The Indian Ocean is an increasingly contested strategic environment. A growing Chinese naval presence raises the prospect that Beijing may seek to challenge US naval dominance, potentially sparking a competitive naval arms race in the region. This would be of huge concern to Australia, forcing us to divert limited defence resources from other priority areas in the Indo-Pacific. Australia and its partners need to consider how to best leverage their strategic advantages to deter or limit China’s naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean.

One of the biggest advantages of Australia and its Indian Ocean partners, and one of China’s biggest vulnerabilities, is in maritime domain awareness. The ability of even large vessels to effectively disappear in the vastness of the Indian Ocean puts maritime domain awareness at a premium. If you can find a naval adversary and they can’t find your ships, the odds are definitely in your favour.

The Chinese navy already has significant disadvantages in the Indian Ocean, operating with limited logistical support far from home ports that are accessible only by transiting the narrow straits through Southeast Asia, where they can be easily located and tracked. China also lacks a comprehensive maritime picture of even significant parts of the Indian Ocean (although it is working to plug that gap, including through the use of satellites and other new technologies).

Individually, Australia and partners such as the United States, India and France already have significant capabilities, including maritime patrol aircraft and uncrewed aerial vehicles, and facilities that, if combined in a collaborative network, would allow comprehensive maritime surveillance of much of the Indian Ocean. The level of maritime domain awareness that could be achieved through such a network would make any Chinese naval presence highly vulnerable in a conflict.

Such a collaborative network would require information sharing, as well as collaboration in use of facilities to support maritime air surveillance. Crucially, adequate surveillance coverage of the Indian Ocean by maritime patrol aircraft would depend on access to air staging points and facilities across the region.

The US and its allies already have arrangements to provide access and logistical support in each other’s facilities, including the US bases at Diego Garcia and in the Persian Gulf. But India, with its growing fleet of Boeing P-8I maritime patrol aircraft and staging points around the region, is an essential partner in building a comprehensive regional network.

Over the past several years, India has reached mutual logistics support agreements with the US and France. The signing of an Australia–India Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement in 2020 represented a big step in building a web of agreements, opening the possibility of mutual use of facilities throughout the region. But the Australia–India piece is yet to be put into practice.

India undertakes surveillance of much of the northern Indian Ocean with P-8Is based at INS Rajali, near Chennai, and INS Hansa in Goa, as well as airfields in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Indian P-8s are increasingly also using facilities of regional partners such as Seychelles, Mauritius and French Reunion in the western Indian Ocean. It is anticipated that Indian P-8s will soon also be able to operate from the new Indian-built airfield on Mauritius’s Agalega island near the northern end of the Mozambique Channel.

Australia has its own strengths in the eastern Indian Ocean. Since at least the 1980s, the Royal Australian Air Force has undertaken aerial surveillance of the country’s northwest approaches and the Malacca Strait/Bay of Bengal as part of Operation Gateway.

The RAAF’s use of P-8A maritime patrol aircraft now provides an opportunity for collaboration with India in sharing of facilities and logistics across the region. Both countries are becoming more confident working together following Exercise AUSINDEX 2019, which saw RAAF and Indian Navy P-8s cooperating in anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Bay of Bengal, as well as the Quad exercises off Guam earlier this year.

Australia has several facilities in the eastern Indian Ocean that could substantially extend the range of India’s operations. There is an existing offer by Australia for Indian P-8s to use Australian facilities at Darwin and potentially also the Learmonth and Curtin air bases in Western Australia. There has been discussion of potential Indian use of the airfield on Australia’s Cocos Island, and an agreement was reached in February for India to place a temporary satellite tracking station there. But until the runway on Cocos is strengthened and widened (currently scheduled for 2023), it won’t be suitable for P-8 operations.

If Indian Navy operations from Australian facilities were normalised, there might also be opportunities for the RAAF to extend the area of cooperation throughout the Bay of Bengal and further afield into the western Indian Ocean. In particular, the ability for the RAAF to stage out of Indian bases in Tamil Nadu and/or Goa would help extend Australia’s reach in the central and western Indian Ocean. US Navy P-8s have already conducted operations from these Indian bases, providing opportunities for combined cooperation among the three countries.

Port Blair in India’s Andaman Islands is another potential staging point. Foreign militaries in the past were rarely given approval to use those facilities, but in October 2020 a US Navy P-8 aircraft was permitted to refuel in Port Blair for the first time. While the facility could deliver additional operational flexibility for Australian P-8s, given Australia’s access to Butterworth in Malaysia, the use of facilities on the Indian mainland would be more advantageous.

All these facilities could be considered as part of a new network of air staging points and facilities around the Indian Ocean potentially available to Australia, India, the US and other partners. This would support a collaborative maritime surveillance system that, potentially, could help deter a damaging naval arms race in the region.

As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, Australians have seen their civil liberties and their community cohesion increasingly securitised and viewed as secondary to the need to prevent violence.

Despite our efforts to promote unity and to deny the world’s divisive cultural, political and ideological conflicts fertile ground to spawn hatred in Australia, old and new divisions remain deeply rooted in our multicultural society. Dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to further fracture and fragment our understanding of civil liberties and national security and how to protect them both.

Good intentions, major investment and considerable thought have been given to both liberties and the national security landscape, but Australia must do more to safeguard those freedoms while providing robust national security responses to threats.

Generations of Australians have come of age during the war on terror with little choice but to accept Australia’s role in overseas conflicts. The erosion of civil liberties in the name of security is normalised for most. We all want to be safe.

Overseas conflicts and threats have impacted our domestic security in ways that were previously unimaginable for most Australians. The world is increasingly unpredictable and subject to the actions of powerful non-state actors, rogue states, a resurgent Russia and an assertive China. Good intentions and optimism can’t spin this reality, but let’s take a closer look at what Australia is working with here.

We are witnessing a trade and economic tug of war with China while the Chinese Communist Party intensifies the mass surveillance and internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

As the last Australian troops returned from Afghanistan, schoolgirls were murdered in a Kabul bombing and Afghan civilians who helped Australia were targeted by the Taliban.

Adherents to right-wing ideologies continue to push the boundaries of ‘free speech’, finding a path between advocating political violence and expressing a political opinion which is protected in our constitution.

The past decade has given birth to extraordinary changes in Australia’s national security landscape. False battle lines are drawn with binary choices between national security and civil liberties and, more recently, trade and national security.

While acknowledging that Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia must be addressed, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said of a Black Lives Matter march that Australians should not be ‘importing the things that are happening overseas to Australia’.

Issues such as black deaths in custody, the indefinite detention of refugees, the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, and the political awareness and participation of young people are not being imported to Australia—they are already here. Recently, at least 10,000 people marched in Sydney to support Palestine, and Hezbollah flags were flying.

The pandemic has further fragmented our idea of nationhood and what Australia offers its citizens.  Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Young people have faced disruptions to their education and restrictions on their movements, domestically and internationally, while their job prospects have withered away. They have seen protestors prosecuted under public health orders and Australian citizens stranded overseas.

Balancing civil liberties and national security has always been a delicate task—and it’s even more so in a pandemic.

Covid-19 has given rise to extraordinary emergency powers that would previously have been unacceptable to Australians.

Many will see the government’s investment of $1.9 billion in law enforcement and intelligence agencies as a means to protect and safeguard citizens while protecting the freedoms that make Australia a democratic and pluralistic state.

But in late 2019, in a report by international civil rights organisations, Australia was quietly downgraded from an ‘open’ democracy to a ‘narrowed’ one, placing us on a par with Ghana, Botswana and the United States.

Before the Covid-19 crisis, trust in our civic institutions and governments was at an all-time low. There has been some improvement in trust over the past year in response to the government’s handling of the pandemic. Arguably, improved trust based on Covid-19 success will be fragile and sensitive to changes in performance. Furthermore, improvements in community trust in government were not universal. Marginalised communities often bear, or at least perceive that they bear, the brunt of national security, law enforcement and intelligence policies. Among these communities, trust in the government to protect basic rights and freedoms is not nearly as strong. We remain one of the few democracies without a bill of rights.

Australia is already conducting secret trials behind closed doors and allowing law enforcement raids on journalists’ homes and on our national broadcaster.

In this tumultuous environment, many pockets of individuals, families, groups and communities in Australia feel disengaged from mainstream Australia because of their geopolitical, generational, religious and political beliefs and values. It’s likely that many feel that their voices and perspectives are not listened to or prioritised because of their differences from mainstream Australia. Disengagement from political, community and civic institutions across the political and religious spectrums is increasingly seen as a legitimate act of rebellion and protest rather than an abrogation of a citizen’s obligations towards their country.

While not everyone who experiences diverse challenges and dislocation becomes susceptible to extremist ideologies, most of those who believe in these ideologies are influenced by such inequality.

Covid-19 has demonstrated that our domestic security and civil liberties framework at home is not immune from what happens overseas. Nor, in a globalised world, can we ignore the interconnectedness of social justice issues.

The bifurcation of ‘local’ and ‘overseas’ issues undermines community cohesion and civil liberties at home, but that’s not an excuse for the securitisation of either our freedoms or cohesion. The alignment of community cohesion with counterterrorism in this context is ironic.

The danger is that we won’t be any safer in another two decades unless we start to address the weaknesses in our responses to threats to both national security and civil liberties and to truly understand the interconnectedness of these issues, especially in the context of Covid-19.

Security and civil liberties have a symbiotic relationship that collectively contributes to Australia’s social cohesion. It seems that after two decades it’s time for government to work with Australians to map out the red line between security and civil liberties.

The gold standard for such an effort is a bill of rights. Of course, developing an Australian bill of rights would likely take several years. In the interim, the government needs to find mechanisms that give a voice to those who feel marginalised. These efforts need to meaningfully ensure that marginalised individuals, groups and communities have the sense that they are being listened to, even if the messages or demands can’t be met. A good starting point could be separating the government’s functions relating to promoting social cohesion and countering violent extremism from its law enforcement, intelligence and national security agencies.

The Antarctic Treaty entered into force in 1961 with 12 participating countries. Sixty years later, 54 countries are signatories to the treaty and the various related instruments that comprise the Antarctic Treaty System. Will the ATS mark another 60 years in 2081? Well, it depends.

Legal eagles will point to the complex requirements and processes for ‘exiting’ the treaty. Environmental scientists are racing to better understand how climate change will shape Antarctica by 2081, and strategic scholars expect great-power competition to rewrite the rules of engagement for the resource-rich and unclaimed continent. Discussion about the future of the ATS is far too caught up in the potential for the system to fail. Instead, the focus should be on the need to recognise and grasp the coercive elements of Antarctic cooperation and the entrenched nature of grey-zone activities on the continent.

Upholding the ATS continues be in Australia’s national interest. It delivers a great return on investment—a whopping big claim shelved into perpetuity and no military conflict on the doorstep. But conflict is underway in Antarctica; indeed, grey-zone activity is a hallmark of the continent. And not only does the ATS facilitate grey-zone threats, but Australia’s national security settings are failing to navigate them.

Grey-zone activities are actions taken by state or non-state actors that are coercive, undesired and even undermining, but that fall short of war. Strategic competition today is facilitated by new technologies and non-traditional security threats, which supports normalisation of grey-zone activities.

Antarctica, shelved as ‘siloed’ from strategic competition elsewhere and ‘protected’ by the ATS, is an environment in which grey-zone campaigns thrive. Examples include dual-use technology that can be applied in both scientific and military contexts, and Russian fishing vessels spoofing their locations to signal that they’re not in protected Antarctic waters. (Of course, one could argue that marine protected areas are an extension of some claimants’ territorial ambitions as well—a charge often levelled at Australia.)

Subversion, deception and sophisticated interpretations of international legal norms in Antarctica are all becoming hallmarks of the ATS. We tend to laud cooperation between nations in Antarctica, mainly because the ATS remains standing. However, this cooperation can be weaponised to frustrate the consensus nature of the ATS and the long-term protectionist foundations of the treaty. This grey-zone element of the ATS is a wicked problem of sorts. Actions beneath the threshold of war don’t breach the agreed rules in Antarctica and are undertaken by liberal democratic states as much as by autocratic revisionist ones.

The ATS facilitates grey-zone activity because the contours of peacetime and wartime, and the conceptions of security threats and acts that constitute militarisation, are different today than they were 60 years ago. And they will be different again 60 years from now. The current ATS business-as-usual approach is perhaps more of a worry than a breakdown in the system entirely. The collapse of the ATS would at least see Canberra craft resolute responses and act on them (after an awkward discussion with Washington, which doesn’t recognize Australia’s Antarctic Territory).

I see three possible avenues for actively protecting national interests in Antarctica. First, we could strengthen the ATS. That might involve inserting new rules of engagement, clarifying permissible and off-limits activities in terms that are relevant to the 2020s, or putting some teeth into ATS enforcement mechanisms. The second avenue involves relaxing the ATS. Parties would agree to disagree but would build tangible rules of engagement (such as resource-extraction caps) or establish regulatory bodies that carry a hard stick. A final option would be to change the system entirely and push for the elusive UN world park status for Antarctica. In not considering these strategic alternatives, and in not taking leadership in the future history of Antarctica, Canberra might be faced with a ‘might versus right’ scenario in 2081.

To get the ATS to 2081, a lot of domestic policy work needs to be done. The Australian government has already put out some signals that suggest a slight shift in strategic conceptions of Antarctica. For instance, the 2013 defence white paper declared: ‘There is no credible risk of Australia’s national interests in the Southern Ocean and the Australian Antarctic Territory being challenged in ways that might require substantial military responses over the next few decades’. In the 2016 defence white paper, that became: ‘The Australian Antarctic Territory faces no credible risk of being challenged in such a way that requires a substantial military response for at least the next few decades.’

Significantly, the 2016 statement clarified that a military response to protect our Antarctic interests was now on the cards. No doubt policymakers will be focusing on the sad state of our Antarctic and Southern Ocean defence capabilities. With no assets (we rely on the French to conduct much of our search-and-rescue responsibilities in the Southern Ocean) or adequate sustainment plans, it would be a short battle.

Immediate policy work should focus on standardising Australia’s national interests in the region. Geographically, policymakers have made this an even harder task; defence white papers and last year’s defence strategic update prioritise the northeast Asian sector of our region. Our Indo-Pacific strategy also appears to miss the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, despite it being a linkage between the two theatres and a key component of US Indo-Pacific Command’s strategic command. We also need to communicate our national strategic interests in Antarctica, and clearly articulate how the maintenance and functionality of the ATS delivers on these interests.

While the 2016 Australian Antarctic strategy and 20 year action plan underscores our interest in supporting a strong ATS and maintaining freedom from strategic and political confrontation by preserving sovereignty over the Australian Antarctic Territory, it doesn’t set out a clear strategy. Policy frames our ideal course of action and outlines our interests. But strategy is more about deliberate actions that employ all political, military, diplomatic and economic tools to advance national interests. A good strategy will be efficiently shaped by the international system in responding to shifts when they occur, whether tomorrow or in 2081.

For now, Australian Antarctic policy appears to be stuck in the romantic age of conquest. In contrast, the strategy of another enthusiastic Antarctic player, Russia, is first and foremost about ensuring national security, facilitating economic development and enhancing Russian identity. Of course, it’s worth noting that these ends for Moscow can be secured by holding up the ATS, not undermining it.

An absence of conflict doesn’t signal an absence of coercive strategies in Antarctica. Missing the elements of coercion and thinking of cooperation as a static concept put stakeholders at risk of strategic complacency. Supporting the ATS serves collective national interests, but these are not necessarily conciliary.

It’s not all doom and gloom; the ATS might yet celebrate another 60 years. But to get to 2081, the treaty and self-appointed leadership states like Australia must accept that the maintenance of the ATS will embolden grey-zone activities. Whether these activities serve to undermine the system this year or in 2048 or 2081, at the very least we must acknowledge that the ATS is a low-cost, high-reward solution that enables and legitimises Chinese and Russian access to and presence on one of the world’s most strategic continents.

Antarctica can be both home to a functioning ATS and a sphere of great-power politics in which grey zone activities proliferate. Australia needs a real strategy to compete. Maybe then we will celebrate another 60 years.

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

Created to both know and kick the Department of Defence, ASPI pursues this part of its mission with gusto.

Sharp analysis starts with an understanding of the magnitude of Defence’s job. To be useful, contestability requires a clear-eyed assessment of the nature of the contest and the players.

When a Defence management review was launched in 2007, Mark Thomson wrote that more fixes were needed in central management and leadership, while offering a sympathetic description of the task:

Defence management is of a scale and complexity unparalleled in Australia below that of the state and federal governments themselves. Not only is Defence one of the largest employers in the country—comparable with the Coles and Woolworths retail chains—but it maintains a diverse range of technologically sophisticated military equipment valued at more than $32 billion. Defence is also the country’s largest single land owner with more than 30,000 buildings spread across the length and breadth of the continent. In addition, Defence undertakes complex operations at short notice ranging from disaster relief through to peacekeeping and conventional war-fighting. No other entity in Australia has to deal with the diversity and complexity of missions allocated to Defence.

The complexity reflected the importance of what had to be delivered. Prime Minister John Howard told an ASPI conference in 2007: ‘I recently remarked to the Defence leadership group that the ADF’s current operational tempo is greater than at any time since the Vietnam war, but also that the complexity and global character of the security challenges we face make them even more serious.’

Concurrent operations were being conducted in Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands, and the ADF had recently completed shorter missions to Fiji and Tonga. Thomson posed the question: Are our defence forces overstretched? Had we reached the point where the scale and diversity of ADF deployments were no longer sustainable?

As always, Thomson went and analysed the numbers. He noted the burden was far from shared evenly, with some parts of the ADF called upon more often than others to deploy in a rolling program of six-month tours.

The operational tempo, though, needed to be seen in the context of an ADF that was hard-working even in peacetime: a small force maintaining a large range of high-tech military capabilities. There’d been no discernible increase to the rate of separations from the ADF compared with historical norms. The operational burden was commensurate with historical precedents post–World War II and was far less than that currently faced by the US and Britain. Thomson’s conclusion: ‘[W]hile the ADF is busy and under some pressure, it is not yet overstretched.’

With the election of the Rudd government in 2007 and its 2009 defence white paper, Labor placed its stamp on defence and strategic policy. ASPI produced a set of papers to explain what it meant for defence policy and what it said about the habits of the Department of Defence.

Rod Lyon was struck by how much ‘uncertainty’ was built into the white paper’s portrayal of the future international security environment, writing: ‘The paper frequently depicts multiple “futures”. Moreover, the paper’s authors often provide more than one judgment on key issues, generally at the price of confusion and contradiction.’

On the world view of Defence, Lyon offered the shrewd assessment of a thinker with long experience as a Canberra practitioner: ‘Australian defence planners remain realists: they trust power and military hardware as the principal means of securing Australia’s interests close to its own coastline, but advocate rules-based order and institutions further away.’

Andrew Davies said that, despite media reporting of new efforts in ‘Australia’s military build-up’, most of the initiatives were based on existing plans and capabilities.

Looking out twenty years at the mooted ADF of 2030, we find that it will be a lot like today’s force with half a dozen extra submarines. And today’s force is itself very similar to that of twenty years ago. Indeed, give or take an aircraft carrier and a few battalions, we can trace the essential shape of the ADF still further back. So this White Paper in many ways perpetuates the force structure that’s been in place since the Menzies Government went shopping in the 1960s. This strongly hints that the strategic discussions in White Papers over the years have been less closely linked to the development of our forces than is purported to be the case. Governments and White Papers come and go, but the ADF marches on.

The strategic argument of the white paper, Davies wrote, ‘could be paraphrased as “the rise of China may upset the power structure we’re very comfortable with, and we don’t want that”’. The force structure Australia wanted to have by 2030 indicated that ‘we’ve chosen, at least in principle, to side with the US—or, at the very least, to retain the option to do so’.

In 2013, a study of Australia’s regional defence diplomacy said old criticisms still applied: a lack of financial information management and clear and public articulation of the goals and objectives of defence cooperation. Defence’s emphasis had shifted from aid to working with allies and partners to promote a secure region, as Sam Bateman, Anthony Bergin and Hayley Channer wrote:

Changes in the power relativities in the region are profound and have major implications for defence engagement. As regional defence forces expand and modernise and we lose our technological advantage, engagement becomes more about strategic partnerships and less about aid and assistance. This requires a significant change of mindset. We need to think differently about how we engage in the region and better understand what is meant by ‘strategic partnership’.

The Abbott Coalition government tackled the tangles of Defence with the 2015 First principles review. An ASPI Strategic Insights paper, with 10 contributors, called the report ‘the most significant review of the defence establishment since the 1973 re-organisation led by Sir Arthur Tange’.

The review recommended a radical streamlining of decision-making, cutting senior management roles, slashing the number of committees, and abolishing the Defence Materiel Organisation to subsume the semi-autonomous organisation into Defence’s central structure.

Allan Behm wrote that the review highlighted critical organisational imperatives: simplify processes to emphasise decision-making as the core function of the Defence leadership; rebalance accountability and responsibility by cutting the number of committees; get internal alignment right—‘a problem that has frustrated chiefs of the defence force and secretaries for the past two decades’; acknowledge that behavioural change drive cultural change—‘an issue on which gender considerations have a direct impact’; recognise the fundamental need for trust between the defence minister and the defence organisation—‘the ever-changing procession of secretaries has generated a civilian organisation that lacks capacity, cohesion and consistency’.

Paddy Gourley harrumphed that beneath a welter of cliché and bamboozling modern management mumbo jumbo in the review, much sound advice lurked.

To the question posed by the review of why Defence had been unable to change itself, Gourley answered that ‘reform’ had been largely outsourced to dozens of reviews, which confused and distracted managers. Too many people at senior levels with narrow divisions of responsibility and the associated need to consult had coagulated management and restricted action.

Reform had to be pushed by leaders at the top, Gourley wrote, and that led to the defence ministers: ‘Few have taken a strong interest in the proper workings of the organisation. Indeed, a number have succumbed to the insidious notion that they are “customers” of Defence. They aren’t, but when they pretend to be, management stasis is usually just around the corner.’

Michael Clifford wrote that Defence, like all large organisations, needed a good pruning from time to time, and the last one was in 1997 with the Defence efficiency review.

Clifford, too, argued that government and ministers were not blameless. The growth in top-line staff numbers had all been agreed by government to meet operational needs, or in response to previous reviews ordered by government:

Successful reform is led and driven by the Minister—not just through media conferences and press releases. Defence is at its best when the Minister of the day regularly engages with the Department and mutual respect can be developed. While they may prefer to, Defence Ministers can’t stand back and point fingers—they need to get their hands dirty. Even if this may result occasionally in some political mud sticking.