Tag Archive for: Australia

Did Gallipoli really make Australia unusually casualty sensitive?

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Three injured soldiers from Mentoring Task Force – Three (MTF-3) are Aero medical Evacuated (AME) to the medical facilities in Tarin Kot, after an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack on a Protected Mobility Vehicle Bushmaster, during a route clearance in the Chora Valley, Southern Afghanistan.

The Australian public turned against the war in Afghanistan a long time ago. In 2010, I argued (PDF) that the mission’s fading prospects for success provided the key explanation. But James Brown has recently argued (in his book ANZAC’s Long Shadow: the cost of our national obsession) that a uniquely Australian variable offers a more compelling explanation: Australia’s lower casualty tolerance derived from the traditions of ANZAC, and specifically from the legacy of the Gallipoli operation, which implanted a national myth of Australian lives being sacrificed for the benefit of others in conflicts not directly related to the Australian national interest.

But just how persuasive is that explanation? First, it doesn’t comport with Australia’s historical record of intervention overseas nor with how Australia is viewed internationally, especially in the United States. As we know, Australia is the only ally to have fought alongside the US in every major American conflict since WWI. By contrast, Canada, for example, didn’t participate in any shooting wars on the ground between Korea and Afghanistan, despite having a small air and naval contingent in Desert Storm. Read more

Britain not a player in Asia?

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HMS Daring's Lynx helicopter arrives on the typhoon stricken Philippine island of Binuluanguan. Sailors from HMS Daring have continued their efforts to deliver aid to the victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Nowadays it’s easy to wonder why there’s a Great in Great Britain. But I’m not sure Harry White’s Canberra Times opinion piece, ‘Britain not a player in Asia’, is entirely on the money.

It’s true that Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his then Secretary of State for Defence Dennis Healey were driven in part by financial considerations when they decided to retreat from East of Suez (see Saki Dockrill on this). But in the same Cabinet Minutes that endorsed that decision (PDF), on 6 July 1967, the Foreign Secretary also reported that ‘…his statement to the Ministerial Council of the Western European Union (WEU)… about the United Kingdom’s applications for membership of the European Communities had been very well received’. So the shift was driven not only by financial circumstance, but was a deliberate policy decision to begin the process of alignment with Europe. Yes, Britain’s economy was at that point larger than China’s, and the opposite is now true. But does it follow that ‘Britain lacks the strategic weight to be America’s best friend in Asia’, or indeed that Britain even wants to be? Read more

Governing the Net: From Bondi to Copacabana

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With the NETmundial multi-stakeholder governance meeting on the horizon, Australia needs to take stock of its position and choose which weightclass to contest in the international Internet governance arena. As we showed last week, the clash of the heavyweights will likely remain deadlocked, and it’ll be the creative middle powers, along with the business, technical, academic, civil society and nongovernmental communities, that’ll determine the nuances of Internet governance.

Australia’s in a prime position to take on a leadership role in defining the future of Internet governance. With its history of leadership on issues such as chemical weapons and nuclear testing and its chairing of the UN Group of Government Experts on cyber security, Australia has a solid foundation upon which to bring together a community of like-minded states. While the Snowden revelations have surely shaken perceptions, it’s important Australia—a member of the UN Security Council and chair of the G20—live up to the expectations held of it. Read more

Two strategic competitions in Asia

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Game of thrones?

The unfolding strategic environment in Asia is generating two strategic competitions: one horizontal and one vertical. The horizontal competition is highly visible: indeed, we see the evidence of it almost daily, as regional countries contest their respective territorial claims. But the vertical competition is less obvious:  it’s a contest over position, not of space. Rank and status matter in Asia. This is a region with a strong historical attachment to notions of hierarchy. We fret the consequences of a possible mishandling of the horizontal competition, but the vertical competition is probably the more serious one—because it’ll define the shape of the Asian security order in the 21st century. Why is that competition important? The main reason is that an era of relative Asian weakness is coming to an end, and Asian countries don’t share a unified vision of the hierarchy of 21st-century Asia. And that, in a nutshell, is what’s especially worrying about current security dynamics in Asia.

That’s not to say the horizontal strategic competition is irrelevant. It certainly isn’t. That contest has two core issues; the growth of Asian power projection capabilities, and the growing intensity of multi-player contests over small islands and rocks. The first of those issues is currently seen most clearly in the steady rise in China’s material power. ASPI analysts have talked before about the geographic expansion of Chinese military power as resembling a growing ‘bubble’, within which it’s becoming more challenging for adversaries to operate. That bubble is slowly expanding to cover more of the US’s principal allies and partners along the Asian rimlands, not to mention the US territories, bases and facilities to be found there. The growth of the bubble underpins Beijing’s ‘anti-access, area denial’ doctrine. Read more

United States: so long, and thanks for all the fish

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey prepares to testify before the House Armed Service Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington D.C. on March 6, 2014. Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed the 2015 Department of Defense Budget Proposal as remarked on the steps the Department has taken to separate itself from military cooperations with Russia in response to the situation in Ukraine. DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo (Released)

The recently released US Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (PDF) describes a difficult set of challenges for the United States military—challenges that have big implications for our alliance. The headlines have focussed on overall cuts to the size of American forces, but behind these reductions is a more complex set of problems for the US and its allies. The QDR says that America’s strategic outlook is becoming ‘more volatile, more unpredictable and, in some instances more threatening’. This is an environment where ‘the United States should not plan to rely on unquestioned technological leadership in all fields’, where ground forces will be cut to the point that American forces will ‘no longer be sized to conduct large-scale prolonged stability operations’, and where more weight will be put on allies’ ability to ‘undergird the ability of the United States to face future crises and contingencies.’

After a decade being focussed on a single type of conflict, the QDR says that the US military must be redesigned to handle the ‘full spectrum of conflict’, a task for which the force is ‘currently out of balance’. The report says that a slimmed-down military will be able to handle a more modest set of military challenges in the future ‘but with increased levels of risk for some missions’. These risks would grow significantly if even deeper levels of cuts are implemented in line with sequestration plans mandated by Congress. Read more

Strengthening trans-Pacific ties

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The Pacific island states face real challenges in managing the security of marine resources in their EEZs.

Australia supports maintaining the prosperity of the region mainly through the Pacific Patrol Boat Program, (twenty two boats donated to 12 island countries and administered through Defence.) We’re committed to gifting a fleet of vessels to replace the existing patrol boats, which need replacing over the period 2018–2028. New vessels will be provided to all states that currently have Pacific Patrol Boats (including Fiji upon a return to democracy). Timor-Leste would be invited to join the program.

But Australia shouldn’t being going alone here: we’ll need to work with others on maritime security in the region. The more resources we can recruit to assist the better, particularly in addressing the illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing problem. In this context, it’s noteworthy that the Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Mark Binskin recently returned from a visit to increase Australia’s defence ties with Chile. Read more

Facing West, Facing North: Canada and Australia in East Asia

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Today ASPI and the Centre for International Governance Innovation released a special report, Facing West, Facing North: Canada and Australia in East Asia.

The report offers a road map for future security and defence cooperation between Australia and Canada, and addresses the question of how best to achieve both countries’ complimentary economic and security interests in a changing East Asia.

It comes at an opportune moment in the bilateral relationship between the two countries that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once described as ‘strategic cousins’. Bilateral engagement between Australia and Canada is set to deepen after the 2011 announcement of annual meetings at the Ministerial, Chief of Defence Force and Deputy Secretary of Defence levels. This institutional foundation is complemented by enthusiasm in both countries for developing shared policy approaches to Asia. Read more

Strategic partnerships: Bismarck and beef

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Otto von Bismarck

The theme of partnership is a growing one in Australian strategic policy. In some ways, it’s a useful qualifier to the emphases placed in an earlier era on ANZUS and self-reliance. And it’s probably not a coincidence that the notion of partnerships has arisen in tandem with Asia’s rise in global politics. In this post we want to work through the concept to highlight a more structured way of thinking about it.

We have to begin by observing something about the region as a whole. For at least the next twenty years, we’ll find ourselves on the periphery of a region where the strategic centre of gravity will be shifting—closer to us, rather than further away. As a consequence, we’ll sense the greater intrusion of Asian power shifts into our personal space. Those power shifts don’t automatically generate a more disintegrated Asian region. If we ask ourselves what would drive the growth of separate strategic blocs in Asia, the simplest answer is that the growth of Bismarckian nationalism, not mere multipolarity, is the factor most likely to exert such disintegrative pressures. In short, Asian mulipolarity is certain but the direction of nationalistic identities is uncertain—and possibly concerning. Read more

Asia in 2014

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The B-2, from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, MoWe enter 2014 with the Asian security mosaic as complicated as it’s been in a long while. The two rising regional great powers, China and India, are still rising but at least in China’s case growth is slowing. The region’s stalled great power, Japan, is making a solid effort to get its motor running again. Russia is probably still a declining power, at least as far as Asia and the Pacific are concerned, but it’s modernising its nuclear forces and playing its foreign policy cards more adroitly. Kim Jong-un’s North Korea remains a regional wild card, the country’s nuclear program accelerating even as its domestic politics become more brutal and less certain. The region’s second-tier powers—and here we could reasonably count South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam—add their own complexities to the mix. And that’s before we even get to the United States.

We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the beginning of President Obama’s second term. And, speaking plainly, I don’t think it has started well. The noted Asia hands of his first administration—people like Kurt Campbell and Jim Steinberg—have left. True, Joe Biden (the Vice President) and Susan Rice (the National Security Adviser) have both delivered big set-piece speeches on Asia. And the rebalance remains the core of US Asia policy—even though Asian audiences are still trying to decide what it actually means. Meanwhile two US decisions about the Middle East—the handling of the Syrian chemical-weapons issue and the Iranian nuclear agreement—have both muddied the waters in US relations with Asia. The first showed a hesitancy in US willingness to use force; the second a US willingness (actually a P5+1 willingness) to accept a quasi-nuclear status for Tehran. Both decisions have generated ripples in our own region.

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The Abbott strategic trifecta (4): the value of values

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B-2

The diplomatic calendar is going to help Tony Abbott work through the current period of diplomatic pain with China. Australia is chairing the G20 and China is the APEC chair as the group celebrates its 25th birthday. Beijing shouldn’t spend too much time beating up Canberra if it is putting energy into the theme it chose for its APEC year: ‘Shaping the Future through Asia-Pacific Partnership.’

Both the G20 and the APEC chairing jobs will focus on shared economic interests, cooperation and the search for consensus. That will aid an Abbott effort to shift the spotlight from his bilateral bother with Beijing, and perhaps help the Prime Minister to do some reframing of his strategic trifecta—the alliance, interests and values that Australia shares with Japan and the US.

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