Defence Minister Richard Marles called in February for the Australian Defence Force to be capable of ‘impactful projection’.

Well, the defence procurement machinery is aiming to achieve that in spades, lining up acquisitions of a remarkable diversity of strike missiles. Plans can be identified to bring no fewer than eight designs of such weapons into service and to start using an old one again.

Taxpayers may well wonder why the country needs so complex a menagerie of weapons that have overlapping capabilities. All can attack distant ships, stationary ground objects or both.

In general, adding each design to an inventory increases the average cost of acquisition, training and in-service support.

The scenario that’s obviously driving the acquisitions, and the one against which their value should be judged, is defence of Australia against China. The weapons will raise the risk of sending hostile ships towards Australia or placing ground installations and equipment—such as bases, surface-to-air batteries, radars and ammunition stores—close to it.

All that assumes targets can be detected and, if mobile, tracked—a major challenge not addressed in this article.

The planned strike missiles vary in utility; some look more justifiable than others. Probably the least justifiable type is also the most famous, the Raytheon RGM-109 Tomahawk.

A partial explanation for buying such a diverse inventory is that Australia’s strike missiles will be variously carried by aircraft, ships and trucks, which often require dissimilar weapon designs. Each of the three categories of platform offers fundamentally distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Aircraft can reach a long way, strike suddenly, return to base and come back again tomorrow. Ranging far and wide, they can rapidly switch to other targets.

Sustaining that capability, however, relies on the planes and their bases surviving an enemy’s strikes. It all vanishes in puffs of smoke if enemy missiles catch unprotected aircraft on the ground or destroy fuel supplies or ammunition stocks.

Ships may be able to approach targets that are further from Australia than aircraft can reach, though that capability is far more relevant to a Middle Eastern expeditionary scenario than to defence against China. Ships can also loiter and fire at short notice, if they can survive within range of their targets for long enough. It’s a big if.

Once they shoot, they usually can’t do so again for days, maybe more than a week, because they must retire to reload, probably at a port.

Ground vehicles have the great advantage of economy. The factory-gate cost of a launcher truck, not including the missiles, may be only millions of Australian dollars. A fighter, admittedly capable of other important functions, costs more than $100 million, and a destroyer more than $1 billion.

Launcher trucks can sit on station almost indefinitely, hiding under trees or in civilian buildings. If some are destroyed, many more may still be available nearby—if their low cost has been exploited to buy them in great numbers. They can reload in minutes, and airlifters can quickly reposition them over hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

But they are restricted to friendly territory and, in Australia’s strategic context, will be unable to move closer to an enemy once they reach a coast. That means that ground-basing of strike missiles is mainly an economical and survivable means of dealing with enemy forces that come towards them.

Bearing all that in mind, let’s look at the merits of the various plans.

The Royal Australian Air Force will use four strike-missile designs, which at first sounds excessive. But three will be versions of a single type, the Lockheed Martin AGM-158, and will therefore share some training and support procedures.

Two of those will be the AGM-158B JASSM-ER land-attack missile (probably its far-flying AGM-158B-2 derivative) and the AGM-158C LRASM anti-ship missile. To some extent they can or may be able to do each other’s jobs, but each has such great strengths in its specialty that buying both looks easily justified.

The third version will be the AGM-158A JASSM land-attack missile, which has a shorter range than the JASSM-ER. Once used by the RAAF on the now-retired F/A-18A/B Hornet, it has been retained in stock—no doubt in the expectation that the F/A-18F Super Hornet or, most likely, F-35A Lightning II will be cleared to use it within a few years.

At a time when securing supplies of Western missiles is difficult, our JASSMs have a great virtue: they’re already in our possession.

Unambiguous capability duplication will appear when the RAAF receives a second strike-missile type, the Kongsberg JSM, which will be useable by F-35As and maybe Super Hornets against both land and sea targets.

Reasons for adding the JSM must be in its characteristics. The AGM-158 versions will have bigger warheads and a longer range, but the JSM should be much better at penetrating strong defences.

Equipping the Royal Australian Navy with Tomahawks is less easy to justify because it’s hard to think of targets that could be safely attacked by ships but not by aircraft.

Against China, the quick reaction time of a ship loitering on station is an improbable asset. China has a fearsome assembly of sensors and weapons for finding and destroying ships even thousands of kilometres from its coasts. Ships couldn’t loiter.

Aircraft, on the other hand, would need only to dart into a firing position and then retire.

The Tomahawk has a long range, advertised at 1,850 kilometres, but the air-launched AGM-158B-2 may fly just about as far.

Another issue is the large number of Tomahawks that Australia apparently plans to buy—220. The Hobart-class destroyers that will carry them have only 48 vertical missile cells each. If 40 cells must be reserved for defensive surface-to-air missiles, a plausible assumption, each of the three ships would carry only eight Tomahawks. So each would need to load and reload nine times to exhaust the Tomahawk stock.

The ships would be exposed not just while on station but also during at least parts of their reloading shuttle runs. Their chances of surviving long enough to fire 220 Tomahawks in a scenario involving China don’t look at all high.

The navy will also install Kongsberg NSM missiles on the Hobarts and the eight Anzac-class frigates for use against land and, mainly, naval targets. Again, if hitting the target means sailing within the coverage of China’s anti-ship reconnaissance-strike complex, the job would be better done by aircraft.

At least NSMs won’t use scarce vertical missile cells; they will have separate canisters. Also, some commonality with JSMs may reduce operating costs.

An anti-ship strike capability will also be available from RIM-174 SM-6s in the Hobarts’ vertical cells—but commanders of those inadequately magazined ships would usually want to reserve SM-6s for air and missile defence, which is their main purpose.

While value for money is a strong reason for equipping the Australian Army with strike missiles, it won’t be able to hit very distant targets with them, at least at first. If based on Australian territory the missiles would provide only a sort of last-ditch capability to ward off enemy ships in case the RAAF was suppressed.

Army strike missiles would be far more useful if moved forward onto islands of our northern neighbours, helping to defend them while creating barriers against access to Australia. That concept seems to gel somewhat with the defence strategic review’s call for the army to have an amphibious capability.

The army will get cruise strike missiles, quite possibly NSMs, and Lockheed Martin PRSM ballistic weapons. The NSM can hit both land and sea targets, and the government should be aiming at a PRSM version that can do the same.

So why would we keep both types? Maybe because the NSM, though it has a shorter range than the 500-kilometre PRSM, would have a better chance of penetrating defences. Also, it would already be in navy service. Still, an opportunity for simplification is apparent.

Later, a third army type, the PRSM Increment 4, should also enter service for use against land and sea targets, justified by having yet more range. It surely will be more expensive, so we’ll probably want to keep the original PRSM, too.

France invented the attack helicopter in 1956. Sixty-seven years later, Japan has decided that the idea has had its day.

‘Elimination of obsolete equipment’ is the cruelly decisive headline above photos of a Bell AH-1 Cobra and a Boeing AH-64D Apache, both attack helicopters, in a Japanese Ministry of Defense policy update published in December.

Uncrewed aircraft will replace them. The reason isn’t budget stress. On the contrary, plenty of money would have been available for the ministry’s formerly planned Cobra replacement program, because Japan is doubling its defence budget’s share of the economy.

This further calls into question Australia’s 2021 decision to renew the Australian Army’s attack helicopter force by buying 29 Apaches of the AH-64E version.

If fact, the Australian government and Department of Defence already may have lost interest in placing an immediate order.

Japan is also getting rid of scout helicopters—essentially, light attack helicopters that put more design emphasis on sensors instead of firepower. This decision is less radical than ditching helicopters for the attack mission, since reconnaissance and surveillance are among the first tasks shifted to uncrewed vehicles of any kind.

Japan will begin operating uncrewed replacements for attack helicopters this year, says the Yomiuri newspaper, citing several unnamed official sources. General deployment is to follow in 2025, the Yomiuri has said.

The 48 Cobras were already due for retirement. The ministry assessed possible crewed replacements for them in 2018 but omitted acquisition from its defence plan for 2019–2023.

Judging from reported plans for the trials, replacements will include loitering munitions (also referred to internationally as ‘kamikaze drones’). There will also be ordinary reusable drones of various sizes, such as have been appearing in armies in greater numbers for decades, often taking over the roles of crewed helicopters.

Australia’s intended order for Apaches has been part of the army’s plan to thoroughly re-equip itself for intense combined-arms ground combat.

As the risk of a maritime and air war involving China has become Australia’s overwhelming security concern, the army’s costly equipment plans have looked ever less relevant.

Now we have the judgement of Japan, a close friend, that attack helicopters are not worthwhile even for its capability requirements, which include land fighting to defend territory.

The attack helicopter was invented when the French Army, fighting in Algeria, took a step beyond simply bolting machine guns onto rotorcraft airframes. In 1956 it variously equipped Alouette II light utility choppers with anti-tank missiles or unguided rockets. Two years later, Bell Helicopter in the US saw that an ideal helicopter configuration for the attack mission would include a slim body with two crew members sitting in tandem; the US Army ordered the concept into production in 1966 as the AH-1.

The Australian Army didn’t participate in this revolution until 2004, when it began taking deliveries of 22 Airbus Tigers. They were so troublesome that they did not become fully operational until 2016 but since then have been performing well. The former government decided to replace them with Apaches.

Weapon categories rarely become suddenly obsolete. Usually, they progressively lose application as people devise increasingly effective countermeasures to them. In the fight to stay relevant, they often become more elaborate and costly. In some cases, a new, cheaper weapon category appears as a replacement.

All that has been happening to the attack helicopter. Short-range weapons for use against fleeting, low-level air targets have improved—and these weapons are largely designed to knock down jet aeroplanes flying several times faster than helicopters. Even unsophisticated guns and rockets intended for ground targets can be alarmingly effective against helicopters.

As lessons from wars such as the Iraq conflict 20 years ago have sunk in, decisions on the use of attack helicopters have become more prudent, meaning that sometimes they’re not used at all.

Russian attack helicopters have suffered badly in Ukraine. The Royal United Services Institute in London finds that at least 37 were lost between the 24 February invasion and 7 November last year.

Portable air-defence systems, or manpads, imposed heavy losses on attack helicopters that penetrated Ukrainian-held territory on search and destroy missions, RUSI says. Russia resorted to keeping such rotorcraft on its own side of the battle area, from where they could safely lob rockets.

No doubt Japan would imagine that its Apaches and the formerly planned Cobra replacements, if it had bought them, would have performed better than Russia’s attack helicopters—but not well enough, it seems.

Attack helicopters have also become more complex as armies have demanded more robustness, situational awareness, and weapon range, for safety. Compared with the Cobra, which is smaller, the Apache is an astonishingly high-performance machine.

And the cost these days? Well, the budget for Australia to buy 29 Apaches and make them operational is more than $5.5 billion—$190 million each.

Meanwhile, cheap battlefield drones are proliferating. They’ve also suffered badly in Ukraine, but they’re much cheaper and don’t have anyone in them when they crash. The Turkish-made Baykar Bayraktar TB2 drone, with a gross weight of 700 kilograms, reportedly costs US$1–2 million. For fair comparison with the Australian Apache acquisition, we could double that figure to include the cost of making them operational, with weapons, training and so on.

All this doesn’t mean that the attack helicopter is useless or that drones can replace it in every mission. But each of the trends discussed here is undermining its competitiveness in terms of value for money.

Japan has evidently judged that the competitiveness has now been damaged too much.

One aspect of its decision should stand out for Australia. Tokyo did not conclude that attack helicopters would still be viable if they had the highest capability available—which is to say, if they were AH-64Es. And it took that view even though its possession of 12 AH-64Ds would have greatly cut the cost of introducing the newer version.

That newer version is precisely the one that Australia decided on.

In May 2022, then–prime minister Scott Morrison said the government had ‘finalised’ the ‘investment’ to acquire AH-64Es.

But is Australia still planning to purchase new crewed attack helicopters at all?

In preparing this article, I asked the Defence Department about the status of the AH-64E program.

Defence did not provide an answer, not even a ‘no comment’, which would be most unusual for a program of no great secrecy that was proceeding more or less as intended. The department may be awaiting the outcome of the government’s defence strategic review.

Originally published 24 March 2022.

The 2020 defence strategic update states that the Australian Defence Force is ‘to deploy military power to shape our environment, deter actions against our interests and, when required, respond with military force’. It’s less certain that the military options available to decision-makers are well suited to these tasks in the contemporary regional environment.

This is arguably the case with the land force. So, how might the Australian Army better integrate with the joint force and our regional geography, remaining grounded in formation tactics while becoming an integral part of what has been described as a joint, federated targeting system? More simply, how can we become as lethal and survivable as possible? In the most recent edition of the Australian Army Journal, I offered some deliberately provocative, creative suggestions for how this might be done.

The tired debate about tanks and armoured vehicles has re-emerged with a looming Land 400 decision. I stress that I’m not anti-tank or anti–Land 400. My professional life started in an armoured regiment and I deeply appreciate the value of armour. There’s space for a discussion about how land forces might operate in the region that eschews the quasi-religious characteristics on both sides of this debate.

Vague military terms of art need some elaboration first. ‘Formation tactics’ is among the key organising concepts for how land forces have traditionally fought. Crudely speaking, this doctrinal framework provides a set of tools for fighting ‘close combat’. While there’s a great deal of flexibility in this framework, for Australia this approach centres on brigades as the key unit of action, with combined arms (that is, integration of various arms of the force like infantry, armour, aviation and fires) the foundation stone of their capability.

The Australian Army, along with allied militaries and the remainder of the ADF, is in the process of refocusing on strike capabilities, notably with major acquisitions of missile systems. This is all occurring alongside a worrying scepticism among informed analysts about what military force will and will not be capable of accomplishing in the region, usually centred on anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities.

Debate is alive on what the future force looks like and how the ADF might pursue a focus on ‘shaping’ and ‘deterring’ adversaries. Yet, despite some organisational developments, the Australian Army is still organised around more or less traditional combat brigades, and formation tactics arguably remains the framework through which most army leaders think.

One of several key difficulties is that what makes a force successful in prosecuting close combat is not necessarily optimal for conducting strike, particularly in a maritime environment.

I suggest a force design with radically different relationships among force elements. This is a highly dispersed and dramatically flattened network of nodes, aggressively interwoven with deception measures and capable of unconventional sustainment. A capacity for both close combat and strike needs to reside within the same task groupings. Close combat enables strike options and strike enables close combat at different points in space and time.

Robust but small—50 to 200 personnel—elements or nodes are dispersed in a maritime setting, paired with a mix of strike assets like anti-ship missiles, and deeply interwoven with decoy measures. This dispersed posture offers options for concealing strike capabilities (both land-based missile systems and sensors integrated with fires from ships and aircraft) within a joint grouping that may well be conducting a range of other taskings. Crises may escalate, for instance, while land forces are already in the region conducting training and assistance tasks or engaged in a stabilisation mission, almost certainly alongside a whole-of-government presence.

Such groupings—small-scale combined-arms capabilities (yes, sometimes including armoured vehicles) teamed with sensors and anti-ship (or land strike or anti-air) missiles—are deployed along coastlines and dispersed among islands. They are deployed with and sustained by military transports, small landing craft, Chinook helicopters and so on, as well as vessels such as civilian ferries and aircraft like Boeing 737 jets. Dummy command nodes are many and form a key part of the signature management of the operation, making it as hard as possible for an adversary to make sense of the Australian posture through the noise of radio traffic. The effort is integrated with whole-of-government effects and intelligence feeds.

In these groupings, close combat and strike capabilities can be seen as a pair, with shifting responsibility for a ‘protect’ function. The close combat force provides intimate protection for missile systems, opens options for deception, and allows the group to fight for position so strike assets can take the shot if needed. (The capability taking the shot might be an integrated land-based missile, but it might also be an F-35 joint strike fighter or a naval platform). Under other conditions, strike capabilities protect the group from adversary strikes and—necessarily tied in with other joint platforms and sensors—mitigate the risk of isolation.

A significant part of this schematic concept comprises efforts to minimise vulnerabilities in our traditional structures. For instance, a number of equivalent command nodes should coexist, either working together in an established operational design or rotating supremacy as ‘first among peer’ headquarters. This could provide a level of redundancy to adversary strike, which will surely target such command nodes, and reinforce the deception effect that’s intended to be pervasive.

Also inherent in this concept is a variable level of reliance on civilian and military logistics. We need to think about how to project and sustain regional operations while scarce military assets (like landing ships or transport aircraft) are being husbanded, or when unconventional sustainment options, like civilian shipping or commercial airliners, might help deceive an adversary.

All militaries operating in our region face convergence pressures. The recent US Marine Corps concept of ‘expeditionary advanced base operations, known as EABO, reflects the similar adaption pressures facing the US military. Multiple authors have already called for emulation of A2/AD approaches.

It’s unsurprising that similar questions are raised with EABO and related developments. Perhaps the most prominent is the tendency to talk about the operating environment as if it were a blank slate. (It is clearly not—see ‘Riding shotgun’ in a previous Army Journal). Not only do adversaries get a say, but so do sovereign partner states, which have their own sensitivities and interests. All military concepts for operating in the region are void unless our relationships with key regional players enable those concepts.

The most significant question, though, is what relatively small and lightweight forces can actually achieve. We have ample experience of the isolation and loss of forces in the near region: the disasters of Sparrow Force in Timor and Lark Force at Rabaul in 1942 are sobering examples of the real risks facing disaggregated forces in the archipelago. The isolation and destruction of even very large conventional forces in maritime Southeast Asia throughout World War II illustrates this risk. In strategic terms, our marginal benefit or comparative advantage in a regional setting, ‘walking among the giants’, will always be limited. We may simply not be capable of credibly holding adversaries at sufficient risk.

More bridges are needed between professional discussion and policymaking. The Australian strategic conversation is awash with references to deterrence. Material acquisitions are important, but judgements about the operational art of the possible should inform our strategic posture. Creative and provocative suggestions about how we might redesign the force should be a part of that discussion.

ASPI recently published Albert Palazzo’s excellent, balanced report on the Australian Army’s planned infantry fighting vehicles, or IFVs. The report achieves its goal of explaining the purpose and nature of the capability. But reading it in its various drafts reminded me that successive governments, for better or worse, have regarded heavy land forces differently from other areas of defence capability. In this piece I’m not going to argue for or against that capability but simply highlight that governments don’t appear to have shared Defence’s priorities.

The Australian Army’s M113 armoured personnel carriers are obsolete. Nobody disputes that. They’ve been obsolete since—well, there are no hard and fast rules around obsolescence. They went to Somalia in the first half of the 1990s and to Timor-Leste in 1999 and again in 2006, but due to their lack of protection, none were sent to Iraq or to Afghanistan in any part of Australia’s long deployments there. So for higher threat environments, they’ve been obsolete for decades.

In 2011, when I returned to the Department of Defence’s contestability function after several years away, the first thing I had to do was prepare a paper for senior committee consideration of the Land 400 constellation of projects, which are to deliver the army’s land combat vehicle system. It was acknowledged by all even then that the M113 was obsolete and the Australian Light Armoured Vehicle, or ASLAV, wasn’t far behind.

The army has consistently argued that the lack of an adequate IFV represents a major capability gap because an IFV is an essential component of a balanced combined-arms concept of warfare. Without it, an army can’t conduct combined arms effectively and consequently can’t operate with acceptable levels of risk in medium- to high-threat environments.

So, why hasn’t the M113 been replaced already? Land 400 Phase 3, which is scoped to acquire a fleet of 450 modern IFVs, has been part of Defence’s investment plan for years. After a long and rigorous evaluation process, the government’s consideration of Defence’s recommended solution (either Rheinmetall’s Lynx or Hanwha’s Redback) was scheduled for September this year. That now appears to have been deferred, potentially until the defence strategic review is finalised in March. But even if a second-pass decision had been announced in September, delivery of the complete system still wouldn’t have occurred until well into the 2030s.

Whether the previous government would have approved the capability as scheduled is a moot point, but it’s worth noting that it requested Defence to provide it with costed options for fewer than 450 vehicles.

This brief historical review raises the question of why, if the capability gap is so serious, the delivery of a suitable replacement has taken so long. Why has the government accepted a capability gap that will have lasted around 40 years?

The contrast with two other areas in which Australian governments haven’t accepted capability gaps couldn’t be more stark. In 2006, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson did not accept the department’s assurances that it could maintain an adequate air combat capability throughout the long transition from the F/A-18A/B Classic Hornet and F-111 fleets to the F-35A. Frankly, as the author of the cabinet submission that set out that transition, I didn’t find the department’s business case to be particularly compelling either, but it’s quite remarkable that the minister overruled his department’s advice. On top of that, he persuaded his cabinet colleagues to find $4 billion in additional funding for a ‘bridging’ air combat capability that the department hadn’t even asked for.

The case of submarine capability is even more dramatic. For years, ministers and government officials told the Senate and Australian public that the Attack-class submarine being designed by France’s Naval Group would provide a ‘regionally superior’ capability. And then, suddenly, even before construction started, the previous government assessed that it would be obsolete virtually the moment it was delivered. Instead, that government embarked on an ambitious, lengthy and extremely expensive pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines. One can only conclude that it believed it was worth $100 billion or more to address the prospect of an obsolete submarine capability.

Moreover, in light of the extended schedule that’s likely to be built into the establishment of a nuclear-powered submarine capability, the new government has now flagged that addressing the prospect of any capability gap that may emerge during that transition is a key part of the work of the strategic review.

It seems reasonable, then, to conclude that successive Australian governments have regarded the risks presented by shortfalls in land combat capability to be more manageable than risks in air and undersea combat capability. And the historical record of recent decades would show that Australian governments have found ways that manage the former to their satisfaction. We can argue about whether Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of necessity or wars of choice in terms of whether Australia showed up or not, or whether a strategy of relying heavily on small numbers of special forces was a successful approach. But the governments of the day seemed to believe they had sufficient choices and didn’t rush out to acquire heavy land capabilities—even modest interim or ‘gap-filling’ ones—to send to those contingencies.

Different observers will have different explanations for this. In my view, the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine has cast a long shadow over Australian strategic thinking. Rightly or wrongly, Australian politicians ultimately believe that an adversary has to cross the air–sea gap, so stopping that from happening is the highest capability priority. The supporters of armour haven’t been able to overcome that assumption.

Advocates of armour have generally made their argument at a number of levels: a general case that soldiers need protection; a doctrinal case that it is necessary for combined-arms operations; and a tactical case that armour can be used in complex terrain, for example. But where they have had less success cutting through is in making an operational case that is situated in our region—that is, explaining the kinds of real-world scenarios in which armour would make a difference in protecting Australia’s interests.

That committee paper a decade ago recommended that Defence explain to the government how the capability would be used in likely contingencies in our region. It wasn’t done back then; I don’t know whether it has been done since. Palazzo’s paper suggests some examples of how and where it could be used and they are certainly within the realm of the possible. In my experience, proponents of armour generally don’t do this, instead arguing that it’s impossible to predict all contingencies. What the government wants, they say, is options to address any potential contingencies and armour does that. Perhaps. There are lots of capability options that Australian governments have chosen not to hold.

When real-world examples of contingencies are put forward, I’m not sure they are particularly compelling for governments. For example, some proponents of armour point to the possibility of another contingency like the battle of Marawi, an urban fight in Southeast Asia that Australia could deploy heavy land forces to. But in the actual battle of Marawi, Australia provided a range of assistance to the Philippines, such as training and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; that is, the government did have viable options to contribute. At this point the discussion devolves into unanswerable hypotheticals: would the government have sent heavy land forces if it had had them? What if the contingency wasn’t discretionary? What if it was closer to home or at home?

Throughout the post–Cold War era characterised by stabilisation, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, Australian governments did not see the need to have options to deploy heavy land forces. The question is, will that change now that we’re in an era of renewed great-power competition that presents the prospect of conventional conflict with a peer adversary? Will the government see the ability to conduct close-quarters land combat as a higher priority than, say, enhancing long-range strike and denial capabilities? It’s entirely possible. But while the government has delayed the IFV decision, it has said that nuclear-powered submarines and the Hunter-class frigates are not in the strategic review’s trade space, suggesting that the traditional capability priorities haven’t yet changed.

That doesn’t mean the government won’t agree to the full scope of Land 400 Phase 3, or at least a large part of it, particularly if the strategic review makes a strong recommendation in its favour. But I would suggest that Defence would help the government reach that decision if its narratives moved beyond the abstract and explained how the capability would play a role in plausible contingencies in our near region in an era of great-power competition. The concrete is always more compelling than the abstract.

The Strategist has been defence-review-heavy recently. Much of the conversation has centred on conventional land forces and armour in particular. This has been couched in terms of generic land combat rather than in the context of Australia’s defence policy, which prioritises independent operations in our near region. Prioritising the region makes sense both for the US alliance and for the Hugh White scenario, in which we have to fight alone. It also provides some specificity, but the geography-agnostic arguments continue to be made.

Last month I argued that the review must pin down the type of fight the Australian Defence Force needs to optimise for. This month I provide examples of the practical consequences of genericism.

Unless Australia is invaded, the army needs to get out into the region to be relevant, but no single service is master of its own destiny. What it can aspire to is constrained by the navy. As a rule, it takes three ships to keep one operational. It may be possible to surge to two or three with long enough notice, at the cost of subsequent downtime. The Canberra-class landing helicopter docks’ heavy vehicle deck can accommodate 12 main battle tanks but the army’s new armoured vehicles will be too heavy for the light vehicle deck, so they will be competing for space on the heavy deck too. HMAS Choules can theoretically carry more. Divide the number of vehicles in a brigade by the capacity of HMA Ships Canberra, Adelaide and Choules, then multiply the number of trips by the time each will take, and you’ll soon see that this won’t be blitzkrieg.

There’s no commercial shipping available in the region suitable for landing heavy armour either. Even if there were, it would need a suitable port, of which there are few and likely not where we want to go. Once hostilities start, hitting static installations like ports doesn’t require a kill chain; it’s just a matter of hitting a grid reference. Lose the port and the landed force becomes the stranded force.

If the deployment isn’t pre-emptive, the force will need to land across beaches. Those beaches must be served by roads and bridges capable of supporting the army’s ever larger and heavier vehicles. There are few such beaches in the region, so they are highly predictable. Predictable landings are contested landings. Contested is bad. The weight of the force means it will take a long time to land, so, even if it’s not contested initially, it soon will be. Then it needs to be supported, which doesn’t look any prettier. Perhaps this is why no one has ever tried to manoeuvre armoured formations around an archipelagic theatre. The historical cop out of ‘The Americans will take care of it’ doesn’t work either. They can’t even shift their own forces—hence the Pentagon’s angst over its failing light amphibious warship program.

Lest I seem to be picking on the army, the navy is similarly constrained by the air force. Surface ships operating without air cover have a bad history. Covering operations in the Bismarck Sea, the Louisiade Archipelago, New Caledonia or Timor from distant mainland bases is questionable at best. I’ll leave it to air force logisticians to explain the infeasibility of placing expeditionary air bases closer to the fight with the air force’s current and planned structures.

All of this illustrates how each service has evolved its thought habits around fighting a different war to the other two. In his 2011 bestseller, Good strategy/bad strategy, Richard Rumelt wrote: ‘Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not just ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and design … [T]o get more performance out of a system you have to integrate its components and subsystems more cleverly and more tightly.’

The current force structure represents ad hoc mutual adjustment. Policy and design don’t impose coherence on the system. The elements are not even a system. As good a proof as any is Australia’s amphibious warfare capability. Uniquely to Australia, it comes under the ‘land’ domain and the navy and army are running their own separate amphibious capability projects to their own separate concepts of operations. When you live next to the world’s largest archipelago and can’t get this right, you have a systemic problem.

Service cultures will push back. As Rumelt says:

Strategies focus resources, energy, and attention on some objectives rather than others … [A] change in strategy will make some people worse off. Hence, there will be powerful forces opposed almost any change in strategy … When organizations are unable to make new strategies … then you get vague … goals that everyone can agree on.

A generic fight is a good way to facilitate goals everyone can agree on and avoid focusing on some objectives rather than others. It allows each service to quietly consent to stay out of the other two’s business as long as it gets its third of the pie. A test of the review will be whether it forces Defence to join the parts together to a common purpose.