Australia has enormous opportunities to influence the world for good, in ways that advance our wellbeing, security and prosperity. That’s the most striking message from ASPI’s new collection of ‘After Covid’ articles and policy proposals, whether the writers are looking at multilateralism, the Korean peninsula, Australia–India or Australia–Japan relations, women in national security, or the Bangsamoro peace process in the southern Philippines.

The other clear message is that Australia needs to think big to take up those opportunities. Simply accelerating or continuing current policies and engagement won’t produce the results we want. Waiting for others to define a post-Covid-19 agenda for us, whether that’s the United Nations, Washington, Delhi, Tokyo or Brussels, just won’t work, because everyone is groping about in search of solutions.

Notably, in several areas, Australians have done at least as much thinking about this as anyone else on the planet. It turns out that we aren’t bad at navigating concurrent crises and making decisions that attract domestic and international support. Australia’s policy and influence can help lead debates and decisions, just as we have in China policy and in technology policy, particularly with 5G and countering foreign interference.

This volume shows us that Australia is entering a more disorderly, poorer world where there’s a real risk of nations and peoples turning inward and hoping that big problems—such as intense China–US struggles over strategic, economic and technological power—will go away without anyone having to make hard choices; that, if we just wait, we can get back to business as usual. That won’t work. The risk of military conflict between the world’s two big powers, involving US allies such as Australia and Japan, will be greater in coming months and years than at most times since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

The authors of these papers have set out many examples of successful actions and decisions by partnerships of leaders and nations other than the ‘big two’. Some, such as the World Health Assembly agreement to have an independent inquiry into the global pandemic and its causes, resulted from successful multilateral diplomacy and engagement by Australia and others, notably the EU, but also African and Asian partners.

This volume sketches an enormous canvas for Australian policymakers.

The ambition required from our leaders and policymakers in politics, business, academia and civil society is equally enormous, but it’s essential, given what’s at stake. Putting human security and the aspirations of our region in the centre of our Pacific policy is possible and achievable and is the key to the deeper security and social and economic integration of our Pacific family.

It’s also possible, with partners, to bend ASEAN’s technological and economic integration away from the easy default path of comprehensively buying into Beijing’s techno-surveillance model of ‘prosperity’. We can help to do that by seizing opportunities to work on much broader political, security, technological and economic levels with Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul, Brussels and London. Those partnerships will also power Australia’s influence and engagement in international forums, whether the East Asia Summit, ASEAN or the UN.

Maybe the central agenda in all this is captured best by the idea that success for Australia will come from demonstrating competence in the pandemic, but also in the turbulent world following it. Doing so, as Caitlin Byrne puts it, requires us to be expert, starting at home.

Underlying all the new international opportunity for Australia is an urgent need to be as competent, expert and ambitious in domestic policy as we’ve shown we can be on the global stage. And that means thinking bigger than a newly painted but old agenda for our economy based on deregulation, tax cuts and spending restraint once the peak of the Covid-19 crisis is over. That’s because the global economy and international system have been changed by the pandemic.

Our ambitions to create energetic international partnerships with like-minded nations and groups on security, human rights, technology and economics require a national approach that’s equally creative and vibrant and necessitate our engagement with multilateral organisations and processes. That means breaking stale old federal–state positioning and politics. We need to use the billions of dollars that are going to be spent trying to kickstart Australia’s economy in ways that align with the directions our writers have identified.

So, the Pacific step-up will be turbocharged through greater understanding of and investment in human security, which may open the door to more opportunities for Australian investment, business and people-to-people links. Supply-chain vulnerabilities for India, Japan, the EU and Australia can be overcome through combined public–private investments that create new enterprises and new partnerships throughout our economies, as long as our leaders resist siren calls to resurrect protected industries in each of our nations.

And the pandemic has demonstrated even further the potential for state-sponsored and -derived technologies (such as high-tech surveillance systems and e-commerce platforms) to change the nature of state–citizen interactions in ways that simultaneously reduce people’s freedom and states’ sovereignty if those technologies are adopted uncritically. That opens opportunities for partnership with others facing the challenges of building digitally based economies while protecting social and political freedom.

That’s a dizzying array of policy directions, but they’re all bounded by two ideas: what we do here in Australia helps set the foundation and direction of our global and bilateral partnerships, and what we do internationally can change global directions.

The 2020 defence strategic update released last month provides a sobering analysis of Australia’s strategic environment and the risks we must manage. The document lays out a conflation of pressing issues and concludes that ‘major power competition has intensified and the prospect of high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific, while still unlikely, is less remote than in the past.’

Defence policy is all about managing risk, and in this regard the update has been well received. Its frank, forthright but balanced tone about the risks of our strategic environment has been appreciated by the public and the policy community alike. But getting our defence policy right isn’t only about understanding our external environment. Aligning strategy, force structure and operating concepts is just as much about managing our internal risks and challenges.

In addressing these challenges and the increased risk of conflict, the strategic update makes a number of issues clear. The focus is no longer on fighting wars of choice in the Middle East with our major-power ally. It is in the Indo-Pacific—especially the area from the northeast Indian Ocean through maritime and mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea and the southwest Pacific—where the Australian Defence Force must be prepared to operate, and if need be fight.

The update provides a significantly revised set of strategic objectives. The first of these is ‘to shape Australia’s strategic environment’. This the ADF should be able to take in its stride.

Australia’s military has a long and extensive history of deep engagement in our region, from the persistent presence of the navy in regional waters to the army’s and air force’s extensive engagement activities and our broad portfolio of military exercises with regional partners, big and small. A stronger emphasis on military diplomacy has been apparent in the ADF for the better part of a decade.

But other objectives of the new strategy, to ‘deter actions against Australia’s interests’ and ‘to respond with credible military force’ in a potential high-end conflict, will provide a profound challenge to our military culture. They strike deep into the heart of our military services’ pre-existing ideas about capabilities, organisation, doctrine and structures, as well as the ability of the ADF to operate as a joint force. This goes fundamentally to the ability of our military to adapt and innovate.

For instance, it took over a decade from the release of the 1976 Australian defence white paper to the 1987 The defence of Australia white paper to align strategy and force structure. The internal battles among the three military services and with the Defence Department during this decade are legendary. In the lead-up to the 1987 white paper, Defence Minister Kim Beazley broke the deadlock by commissioning Paul Dibb to undertake an independent review of Australia’s defence capabilities.

The 2020 update’s strategic reassessment must translate through to Australia’s defence planning, force structure changes and the ADF’s operating concepts. But, as the document lays out, unlike in the past, we don’t have the luxury of time.

Previous defence planning had assumed a 10-year strategic warning time for a major conventional conflict. The update makes it clear that this is no longer ‘an appropriate basis for defence planning.’

Changes are required now, and they are not insignificant. The ADF has been deployed on operations and developed combat experience over three decades in the Middle East. This experience is built mainly around counterinsurgency and maritime security operations. A generation of experience has been acquired by the ADF, with each of the individual services embedded with their US military counterparts, in places far from Australia where access and bases are secure.

This stands in contrast to the new role this strategy requires of our ADF. The geography is local. Their tasks require a much greater emphasis on operating as a joint ADF, as opposed to single services. The threat is much more centred on high-end conventional conflict, and the role is denial.

The changes required will be profound. The 2020 update therefore leaves us with more questions than answers. How will the joint ADF operate in our region, especially one defined by a maritime environment featuring expansive archipelagos with population, infrastructure, economic and military power clustered in littoral areas? How will the air force provide protection to the navy in these areas? How well can the navy deploy and sustain our army in this region? How will our army fight?

The current force structure and most of our planned military capabilities predate the new strategic approach. They are largely the products of single-service preferences conceived under different strategic circumstances. That means much of our planed military expenditure doesn’t address these questions, and in some cases it exacerbates the problems.

However, the current military is armed with some key positional advantages for this challenge. The decisions to create the ADF in 1976 and then to create a joint command structure in 1987 have endeavoured to make our military more than just a sum of its parts. More recently this was supported by the 2015 first principles review, which provided for a capability manager for joint capabilities and streamlined the powers of the chief of the ADF. In addition, the quality of the ADF leadership at the moment is very high and they seem focused on the task ahead.

Most significantly, the 2020 update provides the ADF with an essential clarification of the strategic direction. It will, however, live or die on Defence’s ability to drive through the required reforms.

The risks are real. Despite decades in development, the ADF’s single service cultures and parochialism still run deep. Reform has often been too slow; as the first principles review noted, there have been 48 previous reviews dating back to 1973.

In an era that our army describes as ‘accelerated warfare’, the internal risks we need to overcome to manage our external environment will be critical. Otherwise, we might just find that our prevailing military culture eats our new strategy for breakfast.

At first blush, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s speech releasing the defence strategic update last week was more than a little startling. Its language and tone were blunt to a degree that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. Or even 12 months ago.

But they are of a piece with the government’s recent stands, notably during the pandemic, when it has been much more direct in what it says on matters relating to security—broadly defined—and less concerned about China’s reaction.

This includes (especially) its drive for an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, its calling out of recent escalating cyberattacks on Australian governments, public bodies and businesses, its denunciation of disinformation campaigns by China (and Russia), and its tightening of the scrutiny of foreign investment bids.

Sometimes the government is coy about publicly naming China, as with the cyberattacks and the foreign investment changes, although no doubt has been left about the country in mind. At other times it’s more full-on.

In his speech, Morrison identified the deteriorating situation in the region and announced a ‘pivot’ in Australia’s defence posture.

This means the Australian Defence Force is to concentrate on our near region, defined as ‘the area ranging from the northeastern Indian Ocean through maritime and mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea and the Southwest Pacific’. The government doesn’t rule out excursions further afield as part of coalitions, but downplays them.

Morrison also pivoted to elevating the importance of deterrence in Australia’s military capability. Though the $270 billion ‘spend’ on hardware over a decade doesn’t actually represent a big increase from the 2016 figure of $195 billion, the significant change is that the purchase of long-range strike weaponry is committed, and, more importantly, there are moves to produce munitions and missiles in Australia instead of relying solely on distant suppliers.

While this was not a defence ‘white paper’, it’s worth comparing the thinking behind it with that in recent white papers.

Back when Kevin Rudd was PM, a major consideration underpinning the 2009 white paper was the growing power of China, and the long-term risk of a maritime strike against Australia. That paper was seen as ‘forward-leaning’.

The 2013 and 2016 white papers walked back from the 2009 thinking, although it was noted at the time that the 2016 paper presented ‘a gloomier outlook than previous editions, especially the further out the strategic timeline is projected’.

With China’s increasing assertiveness, Morrison is alert to the danger of Australia’s vulnerability in the event a miscalculation or misadventure leads to conflict between China and the United States.

The defence pivot is designed to increase the military costs for an enemy thinking of attacking Australia, and to boost the ability to strike back at a distance if such an attack occurred.

The more difficult strategic environment Australia faces has not come upon us overnight. It’s been gradually bearing down over a number of years, with China’s increasing power and the stronger note of aggressiveness in its voice and actions. At the same time, there’s been the relative decline in US power in the Asia–Pacific and, under Donald Trump, a good deal of unpredictability in its policy.

As its military and economic strength has increased, China has been active in stretching its influence widely—openly through the Belt and Road Initiative and in a more clandestine way through foreign interference operations.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced legislation to protect against foreign interference in late 2017, straining relations with China in the process. This followed an inquiry by former journalist and China expert John Garnaut, who worked in Turnbull’s office and then in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

But the government was still trying to maintain a fair degree of nuance in its China policy. Events and Morrison’s style have stripped much of that away.

When Australia went out ahead of other countries demanding the Covid-19 inquiry, the old hands around Australian diplomatic circles were horrified. So were those in the business community anxious for the government to avoid upsetting China (even more).

Australia’s stand brought predictable reactions from the Chinese authorities, in both harsh rhetoric and trade retaliation.

China already had Australia ‘in the freezer’, so the Chinese reaction has been a step up, rather than something new—but it’s a big step up.

More than once in his speech, Morrison invoked the 1930s, a decade that started with the Great Depression and ended with a catastrophic world war. ‘That period of the 1930s has been something I have been revisiting on a very regular basis, and when you connect both the economic challenges and the global uncertainty, it can be very haunting’, he said.

In political and diplomatic terms, it was a risky reference, elevating the idea of a threat to a much higher level.

While the economic consequences of the declining relations with China are serious—we’ve seen action against our barley exports and statements discouraging Chinese students from coming here—Morrison knows squaring up to China would have him in tune with the Australian public.

The recently released Lowy Institute poll, taken in March, found, ‘Trust in China is at its lowest point in the [16-year] history of the poll, with 23% saying they trust China a great deal or somewhat “to act responsibly in the world’’.’

Morrison didn’t have a public profile on defence issues before becoming prime minister. But it’s known that he took a strong interest when the chief of the ADF briefed senior ministers. He was also alert on the China front as the Turnbull government became more exercised. When he was treasurer, Huawei was banned from the 5G network, and David Irvine, who has the strongest national security credentials and is a former ambassador to China, was made chair of the Foreign Investment Review Board.

There is a tough-minded advisory circle around the higher reaches of the Morrison government. It includes Cabinet Secretary Andrew Shearer, who was previously deputy director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, ONI Director-General Nick Warner, Defence Department Secretary Greg Moriarty, ADF Chief Angus Campbell, Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo (who wrote the 2009 white paper), and Justin Bassi, the chief of staff to Foreign Minister Marise Payne.

They are clearly getting a sympathetic hearing from a prime minister who is injecting a new message into Australia’s foreign relations and pursuing new muscle for its defence posture.

For the first time since the retirement of the F-111C bomber in 2010, the government looks set to restore a long-range deterrence and strike capability to the Australian Defence Force. This is a very sensible move.

The 2020 defence strategic update, and accompanying force structure plan, mark a decisive shift in approach from the 2016 defence white paper. The update recognises that Australia must respond to a more adverse strategic outlook, characterised by an assertive China, and highlights the risk that strategic competition between Beijing and Washington could escalate into a major conflict in our region.

The key message is that Australia must deter threats from major-power adversaries far away from our shores. The update announces ‘the procurement and integration of advanced longer-range strike weapon systems onto combat aircraft to allow the Air Force to operate at greater range and avoid increasingly sophisticated air defences’. A centrepoint will be the acquisition of the AGM-158C LRASM (long-range anti-ship missile) for the F/A-18F Super Hornets and, eventually, other platforms.

The LRASM is a vast improvement on the much older, less capable Harpoon anti-ship missile system, and the US has approved the sale of up to 200 of them with related equipment to Australia for $1.47 billion. The main benefits of the LRASM are its long range—at least 370 kilometres, compared with the Harpoon’s 124 kilometres—and its ability to attack in intelligent swarms and to autonomously determine the best path to strike a vessel.

The LRASM is also being designed to be carried on the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and potentially could be integrated into the vertical launch systems on the navy’s Hobart-class air warfare destroyers and Hunter-class frigates. Replacing the Harpoon with the LRASM would dramatically boost Australia’s anti-ship capabilities and reduce the need for the launching platform to approach inside the range of an adversary’s weapons.

The LRASM acquisition is a good starting point for building a credible long-range strike and deterrence capability. And it’s long overdue, given the expanding lethal envelopes of Chinese anti-ship missiles, which could strike our naval forces outside the range of the defensive missiles they have now. But an even more capable strike potential will be needed, and the force structure plan outlines a number of potential capability acquisitions.

The plan makes clear that options for investing in hypersonic weapons will be explored under a development, test and evaluation program.

It suggests the ‘acquisition of remotely piloted and/or autonomous combat aircraft, including teaming air vehicles, to complement existing aircraft and increase the capacity of the air combat fleet’. That implies manned–unmanned teaming, and Boeing Australia is already developing an airpower teaming system centred on the ‘loyal wingman’ drone for precisely this role.

As the Australian Defence Force’s offensive capability grows, the update contemplates introducing a more effective defensive capability, noting that ‘survivability of our deployed forces will also be improved through new investments in an enhanced integrated air and missile defence system and very high-speed and ballistic missile defence capabilities for deployed forces’. This is likely to be the SM6 missile, which would also give a ballistic-missile defence capability within the atmosphere, and a potential land-attack capability for the navy’s Hobart-class and Hunter-class vessels.

So, the update is boosting both the offensive and defensive capabilities of our forces. That’s precisely what’s needed for the emerging threat environment we face as a rising China invests in offensive strike warfare capability. But is it enough? Not quite.

The ADF needs to have better situational awareness at greater distances from Australia. Chinese area-denial capabilities include medium- and intermediate-range anti-ship ballistic missiles. Its DF-26 anti-ship-capable IRBM has a 5,000-kilometre range. The ability to strike at such systems isn’t contemplated in the new force structure plan, so although our ability to strike at greater range is a welcome development, it’s still not sufficient to counter these threats. We are still vulnerable.

An essential feature of the US–Australian alliance is the joint facility at Pine Gap, which, among other duties, supports global missile early warning via the space-based infrared system. Any missile launched from China against the Australian mainland, or deployed forces, would be detected by that system, and a warning would be transmitted through Pine Gap, providing some time for defensive measures. For Australia, that capability is likely to come with a ship-based missile defence system as alluded to in the update.

With that in mind, enhancing Australia’s ability to monitor an adversary’s mobile missile systems and be prepared for a possible launch would go a long way towards improving our preparedness to deal with such threats.

Although it’s not suggested that a long-range strike capability for the ADF necessarily implies attacking targets deep inside mainland China, an ability to strike at such systems if they were forward-deployed, perhaps to bases in the South China Sea, would help counter the threat these systems pose. A DF-26 fired from Hainan Island could just reach Darwin Harbour. A DF-17 missile carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle deployed into the Spratly Islands could reach Darwin and also RAAF Base Tindal. The force structure plan notes that geospatial information and intelligence are part of the defence enterprise, and satellites that can detect, track and monitor ballistic-missile activity would directly support both defensive and offensive strike options.

The force structure plan and the strategic update indicate that we will look to acquire hypersonic weapons as a deterrent—if we can see forward-deployed ballistic missiles, we can strike them. Having the ability to detect and strike at an adversary’s long-range missile systems with ground-based long-range missiles should be the next step beyond LRASM if we’re serious about long-range strike. The US has already begun developing such a capability. Australia needs to consider acquiring a weapon like this and working with the US to develop it into something more potent with longer-range.

One option might be to adapt a weapon designed for conventional prompt land strike as an anti-ship-capable weapon to attack an adversary’s naval forces at sea. That would in turn open up a requirement for satellite-based ocean reconnaissance, a capability Australia could easily help develop. It would dramatically expand our deterrence and strike capability well beyond that implied by a weapon like the LRASM.

The pandemic has many lessons for how Australia’s future economy must operate, with opportunities to build new wealth around the global supply chains that originate with us—in natural resources, energy, food, research and education, for example. But these opportunities are accompanied by some nasty risks that the pandemic has revealed with how Australia manages crises—medical and health crises, but also military ones.

And in military crises, a glaring gap we must close is in our ability to supply the Australian Defence Force with precision munitions—notably missiles. Advanced missiles give militaries the edge in combat. In small, discretionary conflicts like Australia’s deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, precision missiles fired from Australian and coalition aircraft were crucial to protecting the lives of ADF personnel, supporting ground operations and killing terrorist leaders and fighters. Without such weapons Islamic State might still control major chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.

In an actual war, not just difficult counterterror and counterinsurgency operations, advanced missiles are essential to defeat modern military adversaries. Without them, the most capable ships and aircraft are not just defenceless, they are ‘offenceless’ as well—unable to inflict casualties on opposing forces without turning to mass attrition approaches or perhaps nuclear weapons.

But advanced missiles are in short supply, and they’ve run short even in the limited conflicts the ADF has been involved in over the past couple of decades. The ADF gets its missiles from US, European and Israeli manufacturers, at the end of long global supply chains. And, when the home nations of these manufacturers need missiles urgently themselves, their needs can get in the way of meeting ours.

That’s bad, but the situation is actually even worse. Missiles are slow to produce under current industrial structures, so orders have long lead times between placement and filling—think years, not weeks. Manufacturers can surge production for limited periods, but it’s hard for them to sustain a high tempo of production. And missiles require servicing and updating if stored, meaning they might need to be returned to the manufacturers far away.

This was all known before the pandemic, and the Australian military’s approach makes sense in peacetime, and even with missions like Syria and Iraq. But the deteriorating strategic environment in our region, combined with the heightened understanding of how vulnerable extended global supply chains are, means the current situation has become unacceptable. Military conflict beyond the scale of recent deployments is unfortunately quite credible.

Missiles are like a combination of a medical ventilator and the masks health workers need during a pandemic. They’re complex electro-mechanical devices like medical ventilators, so they can’t be made by just anyone (they’re also more complex than ventilators, with bespoke components that aren’t easily replaced by other items you have to hand).

In war, missiles are more like masks in a pandemic than like ventilators, though. You need many thousands of them and they can’t be reused. Ordering or holding a few hundred just doesn’t cut any mustard outside peacetime training routines. So, production is key.

We know with the pandemic that normal supply chains can get disrupted. The level of disruption we’ve seen so far from Covid-19 is nowhere near the level of disruption we’ll see during war.

We also know that even with the limited demands our military has made on existing missile production and ordering systems, we struggle to meet those needs.

The current approach is simply unfit if Australia gets involved in any significant military conflict.

With precision munitions production and sustainment, we must assess what our needs during conflict are likely to be and plan to meet them—instead of planning for peacetime levels of use and supply and hoping things will be all right during war.

Knowledge that our current approach is not fit for purpose requires action. Here, fortunately, things are possible that will greatly reduce our military’s vulnerability to running out of the means to fight.

Australia is fortunate in having close relationships with the countries whose companies manufacture our missiles, and in having subsidiaries of these companies operating in Australia—companies like Raytheon, Rafael, Lockheed Martin and Kongsberg. We also have a workforce that can do advanced manufacturing, with some high-profile examples on display during the pandemic as firms like Gekko systems shifted from mining tech to making medical ventilators.

We haven’t used these companies and government-to-government relationships in a creative way that would close our missile supply gap, though, and we need to do so now.

Now is the right time politically, strategically and economically.

The Australian economy is in the middle of a redesign, with the government starting to focus not just on supporting current employment, but on what will drive future employment and prosperity in the changed world of Covid-19.

The government’s future stimulus program can and should include the defence industry sector—not by spending more on the huge ship, submarine and land vehicle projects, but by investing in the focused area of missile production and sustainment facilities in Australia. This type of manufacture is the iconic high-tech, niche manufacturing area that Australians can excel at and that is feasible given our demographics and capacities.

Incentives, and even co-investment in facilities by the Commonwealth, can help create centres of missile production here which the ADF can rely upon during a conflict. This is about co-production of missiles that are already in or are entering the ADF’s inventory, done in partnership with the companies we buy them from now.

Strategically, it makes sense for other nations—notably allies and partners almost certain to be fighting with us against any common adversary—to be able to be resupplied from Australian missile production centres to supplement their own supply sources, and to add different elements to supply chains that make disruption during times of crisis harder.

Strategically and politically, getting this to happen will involve the highest levels of our political leadership engaging with their counterparts. It’s at least an issue that must be on the agenda of the next annual meeting between our defence and foreign affairs ministers, Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne, and their US counterparts, secretaries Mark Esper and Mike Pompeo.

Getting agreement to and support for high-end US missiles, like the long-range anti-ship missile made by Lockheed Martin, to be manufactured in Australia as well as the continental US through co-production will only happen if the senior leadership of our nations drive it.

Along with our military leadership, they are the ones who can see the strategic value in diversified sources of supply during conflict. We’ll need to put aside hardwired industrial protection mindsets and probably change some longstanding policies on technology release.

But to ensure our men and women who may be fighting future wars in our region have the weaponry to win, in the numbers they need when and where they need it, there’s no alternative to growing Australia’s and its allies’ missile production capabilities. Having these capabilities is also the best way to deter others from engaging in military conflict.