces lodging in Solomon Islands.

Geography doesn’t change. Imagine a point, say 15 years from now, when Australia has built its nuclear submarine port on the east coast. Scott Morrison says that this port will ‘enable regular visits from the United States and United Kingdom’s nuclear-powered submarines’.

If China establishes a military presence in the Solomons, we could in 15 years see People’s Liberation Army maritime surveillance aircraft using Honiara to keep a permanent surveillance cap over our east coast.

Beijing could have installed signals intelligence systems able to suck up electronic emissions from Cairns to Melbourne and an over-the-horizon radar system to track ship and aircraft movements.

What if China covertly brought into the Solomons anti-aircraft missile batteries or a stock of sea mines able to be laid by Chinese ‘civilian’ fishing boats?

Some may see this as exaggerating the threat, but Xi Jinping does not lack strategic imagination.

A Chinese military base in Honiara crosses a line that Canberra cannot permit. Moreover, Washington will share these concerns and expect Australia to find a way to stop this agreement being finalised.

The Australian national security establishment will be worried and will be looking for ways to dissuade the Solomon Islands government from agreeing to the deal.

The broader context is decades of Australian benign neglect of the region. In truth, we don’t have a close or privileged relationship with many Pacific island governments.

Based on the latest figures from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Solomon Islands has $244 million invested in Australia, compared to only $70 million worth of Australian investments there. China is Solomon Islands’ top export destination, taking 66.8% of the country’s exports. Australia languishes at 13th place, taking only 0.9% of goods.

Australia’s biggest interest in the Solomons is low-cost seasonal labour. We shouldn’t be too surprised if Honiara concludes that, for all the talk about being family, Australia is just not that engaged. We turn up with police and soldiers when Honiara riots, but China turns up, and stays, with bags of money.

The good news is that Solomon Islands is a lively and loud democracy and there will be plenty of people in parliament and in the country offended by a draft treaty that cedes so much unchecked power to China. It’s possible that the agreement will be voted down in Honiara’s national parliament.

The onus is on Australia to come up with a compelling reason for Solomon Islands to see us as its best possible security partner. The offer to establish an Australian naval base would be a good start. How about jointly offering with the Americans a series of long-term military construction, engineering and medical visits to help the country’s decaying infrastructure?

The US does a superb job of linking state National Guard units to small countries, building relationships through regular deployments doing civil construction work. Why not designate Australian Defence Force reserve units to similar roles?

In earlier years, the Defence reaction was to oppose the idea of naval basing or engaging in engineering or construction tasks other than in response to natural disasters. Now we have a strategic need to change that mindset.

This amounts to yet another task for the Defence checklist and another reason why our military spending needs to double from its current 2.1% floor. Consider it the price of regional leadership. The Chinese will eat our lunch for us if we can’t or won’t make the effort ourselves.

US Indo-Pacific strategy presents opportunities for Australia to broaden its view of security

The White House released the Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States on 11 February to coincide with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Fiji. Commentary has focused on its mentions of Chinese aggression, so it would be easy to miss that this is a new type of security strategy: one that focuses as much on individual and community security as on state security. Australia needs to align with this perspective or it will be out of step with its great and powerful friend.

The Indo-Pacific strategy is clear about the challenges in the region that require an intensifying American focus: ‘The PRC is combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific.’

But that doesn’t mean that military and hard security responses are the only priorities of the US strategy. Insofar as one can read into the hierarchy of a strategic policy document, security is fourth in line.

The first strategic objective is to ‘advance a free and open Indo-Pacific’ by ‘building resilience’ within countries, including a free press, vibrant civil societies and fiscal transparency to expose corruption. The second is to ‘build connections within and beyond the region’, which focuses on bilateral and multilateral engagement by the US. The third objective is to ‘drive regional prosperity’, which involves setting out economic frameworks that respect the region’s demands for labour and environmental standards, and support digital economic governance, decarbonisation, clean energy investments, infrastructure and secure supply chains. ‘Bolster Indo-Pacific security’ is next in line, followed by ‘build regional resilience to transnational threats’.

Of course, this should not be read as the US somehow deprioritising hard security. The geostrategic headwinds are blowing too strongly for that. But it can be interpreted as prioritising US investments in security interests of people in the Indo-Pacific—the ability for individuals to participate in public life, to feed their families and to enjoy basic labour rights and a sustainable environment—as an avenue for maintaining influence and increasing development-derived regional stability.

Australia needs to get on board with this broad idea of security.

In many ways it suits Australia. Development is the $4.5 billion arm of statecraft that is the primary point of connection many in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have with our country. Australia’s development spending does high-profile things like vaccine delivery and humanitarian response in times of crisis. It also maintains a civilian footprint for Australia throughout the region.

But in other ways, the contrast between the US and Australian approaches to the link between individual security, economic development and national security can be striking.

Whereas the US is out and proud on democracy promotion, anti-corruption and civil society, Australia prefers to work on these issues mainly behind the scenes.

While the US administration has a dedicated position on the National Security Council for development, Australia doesn’t (instead, it’s represented by the minister for foreign affairs, who overseas an expansive portfolio).

While the USAID budget is growing, Australia’s core development assistance budget is hovering at its lowest figure in a decade and its lowest percentage of the federal budget since the 1970s.

While the US foreign-policy community seeks to rally behind, promote and speak publicly about the value of aid, Australian government leaders have historically been camera-shy.

While USAID is looking to build cultural and development expertise into its administration, the 2013 merger of AusAID into the Department of Foreign Affairs has attracted consistent criticism over the loss of expertise in Australia’s development program.

And whereas the US is expanding its focus to issues at the intersection of technology, security and development, Australia’s shifts into these spaces is limited.

The US strategy on the Indo-Pacific means that there’s a new development cooperation dynamic between Australia and the US—and Australia will need to keep up.

In this context, it’s heartening to see some consensus emerging among Australia’s policy communities that we can improve our national security outcomes by bolstering our complementary investments in individual security and economic development. A recent report by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue drawing on consultation with more than 150 experts sets out pathways for Australia to be an effective security partner by ‘investing in human security and state security as complementary and mutually reinforcing endeavours, not competing paradigms’.

Insecurity at the individual level undermines national stability. Secure individuals who have physical safety, jobs and access to education and opportunities build secure communities. Secure communities build secure states. The transformative power of prioritising human security—not just through the development program, but through all tools of statecraft—will position Australia as a practical partner in the Indo-Pacific. A partner that can help address challenges driven by inequality and instability before they translate into national and regional instability that requires a hard security response.

In principle, this is uncontroversial, especially for a country surrounded by developing countries, with a lot to offer in terms of resource and expertise. In practice, it requires a pragmatic rethink of the comparative advantages offered by trade, development and diplomatic initiatives.

Australia can achieve huge impacts by broadening its view.

It would be a win–win for Australia and the US development portfolios to cooperate more closely, building on a recent memorandum of understanding. Australia has a lot of knowledge and understanding of the Pacific region—an area not traditionally the focus of US development interests. And Australia might take a lesson or two from the US when it comes to clear-headed, long-term development policy.

The US Indo-Pacific strategy and the USAID presence in the Indo-Pacific recognise that catalysing human security is a key strategy for generating the type of Indo-Pacific the US seeks to shape: a region that is ‘open, connected, prosperous, resilient and secure’. That’s where development fits as a foreign policy tool—one that’s more powerful than ever.

Defence ‘acutely aware’ of risks posed by climate change: ADF chief

Defence has a key role to play supporting the government’s climate and disaster resilience agenda by integrating climate risk into the planning and conduct of its activities and operations, says Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell.

In a video statement at the launch of a new ASPI publication, The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific, Campbell described as ‘outstanding’ the work of ASPI’s Climate and Security Policy Centre led by Robert Glasser and said it performed an essential role in driving discussion of the long-term strategic consequences of climate change.

‘Those of us in Defence are acutely aware of the significant impact climate risks will have on the future of our region,’ he said. ‘Both the 2016 defence white paper and the 2020 defence strategic update identify that climate risk will affect our operating environment.’

The strategic update stated that threats to human security such as pandemics and growing water and food scarcity were likely to result in greater political instability and friction within and between countries, and reshape Australia’s security environment.

These threats would be compounded by population growth and extreme weather events in which climate change played a part, Campbell said.

The update said that while Defence had made substantial progress in building a more potent, capable and agile defence force, adjustments to the plans in the white paper were required, including measures to enhance ADF support to civil authorities in response to national crises and natural disasters such as pandemics, bushfires, floods and cyclones.

The strategic update noted that disaster response and resilience measures demanded a higher priority in defence planning, Campbell said. The ADF was working hard on such a response. Many climate risks were most consequential and urgent in the Pacific region. The ADF’s support to the region was guided by the Framework for Pacific Regionalism and the Boe Declaration on Regional Security with its values and vision of peace, harmony, security, social inclusion and prosperity, so that all Pacific people could lead free, healthy and productive lives, he said.

The declaration stated that climate change remained the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific. It recognised an increasingly complex regional security environment driven by multifaceted security challenges and affirmed the peoples’ stewardship of the Blue Pacific and the need to strengthen and enhance capacity to pursue collective security interests in the region.

‘Defence stands ready to support the Pacific in these aspirations,’ Campbell said. Australia remained a principle regional partner supporting nations responding to disasters, especially in the Southwest Pacific. Similarly, as a Center for Strategic and International Studies report identified, Southeast Asia would be one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change. A temperature increase of 1.5°C would cause rising seas, dangerous flooding and changing rainfall patterns, leading to violent typhoons and droughts.

These climate risks posed a threat to food security, hobbled economic growth, prompted political instability and catalysed pandemics. ‘As the contributors to this ASPI publication make clear, the impacts of climate risks on the geopolitics and security of the Indo-Pacific are complex, but undeniable,’ Campbell said. ‘They alter the context in which regional actors make decisions and influence the strategies they pursue to achieve their goals.’

These factors contributed to state fragility and the risk of strategic miscalculation, he warned. Defence considered climate and disaster resilience risk in its strategic guidance and planning for structure, preparedness and mobilisation, supply chain logistics, estate and infrastructure plans, joint force operations, technological innovations, and capability development.

Paying his respects to Indigenous Australians, Campbell noted: ‘Like all of us, … our Indigenous peoples are deeply invested in the future of this great continent and the planetary systems that support its continuing sustainability.’

The challenges were significant, as the new report highlighted, he said. ‘Sometimes it takes determination not to be disheartened by the scope and scale of the challenges our region faces, particularly when it comes to climate risks, especially as we manage other overlapping short-term risks and crises on a daily basis,’ he said.

‘But I am hopeful. Each challenge presents an opportunity for cooperation for the common good, helping us to overcome entrenched suspicions or rivalries through collective action. It may be in small ways at first, but enough small moments of cooperation can build into greater things. They form the foundation for a better future and a stronger community within the Indo-Pacific.’

Campbell said he was not disheartened by the challenges or the work ahead. ‘I hope you are not either. The Climate and Security Policy Centre has done an excellent job in outlining the challenges we face within the region, but they’ve also pointed the way forward and offered potential solutions or areas for cooperation to address these challenges.

‘It represents yet another step forward. Congratulations on the publication of The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific. It should be closely read, and I hope it will inspire many to take heart and to take action.’

Australia needs a radical expansion of its land-based strike capabilities

To meet the challenges of expanding high-end military capabilities in the region and the need to significantly increase the Australian Defence Force’s deterrent capabilities, the Australian government should up-end one of the traditional ways it has approached regional defence.

By moving the army away from its outdated position as the strategic goalkeeper in the defence of Australia and placing it front and centre in regional anti-access/area-denial capabilities, the government would radically reshape the joint force and the ADF’s capabilities. The project to revolutionise the army’s role, Land 8113—long-range fires, is already underway. By quadrupling the budget for Land 8113 from $5 billion to $20 billion, the government could quickly, massively and comparatively cheaply increase the ADF’s deterrent capabilities and mould it into a much more modern and joint force.

In recent weeks, we have seen a major discussion of the shape, size and fit of the current and proposed force structure. We are all aware of the failures and promises of Australia’s troubled future submarine program. Details have now emerged of serious concerns with the navy’s Hunter-class frigate program. More broadly, ASPI’s Marcus Hellyer has noted that ‘[t]he government’s $575 billion expenditure on defence in the 2020s, which includes $270 billion on new capability, will not get any front-line warships to sea this decade and likely none until the middle of the next decade’.

The ADF’s force structure woes don’t end there. Concerns are ongoing over the ability of the air force’s F-35 fighter jets to meet Australia’s needs given their short range, small numbers and lack of a long-range anti-ship missile. These problems are only compounded by continued concerns about the cost of the modernisation of the army’s tank force and the appropriateness of its cornerstone capability acquisition program, the recapitalisation of its armoured vehicle fleet through project Land 400, for operations in the Indo-Pacific.

Even more troubling is the fact that the government’s strategic guidance made it clear that deterrence and high-end conflict in the Indo-Pacific are now the major focus of the ADF and that it had ended the 10-year warning time for major conflict. What this leaves us with is an ADF force structure that is out of date and a future force structure plan that is out of sync with strategic guidance.

The current macro ADF force structure—12 to 14 major surface combatants and six submarines for the navy, 70 to 100 strike aircraft for the air force and three brigades for army—is a six-decade-old legacy of the Menzies government and Australia’s response to the limits of US support during Konfrontasi. This macro force structure was built around the need for limited self-reliance for regional contingencies and the concept of maintaining a capability edge to ensure a regionally superior ADF.

This force structure proved enduring because it was based on our major ally, the United States, maintaining hegemony and uncontested maritime supremacy in the Indo-Pacific. For decades now, however, warnings have occurred about the erosion of this capability edge as well as the return of major-power competition in the region. As the then defence minister, Linda Reynolds, stated in 2020 at the Perth launch of the government’s defence strategic update, ‘The world we grew up in is no more.’

Despite this, force structure plans for the ADF continue on the same well-trodden path as if nothing has changed. The force structure plan released with the 2020 update gives us pretty much the same ADF. F-35s and Super Hornets replace F-111s and Classic Hornets, three air warfare destroyers have replaced three guided missile destroyers, nine Hunter-class frigates will replace eight Anzac frigates, and Land 400 vehicles will replace ASLAVs and M-113 armoured personnel carriers.

The growing reach of China’s military capabilities along with the declining power of the US has brought Australia to an inflection point. The AUKUS announcement and the US’s move to embrace integrated deterrence in the Indo-Pacific is tantamount to a long overdue admission that the US has lost primacy in the region and can no longer provide unilateral extended conventional deterrence. What’s clear is that the ADF’s force structure and force posture need a radical rethink to match a fundamentally different strategic environment.

Even if the proposed future force is, somehow, the best to defend Australia’s interests, the nuclear-powered submarines won’t come into service until the late 2030s (at best) and the timeframe for the Hunter-class frigates is 2033 to 2044 (if they are on time). We also can’t hold out any hope for the ADF to acquire a long-range strike aircraft anytime soon. The only real prospect, the US B-21 Raider, is still in development and isn’t expected until the late 2020s in the US Air Force (at an estimated cost of US$500 million each).

Putting aside the constraints of a legacy macro force structure designed for a different world, the challenge for the government is to figure out what can be done for the ADF in the short term to significantly increase its high-end warfighting and deterrent capabilities.

As two of the doyens of Australian strategic thinking, Richard Brabin-Smith and Paul Dibb, pointed out in October, that focus has to be on long-range missiles and investments in the ‘preparedness of the ADF and … plans for force expansion’.

One of the best, quickest and cheapest ways to achieve all this is by a significant expansion of project Land 8113. As US Army Secretary Christine Wormuth noted late last year, 2023 will be ‘the year of long-range [land-based] precision fires’ as several US munitions programs with ranges far exceeding those of a generation ago will come online. Land-based cruise missiles, ‘based on Raytheon’s Tomahawk, will have a range of at least 1,000 miles and be able to destroy warships in transit plus hardened land targets like command centers’.

Significantly, land-based mobile launchers are much cheaper than launchers based on ships and aircraft. They’re also more difficult to find and destroy, especially when dispersed throughout the extended archipelagos that surround the Australian continent. Long-range land-based fires would also provide the ADF with an ability to generate mass, an element of combat power that always proves difficult to achieve for such a small force.

In addition, this move would build on the Australian government’s decision to develop a sovereign guided weapons enterprise and leverage some of the key details of AUKUS, which include Tomahawk missiles for the navy’s destroyers and extended-range joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, and long-range anti-ship missiles for the Super Hornets and F-35s. AUKUS also includes provisions for cooperation on hypersonic missiles and establishes an accelerated guided weapons manufacture and talent pool program.

The expansion and acceleration of Land 8133 would transform the army into a modern force, end its ‘battle for relevance’ and drive the ADF towards being a truly integrated joint force capable of high-end deterrence.

Agenda for change: the urgent need for a regional climate change risk assessment

On 2 February, ASPI released Agenda for change 2022: shaping a different future for our nation to promote public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to Australia. The key message in Agenda for change 2022 is that we need to embrace uncertainty, engage with complexity and break down the silos. Our economic prosperity, national resilience and security depend upon it.

In the lead-up to every federal election, ASPI looks at the big challenges facing Australia and what’s needed to address them. Included in Agenda for change 2022 is a chapter by Robert Glasser and Anastasia Kapetas on the urgent need for a regional climate change risk assessment.

The authors advocate for a filling in of the climate and security ‘policy vacuum’ by the next Australian government. This will require a better understanding of the profound consequences of climate change for both regional and national security. A regional climate change risk assessment would provide the evidence base for more effective policy interventions to help mitigate climate change risks and bolster the climate resilience of our neighbours.

Glasser and Kapetas say Australia has never conducted a comprehensive regional climate risk assessment that incorporates geopolitical impacts. This assessment would also explore how climate risks interact with current social, political, economic and technological risks to form new threats to our national interests and national security.

The need for urgent action is being driven by the presence of ‘overlapping systemic risks’ compounded by ‘state fragility and declining governance’, which are ‘increasingly important regional features in a warming climate’.

In mounting the case for a regional risk assessment, this chapter points to the compelling evidence on the impacts already being felt:

Sea-level rise, for example, is accelerating more rapidly in maritime Southeast Asia than anywhere else in the world. Extreme rainfall events will increase in severity and frequency across parts of Australia, Southeast Asia and continental Asia, while simultaneously other subregions will experience more severe and persistent droughts. The severity of tropical cyclones will increase, and their tracks are likely to shift poleward.

The authors note that the ‘implications of those impacts are obvious’, for example, in the ‘existential threat to low-lying small island states’. But in more complex climate interactions with critical components of human security, such as food systems, the impacts are not as well understood.

Glasser and Kapetas warn that the geopolitical consequences of climate change in the Indo-Pacific region include disruption of supply chains, effects on trade relations, and the impact of ‘winners and losers in the global energy transformation from fossil fuels to renewables’.

Increasing climate-related migration arising from extreme weather events is also highlighted. The authors note that in 2020 more than 30 million people (the vast majority of which were in the Indo-Pacific region) were displaced by climate-related disasters. ‘Such a disaster [drought] was a factor in the Syrian civil war, which resulted in the huge influx of Syrian refugees to Europe. More recently, it was the primary factor in a wave of migration from Central America to the US.’

The authors also note studies that link climate-change effects and terrorism.

There’s robust evidence suggesting that natural disasters are strongly associated with outbreaks of terrorism. In the Middle East and North Africa, climate-change impacts facilitated the rise of ISIS and Al-Nusra in Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Terrorism escalated significantly in both Sri Lanka and Thailand following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Glasser and Kapetas argue that the ‘reference point’ for a regional climate risk assessment should be ‘Australia’s national interests, extending beyond our narrow security and economic interests’. Such a focus requires a whole-of-nation approach and must draw in cross-sectoral interests and bring together policymakers, hazard and risk experts, climate scientists and supply-chain experts.

In undertaking this assessment, the authors say we need to establish governance arrangements to identify our national interests and select climate warming scenarios. We also need to identify hazards and how they ‘interact with the region’s complex human systems’. From there recommendations will flow and assessment information will guide implementation across government.

The timeframe to undertake the climate risk assessment is an ambitious 12 months—a reflection of both the severity and the wide-ranging consequences of this threat. Given the region’s ‘exceptional exposure and vulnerability to climate change’ and the ‘significant strategic risk’ to Australia, it must be an urgent priority for the next government.

Is Defence turning money into capability fast enough?

It’s a brutal time to be a Commonwealth public servant working on the budget. Portfolio additional estimates statements—the mid-year budget update for portfolio agencies—were tabled on Friday, yet with the 2022–23 budget brought forward to late March to clear the decks for the election, we’re only a month and a half away from budget night. In essence, the worker bees have been working on the PAES and next year’s budget simultaneously.

So, what can we learn from their hard work? First of all, as we have now become accustomed to seeing, the government has delivered the growing defence funding promised in its strategic documents such as the 2016 white paper and the 2020 strategic update. The issue that we’ll come to is whether Defence can spend it—and spend it in ways that deal with our strategic environment.

The main changes in Defence’s funding are a $463.1 million no-win, no-loss foreign exchange adjustment to maintain buying power in the face of a declining Australian dollar and $91.8 million more for Operation Covid-19 Assist. Defence is also transferring a further $56.5 million to the Office of the Special Investigator next year. Coming on top of the initial $116.5 million moved from Defence to fund the OSI in last year’s mid-year update, it suggests that the investigation of potential war crimes in Afghanistan still has a long way to go.

There’s some good news. There are signs that the long trajectory of de-skilling of the public service and outsourcing of core capabilities has finally bottomed out. There’s provision for an additional 540 public servants—190 this year and a further 350 next year—to implement crucial new programs such as the sovereign guided weapons enterprise and AUKUS. Hopefully the government has acknowledged that you can’t double the size of your capital investment program while gutting your in-house expertise and still hope to be a ‘smart buyer’, to use Defence’s own term. The continuing sorry narrative of project cancellations shows that Defence is far from it.

That gets us to Defence’s capital investment program. If we cast our minds back to the 2021–22 budget, the key question there was whether Defence could spend the substantially increased capital budget the government was providing it with. In 2020–21 Defence did well in the face of Covid-19 to set spending records in its acquisition programs, but it still fell about $1 billion short of the target. With a further increase of around $3 billion planned for this year, there was always going to be a question mark over Defence and its industry partners’ ability to turn that money into capability.

At a high level, the PAES indicate Defence will fall short again. The acquisition program is predicted to come in $815 million under the original budget target. When we consider that the acquisition program should also be spending a big chunk of the $463.1 million foreign exchange adjustment, it looks like it will again fall around $1 billion short.

But it’s when we look under the bonnet that things get interesting—and troubling. The military equipment acquisition program looks like it’s doing very well, actually passing its $11.2 billion target by $120.6 million (noting that it needs to overspend to address the foreign exchange adjustment). But there’s a clear pattern in the top 30 spenders for the year; the big projects are falling well short of their spending goals, and one of the iron laws of project management is when you don’t spend, you don’t get the capability on schedule.

The F-35A project is missing by $175 million, with only 54 aircraft delivered instead of 56 by the end of 2021–22. Two fewer aircraft may not seem like much, but with the classic Hornet fleet now fully retired, the air force needs every plane it can get. The Triton high-altitude UAV program is $98 million short between equipment and infrastructure.

Spending on the Hawkei protected mobility vehicle is $207 million short, due to a delay caused by a problem with its brakes and supply-chain woes. That means it will spend less than last year even though it’s meant to be entering full-rate production. The Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicle similarly is nearly $300 million short of its target and spending less this year than last. Somewhat depressingly, by the end of this financial year the project will still have spent more than $1.8 billion with only the first block of 25 overseas-built vehicles delivered and local construction of the remainder not due to start until 2023.

The list goes on. The troubled Hunter frigate program is $123 million under and will barely spend more this year than last. It’s not the trajectory you’d want to see as design activity ramps up and purchases of long-lead-time items such as combat-system and propulsion-train elements start. And while the government has made a lot of announcements about long-range missiles, they haven’t transformed into spending; the navy’s guided weapons subprogram is falling well short of its planned outlay (from $210 million down to $74 million) and is another big program spending less than last year ($190 million). Even a project that is spending and delivering broadly on schedule, the Arafura offshore patrol vessel, isn’t delivering lethal capability. A vessel that was massively undergunned in the first place is now being delivered virtually unarmed.

And true to form, the MRH-90 helicopter failed to achieve one final time, missing its target by $106 million ‘due to delay in its delivery schedule’. Its cancellation did not come soon enough.

Ironically, one of the few big projects that’s still forecast to hit its spending target for the year is the future submarine program that was cancelled less than a quarter of the way into the financial year. It’s hard to know what to make of that. The PAES says that funds are being transferred to the nuclear-powered submarine taskforce and to cover costs ‘associated with transitioning out of contractual arrangements’, but will that really use up $981 million this year? In any event, we’re still some way from knowing the final cost of the Attack-class saga. If that full amount is actually used up, it will get us perilously close to $3 billion.

The top 30 projects are a combined $1.9 billion under their planned budget for the year. No doubt the pandemic is playing a major role, but overall it’s not the sort of narrative that’s consistent with the one laid out in the government’s 2020 defence strategic update of evaporating warning times and a pressing need for new capabilities delivered faster, not slower than previously planned.

That huge shortfall is offset by some degree by an $860 million increase in spending in the rest of the military equipment program (those projects outside the top 30). That would suggest a significant amount of opportunity spending, but there’s nothing in the PAES to say what we’re getting for that sum. Is it new stuff like additional Seahawk Romeo helicopters, or is it simply bringing forward spending on things that were already in the plan like tanks? Or something else entirely?

A final admission of my inability to make sense of the document. Table 9 states that the estate and infrastructure program will underachieve by $682.5 million. Yet when one looks at the program in more detail in table 66, it appears to be spending $593.7 million more on individual infrastructure projects than planned in the budget. A large part of that is flowing into the Northern Territory, no doubt providing a welcome Covid-19 stimulus. Defence hasn’t responded to my request for an explanation on how you can spend nearly $600 million more than planned but end up nearly $700 million short of what you planned. Perhaps at estimates hearings this week senators can elicit a plain-English explanation.