Tag Archive for: Australia

US extended nuclear assurance: hiding in plain sight

Boeing US Air Force B-52 being refueled by a Boeing KC-135A. Nuclear-armed B-52s were a key element of Nixon Doctrine-era nuclear deterrence.There’s been a resurgence of interest in recent years among Australian academics in the issue of US extended nuclear assurance to its Asian allies in general and to Australia in particular. I’ve written on this issue, but so too have Andrew O’Neill (PDF), Stephan Fruehling, Ron Huisken (PDF), and Richard Tanter, to name just some of the contributors.

One particular point has often generated a degree of confusion and uncertainty—the question of whether Washington has ever actually extended a nuclear guarantee to Australia. This isn’t a trivial question. In a submission (PDF) to the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in March 2004, Ron Huisken observed that he knew of no specific US commitment to extend nuclear assurance to Australia. Australians, said Huisken, had often ‘claimed’ a US nuclear guarantee, and Washington had never contradicted those claims, but it wasn’t clear the US had ever actually provided a guarantee. Read more

Joint warfighting as a solution to strategic uncertainty for the ADF

Navy Lieutenant Arthur Jagiello goes about his work in the Joint Control Centre of Headquarters Joint Operations Command (HQJOC), Bungendore.Whenever I talk about leadership to various audiences, I use two concepts as illustrations.

The first I thought was my concept of risk management, until I Googled it and discovered that others had thought of it too. It solidified in my mind at the conclusion of the theatre strategic shaping operations for the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. The organisation I headed had achieved so much over about three months and, when on the verge of handing the fight over to the Marines, there was a natural tendency to relax. What I’d learned the hard way over a long operational career was to stay ‘paranoid’—there could always be people looking to hurt us. But the paranoia has to be constructive and so ‘Constructive Paranoia’ as a personal concept was (re-)invented—a concept which generations of soldiers know from bitter experience to be true and have expressed in many different ways.

The second concept is borrowed with permission from the St James Ethics Centre where, as a director, I hang around with philosophers. Simon Longstaff gives an excellent presentation on ‘Constructive Subversion’ as a way of outflanking unthinking custom and practice, the greatest threat to effective leadership that I know. Read more

On projects and performance

Every year I get to watch Mark Thomson pull off a remarkable feat of ‘extreme analysis’, as he cranks out 260 pages of the annual Cost of Defence report in the couple of weeks after the federal budget is released. (It’s a bit like extreme ironing, but with fewer shirts and more graphs.) You’ll be able to read the executive summary of the report on The Strategist from 12:30 today, and download the entire report from ASPI’s home page a little later.

Until then, here’s a potted summary of the chapter of the budget brief that I have responsibility for—the ‘Selected Defence Projects’ chapter. The idea of the chapter is very simple—to provide a ‘one-stop’ look at selected defence projects that provides a compendium of facts and figures, along with a short commentary. There’s a tendency for some revisionism to sneak into the reporting of defence projects, such as reporting progress against a rebaselined schedule, or measuring achieved expenditure against additional estimates only a couple of months old at budget time instead of against the projections from a year previous. Since we think that transparency is a fine thing, we’ve included as much original data as we can.

This year saw the addition of a couple of significant new projects to our list—the first explicitly funded work on the future submarine project, and the acquisition of 12 new EA-18G Growler aircraft. Both of those were announced when the Defence white paper was released earlier in the month. They seem to be the only major procurement announcements made in the twelve months since the last budget brief. But that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been more work done in getting projects approved—Chapter 3 of the Cost of Defence report records 21 approvals in total (five first pass and 11 second pass) and examines the progress made in delivering the Defence Capability Plan. Read more

Walking among giants: Australia and Indonesia between the US and China

Republic of Indonesia Sailors render honors as the guided missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92) arrives in Jakarta, Indonesia. Momsen, along with more than 1,000 Sailors and Marines are participating in Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) Indonesia 2013.

As mentioned on The Strategist, last week ASPI convened its first ‘Australia–Indonesia Next Generation Defence & Security Forum’ to discuss the state and future of the relationship. I talked about the strategic implications of the US-Sino relationship for the two countries, both individually and in a bilateral context.

How the US and China manage their relations is of key importance for Australia and Indonesia. Greater strategic competition could lead to serious conflict, even war, with devastating consequences. But accommodating any Chinese hegemonic ambitions could easily come at the cost of smaller powers and is therefore neither in Australia’s, nor Indonesia’s interests.

Luckily, US-China strategic relations are characterised by both cooperation and competition. As the new Australian Defence White Paper (DWP) stresses, this situation allows Australia (and I’d add, Indonesia) to avoid binary choices between Washington and Beijing. Our strategic interactions with the two major powers are not mechanistic ‘zero sum games’ in which cooperation with one country automatically comes at the expense of the other. We don’t (yet) live in a Cold War-type Asia and it’s far from inevitable that we’ll enter into such a period any time soon. Read more

Business or plunder: international corruption robbing Africa’s poor

Mapping Africa's mineral wealth

Africa is a resource-rich continent, but most of its people live in extreme poverty. Amid the world’s resources boom and high global demand, Africa’s vast oil, gas and mineral resources have the potential to drastically improve and transform the lives of African populations.

So why do some of the world’s poorest people live in one of the world’s most resource-abundant regions? And, as Australian business, investment and trade with African countries increase, how can this economic injustice simply be ignored?

Global momentum to address the current dismal state of affairs is mounting, and Australia needs to take an active part in efforts to ensure greater transparency and accountability in Africa’s resources sector and international transactions. Read more

Australia–Indonesia relations: all marriages need effort

Group shot of the ASPI-Defence 1.5 track dialogue with Indonesia (photo credit: Luke Wilson, ASPI)The Australia–Indonesia relationship is headed in a broadly positive direction, with the potential for defence and security cooperation to grow. But people-to-people and economic links are surprisingly limited and more needs to be done to build ballast into a relationship often at risk due to misperceptions. These are our personal conclusions after ASPI’s inaugural ‘Australia–Indonesia Next Generation Defence & Security Forum’ in Sydney, 14 to 16 May. With the support of the Department of Defence, we brought together 20 Australian and Indonesian participants from the military, academia, government departments and think tanks for two days of 1.5 track discussion on pressing defence and strategic issues. To encourage frankness, the meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule, so we won’t attribute comments to individuals, rather we’ll offer our own impressions of the meeting.

There were several key themes that emerged from the presentations and discussion. For one, maps made an appearance in several instances—a salient reminder that geography is one of the key forces that necessitates greater Indonesia–Australia cooperation. Some presenters used maps to articulate an Indonesian perspective of our strategic environment and its security challenges. In one case, the visual representation of Indonesia’s archipelagic sea-lanes and their vulnerability to foreign vessels highlighted Indonesia’s need for greater investment in naval capabilities as well as for maritime cooperation.

Several speakers also looked at future prospects for the bilateral relationship. One speaker asked, ‘What should the relationship feel like in 20 years?’, the implication being that national sentiment and the degree of ‘warmth’ each country felt for the other would set the course towards stronger strategic ties down the track. For example, interoperability between our militaries (and even officers serving in each other’s battalions) was proposed as a desirable end. Yet several participants challenged this idea, on the grounds that interoperability entails greater compatibility between our systems than is commonly understood and greater congruence between our respective strategic cultures was still needed. Read more

Reader response: Defence White Paper—between the lines

Mark Thompson writes:

Imagine how the White Paper would have read if it had begun with the recognition—brutal yet surely accurate—that our security ultimately depends on the geopolitical balance in our part of the world rather than on our ability to defend the continent against attack.

Unfortunately, that “brutal” recognition is more of a theoretical assumption derived from the attitudes of large states rather than a universal reality for all states. Australia’s security is not ‘ultimately’ dependent upon the geopolitical balance of Asia. Just as the evolving changes during the Cold War between the US and USSR had no substantial impact on Australia’s day to day environment, neither will a (much more geographically restricted) balancing act in northeast Asia affect us. Certainly the balancers may get it wrong with occasional clashes but, save a WW3 type scenario, Australia’s security does not “ultimately depend” upon the degree or even existence of ‘balance’ 10’000km to our north. Read more

Four principles of Australian defence policy

LCPL Dustin Hoppe from Melbourne’s 4th/19th Prince of Wales Light Horse Regiment stands at Rest on Arms as a member of the Catafalque Party during the Dawn Service in Honiara, Solomon Islands.I’m an old Defence-of-Australia hand, so I’ll offer a perspective which looks at the 2013 Defence White Paper through that prism, and then draw some conclusions.

There are four overall principles that have characterised Defence of Australia policies. The first is the self-reliant Defence of Australia. The new White Paper leaves no equivocation on this point.  Paragraph 3.35 says ‘The highest priority ADF task is to deter or defeat armed attacks on Australia without having to rely on the combat or combat support forces of another country’. The next paragraph elaborates:  ‘Australia’s defence policy is founded on the principle of self-reliance in deterring or defeating armed attack on Australia, within the context of our Alliance with the United States and our cooperation with regional partners’. What’s new here is the reference to the region in the final phrase.

The second policy principle is that there are limits to Australia’s military resources and influence. There are few direct references to this (perhaps it’s taken as self-evident) but there’s little doubt that it’s a central factor.  Paragraph 3.2 reads to the effect that the Government’s responses to security threats and opportunities will have to acknowledge ‘the limits of our capability and reach’. The next sentence is in some ways more telling:  ‘Choices must therefore be made to guide the allocation of finite resources to deal with challenges that are most likely or most dangerous, and where our response can be most effective’. This theme of choice, and by implication difficult choice, recurs throughout the document:  see for example paragraph 7.9. Read more

Antarctic logistics—in for the long haul?

Guest editor Anthony BerginResearchers studying penguins while voyaging aboard the icebreaker Aurora Australis.Australia made its last significant new investment in Antarctic logistic capability during the Howard government years, when we funded an intercontinental air capability in the form of a commercial Airbus A319 flying from Hobart to an ice runway in Antarctica.

This was the first time a commercial wheeled jet aircraft had been licensed to fly to and land in Antarctica. The construction of Australia’s research and resupply icebreaker Aurora Australis in Newcastle (Australia) and a station rebuilding program in the 1980s were the previous major investments in Antarctic logistics. Read more

Between bullets and votes: Australia’s role in improving security in Africa

A United Nations peacekeeper from the Indian battalion of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) examines AK-47 magazines stored in a warehouse in Beni, where all weapons and ammunition are stored after they have been collected in the demobilization process in Matembo, North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.As Australia begins to take a greater role in African security issues, we must also begin to better scrutinise the role the international community has had in perpetuating the militarisation of political power in many African countries.

It’s foreseeable that we will continue to contribute to international decision-making on African security issues well beyond our two-year term on the Security Council. At this point, we need to stop and analyse how we can use our position to contribute productively to building a more stable and prosperous Africa. If we’re to make a contribution that will benefit both continents, we need to help address the underlying causes of insecurity and conflict on the continent rather than signing up to the status quo approach and especially to military-based solutions. How to really contribute to building a more stable, secure Africa, which is ripe for increased and less risky Australian business, investment, trade and the utilisation of our services sector, is an issue worth examining for Australians. Read more