Defence alliances thrive on liberal doses of new ideas to turn the wheels of big military machines doing practical things. If the ideas dry up, alliances slow down and eventually cease moving forward. Those charged with managing our US alliance must constantly find new ways to refresh cooperation, and to keep defence activities relevant to the strategic need.

The good news is that there’s ample scope for expanding cooperation. Closer engagement with the US will be driven by emerging strategic challenges and worries in the Asia-Pacific. The broad context here is that ANZUS is regionalising—taking on a wider importance as a contributor to the stability of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. This carries with it greater opportunities as well as responsibilities for Australia. Here I set out five areas where alliance cooperation can be extended.

First, Australia can speed up the deployment of Marines and increase the pace of USAF–RAAF cooperation in our north. The current phased implementation aims to have the full Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) of 2,500 personnel on rotational deployment by 2016. This is unnecessarily slow and could be achieved much more quickly without doing an injustice to important economic, environmental and cultural impact studies. The slow phasing gives comfort to those who claim that there is less to the pivot than meets the eye, and it makes the Americans worry that the Australians aren’t serious about enhanced cooperation. Read more

Yesterday I described how a series of important security-related public policy documents had been effectively ‘tabled’ in public before the Parliament had seen them. In the case of the National Security Statement, it never made the table in Parliament at all. Now the dogs are barking and the Canberra system is whispering that the trick is about to be repeated with the public release of the new Defence White Paper in the next fortnight, before Parliament assembles on May 14 for the Budget sessions. The whispers have it that the Government wants to announce the White Paper ahead of the Budget, instead of late June as previously stated by the Defence Minister, ‘so it doesn’t clutter post-budget discussion of more electorally saleable issues’. The Navy would be well advised to have a ship on standby so it can do picture duty as with the previous White Paper.

The Presidential Pretensions that have long afflicted Australian Prime Ministers feed a desire to rise above the clutches of the Parliament. The way caucus cut down ‘President’ Rudd in 2010 and Labor’s constant vigilance on the floor of the House of Reps to sustain a minority government this term don’t seem to have had much effect on the hankering for the Oval Office. Canberra has cherry-picked some excellent elements from Washington, such as the formation of the National Security Committee of Cabinet and in the creation of the post of a National Security Adviser. The US President issues a National Security Strategy (PDF); what could be more natural than for the Australian President to do the same? Read more

In my previous post, I found myself agreeing with Jim Molan that the ADF was in danger of entering a period of serious decline in its ability to maintain capability. The combination of tight budgets and the need to replace assets across the board at the ‘pointy end’ in the next ten to twenty years is a recipe for bad outcomes.

The Defence White Paper that will be released in the next few weeks probably won’t help. If, as expected, it maintains the fiction that all of the ‘core capabilities’ can be retained without a funding boost at least as generous as the levels promised in its predecessor, it will only make a future train wreck more likely.

We know that to be the case, because we’ve done the experiment before. As Mark Thomson has documented over the years in his budget briefs, the 1990s were tough times for the ADF. Funding was constrained as successive governments worked their way back from the recession we had to have, causing the ADF’s readiness and capability levels to fall away. Submarine capabilities declined alarmingly and the Anzac frigates were ‘fitted for but not with’ the systems needed to make them combat ready. Our air combat platforms weren’t able to participate in even moderately challenging environments due to inadequate electronic warfare fits and long-delayed weapons upgrades. At the same time, the Army spent a demoralising decade preparing to hunt for small groups of insurgents who had decided—for reasons nobody could ever adequately explain—to penetrate the vast expanse of Australia’s north to do who knows what. Read more

The Australian public service has two modes for offering its famed frank and fearless advice to ministers. One method is ‘stand ready’. The much rarer, high risk approach is ‘cop this’.

In stand ready mode, senior mandarins wait to be asked to offer advice on dangerous or controversial topics. Thus, it is a matter of standing, being ready, but not necessarily doing anything. For public servants, the stand ready position leans heavily towards the servant side of the job title.

When a public servant goes ‘cop this, Minister, ready or not’, he or she is emphasising the public dimension of the role rather than the servant side. The risk in offering an unpalatable and unwelcome message is that the messenger ends in quite a mess. Even so, the Australian public service at its highest levels has a proud tradition of being able to get ministers to cop it at key moments. Read more

The recent exchange between Graeme Dobell and Peter Jennings over Australia’s commitment to Iraq highlighted the critical roles to be played by Parliament and the Public Service when war is being considered. I have but a small postscript to add. I believe that the onus to provide frank and fearless advice extends to everyone who earns a crust as an analyst or commentator in the public defence and foreign policy space. And just as it’s always easier to hunt with the hounds and run with the foxes inside the system, the same is often true in the public domain.

So for what it’s worth, here’s what I was thinking on the eve of the Iraq war but didn’t have the guts to publish at the time. The only changes I’ve made are to correct spelling errors and typos. If nothing else, it might provide a counterbalance to the great many column inches that have been written in recent weeks with the benefit of hindsight.

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