Tag Archive for: Australian Army

Remembering Jim Molan

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Major General Jim Molan—outstanding soldier, leader, statesman, strategist, pilot, linguist, politician, patriot and author—passed away peacefully on 16 January. At 72 years young, Jim lost his last campaign with his loving wife Anne and their family by his side. As with everything in his life, Jim faced cancer with courage, determination and good cheer. He made the most of every moment throughout his life.

Deservedly, Jim’s life and his many achievements have been acknowledged by our national leaders and recorded in our media, as is right and proper for such a distinguished human being as Jim was. There is no need for me to repeat the many well-deserved accolades here. Instead, we all harbour and cherish our own memories of Jim’s remarkable life, which, above all, was one of service before self. Right up to the end, Jim continued to work hard for his family and all Australians, living the legacy of our Royal Australian Regiment’s motto ‘Duty First’, and always living by the motto of the Corps of Staff Cadets, doctrina vim promovet (‘learning promotes strength’).

Jim and I met as fellow Duntroon classmates in 1968, and we continued as close friends throughout our parallel military careers, linked as well by our similar family circumstances and constant relocations. Very aware of Jim’s battle with cancer, our fellow classmates feared the worst and yet, when the news broke of Jim’s death, I instantly recalled Mark Twain’s comment on the false report of his own death: ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration,’ he wrote. I had wished it was the same for Jim. Numbness. Disbelief. My good friend was too resilient. He had so much more on his to-do list.

Throughout his full life, Jim made many friends. Hailing from a large Catholic family in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe, and an Essendon supporter, Jim was forthright in his views and firm in his opinions, which were not always agreed by others. There was never any doubt about what Jim thought or his respect for the people around him. He was a good arguer, and an even better listener, always paying attention to the opinions of others. People might have disagreed with Jim, but I have never known anyone (not even non-Essendon supporters) who did not like and respect Jim Molan after sharing time with him.

Jim had a great way of connecting with and empowering people. Wisely, he kept his friends close and his foes even closer. Jim was envied by many of us as one of those rare ‘great blokes’—industrious, knowledgeable, talented and with a great sense of fun. Among our classmates and their families, Jim was sometimes known as ‘Lloyd Nolan’, after being incorrectly named by the Canberra media on winning an Aussie Rules award as a cadet. Some thought this misnaming was poetic justice for an Essendon supporter.

Jim’s emotional intelligence and cultural awareness guided his success. He led and empowered others, and he was highly regarded by all the nationalities with which he worked. As a young platoon commander in Papua New Guinea he was revered by his soldiers. Jim was the head of the Australian Defence Staff in Indonesia during the fall of President Suharto and the East Timor crisis, and he and his team were tireless in supporting the Australian embassy as it managed the repatriation of non-essential personnel.

But it was his ability to engage with his Indonesian military counterparts that greatly contributed to the success of Australia’s intervention in East Timor in 1999. As I set about putting together the UN force elements in New York, Jim’s brilliance as a military diplomat was the key to INTERFET’s success. Many young Australians who served in East Timor are alive today because of Jim’s negotiation skills.

And later, as a major general working with the Americans in Iraq as chief of operations, Jim’s attention to detail and his deep care for the welfare of his troops enhanced his own reputation as a commander and the Australian Defence Force’s reputation as a professional military.

As a senator for New South Wales and a deeply committed Australian, Jim campaigned for our country to have a national security strategy, but his early death left this work unfinished. While he and I may have collegiately differed about the content, we were in total agreement on its need for the future security of our country and the wellbeing of our fellow Australians. Let us all hope that his wishes will be fulfilled, and that his legacy is a safer and more secure Australia.

Vale, Jim Molan. You have departed this mortal life prematurely, but never from our hearts.

Editors’ picks for 2022: ‘Redesigning the Australian Army for an uncertain future’

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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.

Australian Army’s long-range strike capability could be firing blind

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The Australian government has committed to spending $5 billion on procuring a land-based long-range strike capability, which will almost certainly be the US-produced High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, better known as HIMARS. This investment, under the Defence Department’s Land 8113 project, includes $70 million in spending on the US’s Precision Strike Missile program to develop land-based strike munitions with a range of 499 to 5,000 kilometres.

This significant investment will deliver an essential element for the Australian Army to develop a robust and persistent anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capability. But acquiring the missile-delivery system without a dedicated surveillance and target acquisition, or STA, capability means that Australia’s long-range fires will have no eyes.

Without accurate targeting data, the capability will be unable to provide accurate kinetic effects at the time and place required. However, as discussed below, there are a few options to remediate this deficiency and generate a decisive land-based strike capability for the Australian Defence Force.

Land 8113 will procure the long-range fires missile launcher with appropriate command and control, logistics and an organic counter-fires radar capability. These radars can detect and provide highly accurate target data on adversary surface-to-surface fires to enable them to be quickly and accurately struck. In this, the army will have a very effective and efficient counter-fires capability.

However, this will only support close combat of 30–100 kilometres and is inherently reactionary: the enemy must fire artillery shells or missiles for the radar to provide target data. Long-range fires need sensors in their engagement range to proactively target non-firing or passive enemy positions.

Long-range fires will be employed mainly in support of the joint force at the operational level. One of the primary intended STA capabilities for the joint force, the MQ-9B SkyGuardian, was planned under project Air 7003, which has now been cancelled in part to fund the $10 billion REDSPICE cyber program. The SkyGuardian was to provide an ‘armed, medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft system providing persistent airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, Electronic Warfare, and precision strike capability for both land and maritime environments’. It could be argued that the capability offered under Air 7003 was essential to the ADF’s aspirational A2/AD capability and that a major gap now exists.

Now that Air 7003 has been cancelled, the STA capability for the joint force falls to ‘other joint and strategic sensors’. This ambiguous term refers to using two sets of capabilities. The first consists of the air force’s P-8 Poseidon and the yet-to-be-delivered MC-55A Peregrine and MQ-4 Triton platforms—all of which have arguably already been assigned necessary air and maritime domain tasks. Regarding the second, the loose argument is that strategic collection assets would support joint force targeting.

However, the reality is likely to be that none of these systems or capabilities would be assigned to directly support long-range fires, and any targeting support would be incidental or opportunistic at best across undefined and fragile communications systems. This tenuous ‘solution’ is not conducive to Defence having a responsive, agile and robust long-range fires capability to support the joint force.

The army has its own STA capability, based on the 20th Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery, which operates the RQ-7B Shadow tactical uncrewed aerial system, or TUAS. From 2023 to 2026, Phase 3 of the Land 129 project will replace the Shadow with the Boeing Integrator, with an expansion from two subunits to three and an increase of two TUAS to six. (A TUAS consists of sufficient air vehicles, ground control stations, launch and recovery and ground support equipment to enable 24-hour persistent operations.)

Despite the three-fold increase in capability and the possibility of an extended-range version of the Integrator, this platform is not being positioned to support long-range fires despite its suitability. The dislocation of a suitable STA capability can be primarily attributed to 20th Regiment’s impending move to the Army Aviation Command. While the move will facilitate the regiment’s stated role of providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) support to combat brigades inside Forces Command, it will not allow it to build the relationships, practices and integration pathways needed to support long-range fires.

The expanding role of TUAS will exacerbate this problem, because the systems are also set to support armed reconnaissance helicopters under Land 4503 and provide ISR to joint taskforces, the Amphibious Task Group and Special Operations Command. This breadth and a lack of prioritisation of ‘customers’ for the army’s TUAS means it is also unlikely to be a reliable direct STA capability for long-range fires.

So, what are the possible solutions for filling this STA capability gap? Defence could accept the risk and seek to coalesce an STA capability with the various peripheral capabilities mentioned here. However, that approach would be problematic, fragile and likely not tenable in combat. Another option would be for Defence to reinvest some of the Land 8113 funds into an STA capability, possibly expanding Phase 3 of the Land 129 acquisition while it’s still in production, combining counter-fires and TUAS STA capabilities within the fires brigade being established in 2023. That is possible, but would require funding of $250–350 million, noting that the total cost for Land 129 Phase 3 is $650 million. A third option would be to re-establish Air 7003 and fill the capability gap its cancellation created at a cost of $1.3 billion.

The army needs a specified STA capability that can provide direct target acquisition as part of a joint, operational system for the long-range fires units. Without such a capability, the government’s $5 billion investment is unlikely to provide the long-range strike and A2/AD capability deemed critical in Australia’s increasingly uncertain and complex geostrategic environment.

Where does armour sit among the government’s defence priorities?

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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.

Infantry fighting vehicle decision will determine Australia’s way of war

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How a nation prepares for war is nearly as important as how it wages war. It is in peacetime that a military identifies and acquires the weapons with which it will fight, determines their optimal use, perfects doctrine, and trains its force. Once war comes it is largely too late to make major adjustments—a military fights with what it has, and hopes that its doctrine and training are appropriate, and that there is scope to make adjustments where needed.

The Australian Defence Force is at a transition point in its understanding of the future of war. As its chief, General Angus Campbell, said to an ASPI audience in 2020, Australia faces a more dangerous and unstable future. To meet this danger, the ADF must acquire equipment that is up to the task of safeguarding the nation in a more disruptive age. For the Australian Army, the critical acquisition is the infantry fighting vehicle under project Land 400 Phase 3. These heavily protected and well-armed vehicles sit at the heart of the army’s future combined-arms system which will help enable the ADF to fight as a joint integrated force rather than as three separate services.

The assertion that a single vehicle, such as the IFV, is so central to how the ADF will fight in the future may strike some as an exaggeration. It is not. The infantry fighting vehicle goes to the heart of what war has always been and what it will remain—a contest between people and the land on which they live. Whether Australia finds itself in a future insurgency-style war, similar to Afghanistan, or a more intensive struggle, such as that in Ukraine, control of people and the land they live upon is the constant.

There’s no doubt that long-range missiles, drones, submarines and long-range bombers are useful and necessary platforms. However, distant strike, ubiquitous sensing and cyber-driven operations exist to achieve what continues to determine war’s outcome: soldiers closing with their adversary, seizing ground and giving them no choice but to accept defeat. This requires personnel on the ground, and IFVs will provide the battlefield protection and mobility they need to exert force over the enemy.

Soon the government will make a decision on which IFV it will acquire for the army and in what number. The contenders are the Hanwha Redback and the Rheinmetall Lynx. It will not be an easy decision since both are highly capable vehicles. To assist in this decision, I have authored an ASPI special report, Deciding the future: The Australian Army and the infantry fighting vehicle.

My goal was to explain the importance of the IFV in determining how the army will fight in the more dangerous future that is unfolding. It highlights the role these vehicles will play in advancing the ADF’s joint warfighting system. These vehicles represent a generational leap in technological capability over what they replace, much like the Royal Australian Air Force’s experience when it went from a fourth- to a fifth-generation force with the acquisition of the F-35.

In making its observations on the critical importance of the IFV decision, Deciding the future also considers the existing gaps and opportunities that Defence needs to address to obtain the most from these vehicles. For example, the ADF has traditionally undervalued logistics, which will have an effect on the operational deployment and sustainment of these vehicles. There are solutions to present logistic gaps or offsets that can be leveraged. Still the government needs to recognise, as the report points out, that optimising the ADF’s combat capability will necessitate additional investment, not just in logistics, but also in armed and counter-drone systems, local ammunition manufacturing and further integration with the other services. Mitigations exist for these deficiencies, but the point is that the IFV is not a stand-apart capability. Rather, it is one that both needs and creates links across the entire force.

The performance of the Russian army in its war with the Ukraine has led some to hastily conclude that armoured vehicles have had their day. This is short-sighted thinking, which the report disputes. Russia’s performance has been abysmal, but its failure to employ properly trained troops, decent leadership, effective logistics and up-to-date platforms have been more telling than armour’s putative obsolescence. This war offers many lessons, but none suggest that the Australian Army does not require an IFV.

To put its conclusions into a broader context, Deciding the future provides scenarios illustrating potential tasks the government may want the ADF to perform, and the place of the IFV in such tasks. These include an urban fight in support of our archipelagic neighbours, a resumption of conflict on the Korean Peninsula and the defence of forward-deployed missile batteries in a maritime contest against a peer competitor. The report also takes into account climate change and its potential to result in deployments ranging from peacekeeping to helping restore stability amid state collapse.

The more dangerous world that Campbell predicted two years ago is coming into being. Strains are being felt across the international system, from climate change to more assertive authoritarian states, while fundamentalist movements continue to threaten. To protect Australia the nation will need a force that is more robust and powerful than it is at present. The IFV represents an investment in army capability for a more dangerous age.  As Deciding the future maintains, it is now up to the government to determine the extent and direction of that investment.

Defence review must find a way to join the parts of the ADF together—before it’s too late

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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.

Defence review must examine Australia’s amphibious basing quandary

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The terms of reference for the defence strategic review provided by the government to the independent leads are just short of two pages long. The length of this document doesn’t do justice to all that the two reviewers, former defence minister Stephen Smith and former defence force chief Angus Houston, are being asked to do in a very short timeframe. They’ll need to dive deep if they’re to deliver the frameworks for a level of capability and preparedness not seen in Australia since World War II. They will also need to navigate the usual parochial force posture demands—a relatively minor task in the bigger scheme of things.

One of the biggest challenges will be resetting the defence organisation’s dogged, often myopic, multi-decade focus on efficiency over effectiveness. Smith and Houston will not be able to do this independently within defence policy silos. This observation doesn’t mean that Australia’s national strategy should coalesce around defence. Nor is it an argument that the defence organisation should be underwriting nation-building and resilience policies. Instead, the review must consider the defence strategy’s alignment with broader government strategies and policy measures. The looming decisions on the army’s amphibious basing and construction projects epitomise this challenge.

Australia’s amphibious force has rapidly evolved and is poised to expand quickly over the next several years. Today, the Australian amphibious force can deploy a landing force of up to battalion-group strength over the spectrum of operations, from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to high-end warfighting.

Defence Project Land 8710 Phase 1 will introduce a greater number of ‘larger, faster and better protected’ littoral manoeuvre vessels (LMVs) to support operations.

Phase 1A will acquire 18 steel-hulled LMV-Ms (the second M stands for ‘medium’) with an expected life of 20 years. These vessels will replace the ageing fleet of mechanised landing craft, mark 8 (LCM-8), operated by the army since the Vietnam War.

The LMV-M isn’t just a replacement. The new vessels will have a range of 1,200 nautical miles at a speed of 15 knots. They will be able to handle a range of sea states and to endure up to 10 days at sea. They will have a crew of 10 and will be capable of accommodating mixed cargo, including wheeled and tracked vehicles.

The LMV-Ms will work independently or as part of an amphibious task element to provide intra-theatre shore-to-shore manoeuvre and sustain the joint force in littoral and riverine environments, with a secondary mission of providing ship-to-shore manoeuvre.

The contract is expected to be awarded in early 2024. Initial operating capability for two LMV-Ms is required in 2026, with final operating capability in 2032.

The request for tender suggests that LMV-H (heavy) and LMV-P (patrol) vessels will developed in the future. The LMV-H could be like the US Army’s Runnymede-class large landing craft (50 metres in length with a 13-metre beam with a displacement of 1,104 tonnes full load). The LMV-P will likely be similar to the US Navy’s CB-90 riverine command boat. It’s unclear whether the LMV-P will be the ‘riverine patrol craft’ touted in Australian defence circles since the release of the 2016 defence integrated investment program.

The Australian Army will be the recipient of the LMV-M and other future amphibious capabilities.

The 2020 defence force structure plan signalled the government’s intent to develop a new, long-overdue army watercraft base in northern Australia. Defence will use the base to consolidate all army watercraft, enhance amphibious ship-loading capacity, and allow the docking of patrol vessels and minehunters.

Defence will develop the new army watercraft base in the period 2025–2040 with a $2.6–3.9 billion budget. They are referred to as the ‘FSP 205 Army Watercraft Bases facilities project’ in Land 8710 Phase 1A tender documents.

Currently available information indicates that the LMV-M will be distributed between a new amphibious unit in the 1st Brigade (based at Robertson Barracks in Darwin, Northern Territory) and the 2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (part of the 1st Division Amphibious Task Group based at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, Queensland).

Unfortunately, a lack of detail about where the watercraft bases will be built has sent state, territory and local governments into a competition cycle. This competition has unnecessary yet real economic costs for all involved.

Of course, for efficiency, there’s an argument for centralisation. The adoption of this approach isn’t without precedent; after all, it seems to be happening to the army’s aviation fleet with its movement to Townsville. However, centralisation arguably denies the opportunity to create redundancy and agility in infrastructure and supporting industries.

It makes sense for the army to collocate some of its planned fleet with its designated amphibious battalion in Townsville. And there’s plenty of room for them in Townsville harbour. However, with the limited marine maintenance industry presence in Townsville, there’s an argument for defence to consolidate maritime maintenance with the navy’s vessels in Cairns. Such a move and the existing local demand would encourage expansion of the marine maintenance sector in Cairns, which would have positive defence and economic benefits.

There’s no Goldilocks location for the amphibious capability in northern Australia. Darwin is likely another option for an amphibious base, especially since the army’s second amphibious unit will likely be there. Darwin has added an attraction because the US Marine Rotational Force—Darwin is training there for half the year. The Darwin region provides a diverse and challenging environment for all training, including riverine operations. If Defence were to commit to an amphibious base in Darwin, it, along with the planned basing of offshore patrol vessels, would provide the opportunity for developing a second maritime maintenance industry capability, including a shiplift in northern Australia. Again, that would have defence and economic benefits.

Achieving all of this will require vision and motivation to achieve coordination within and across multiple levels of government. Also, various defence prime contractors and small and medium enterprises must be involved throughout this process. Getting Australia’s national security, defence and economic settings right is no easy task. Still, the future of our nation will be increasingly reliant on achieving this kind of aligned outcome.

Smith and Houston have their work cut out for them, especially when it comes to preparedness. If they think beyond the traditional defence lens, they won’t be alone in doing so.

Land 400 Phase 3: cutting the foot to fit the shoe

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The recent Strategist post and associated Strategic Insight paper by the director of ASPI’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge, again targets Australia’s infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) acquisition.

I disagree strongly with the argument that the number of IFVs should be reduced significantly from the planned 450 to allow the acquisition of other capabilities.

Shoebridge argues that a ‘part’ of the Australian Defence Force should recruit, train, structure and equip to fill a growing disaster relief role, thereby ‘protecting’ the warfighting elements from being tasked to do so.

He says that because climate change will drive a growing demand for the ADF to play a role in disaster relief domestically and in the region, and to avoid having to divert people and systems designed for warfighting to deal with civil crises, Defence should have the resources to recruit, train, structure and equip a part of the ADF for a growing disaster relief role.

Shoebridge also says Australia is not likely to need to fight a large-scale war of attrition with a land power such as Russia and nor is it likely to refight the battles of Iraq, and this means the defence strategic review can re-examine the wisdom of buying 450 IFVs.

And he says Australia’s military simply can’t deploy, sustain and support more than 700 heavy armoured vehicles in our region and nor should the ADF be structured to fight major land battles on the Korean peninsula or the India–Pakistan border.

I will keep my comments on the issues raised about climate change short and sharp. While Shoebridge does not say which service should do this, it is likely that, given its ability to put boots on the ground and perform a vast array of roles that air and naval forces cannot, the ‘part’ of the ADF that would do this is the army.

I would argue that this notion implies that the army should be sacrificed on the altar of climate change to enable the other services to get on with the real business of warfighting and fails to comprehend the vital tool of statecraft that the army is. I believe it also illustrates a lack of understanding of the key roles the army performs in establishing and maintaining collective security across our region with allies and partners and the essential and unique contribution it makes to Australia’s military strategy.

There is an implication in Shoebridge’s pieces that the army is modernising its armour capability to fight a large-scale land war of attrition. This is incorrect. The army is not structured or equipped to fight the armed forces of a major power such as Russia. Unlike the US, British and Canadian armies, Australia has never undertaken exercises such as REFORGER or BATUS to replicate fighting on the European steppe. The army and its armour capability, which is to include IFVs, main battle tanks and combat reconnaissance vehicles, is structured, equipped and trained to operate in Australia’s primary operating environment as part of the nation’s military strategy.

Chief of Army Lieutenant General Simon Stuart said in a recent speech it had to be made very clear that not providing the protection afforded by 21st-century combined-arms fighting systems would reduce the probability of mission success, and ultimately cost a greater price—or leave the ADF without an option.

‘The combined arms fighting system that protects our soldiers today has at its core a 60-year-old armoured personnel carrier,’ Stuart said. ‘We can and we must do better—and we have a plan to do so.’

To suggest that Australia should radically reduce the number of IFVs the army is seeking because 700 heavy armoured vehicles cannot be deployed overseas is misleading. In broad terms, 700 vehicles constitute the total of all the armour in the Australian inventory—450 IFVs, 211 combat reconnaissance vehicles and 75 main battle tanks. As was clearly articulated by defence analyst and historian Leo Purdy, the acquisition target of 450 vehicles is to adequately equip operational forces, training elements and sustainment stocks. As discussed in a recent issue of Defence Technology Review, deploying 450 or 700 vehicles offshore makes no sense in the context of how the army force-generates, deploys and sustains capability. Equally, no armed force on the planet would deploy 100% of its military capability abroad, including all its operational, training and sustainment stocks. Suggesting that Australia might do so is misleading.

Shoebridge says the ‘dream number of 450 IFVs is almost certainly unaffordable even for the existing $18–27 billion budget’ and argues that cuts to this mega-project could allow funds to be used on other capabilities. He does not explain why the IFV program is unaffordable. Given that it is a live tender and subject to government determination in the near term, I find it difficult to believe that Defence would elevate a project to cabinet without the necessary internal checks and balances by various committees, as well other external agencies, occurring.

I’d disagree strongly with any suggestion that in all the possibilities of future war, conflict and crises, the army, or more accurately land power, is less useful and less necessary than sea and air power and thus can be divested of capability, function and funding.

As Professor Michael Evans has articulated in more detail, the ability to predict future war is extremely elusive. War with China is possible as is war on the Korean peninsula, but Australia’s involvement is not predestined. Equally, a civil war or insurgency spawned by the coup of a dictator; the failure of a state in our region due to economic, religious, ethnic or social tensions; or the occupation and subjugation of a neighbour by a hostile power are also possibilities.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the requirement for credible, deployable and sustainable combined-arms land power, which includes armour, in the belief that future war will only require naval and air power.

Cutting the number of IFVs would be not only flawed but dangerous. To do so would undermine Australia’s declared defence policy by reducing its ability to engage with regional allies and partners and unbalance the execution of its military strategy. It is patently dangerous for Australia’s soldiers who would be condemned to fight a 21-century threat with 20-century means. That is not an argument which should be taken seriously.

The Russo-Ukrainian war’s lessons for the Australian Army

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The war in Ukraine has several features with which we in Australia are already familiar. The Ukrainian state has dominated the information war in our news cycles and social media. We have seen images of smashed Russian truck convoys, Ukrainian farmers towing off Russian armoured vehicles and air defence systems, and Russian tanks being destroyed in great numbers by Ukrainian artillery, armed drones and infantry wielding lethal, mobile anti-tank guided-missile systems such as the Javelin and NLAW (next-generation light anti-tank weapon).

The Russian military is pursuing too many objectives with too few forces, a mistake compounded by logistical and intelligence failures, and a wildly over-optimistic assessment of Ukrainian morale and resolve. Most startlingly, the Russian military seems to be bedevilled by poor morale, incompetence and an inability to conduct combined-arms warfare and air–ground integration.

Russia’s much discussed military transformation has proved illusory. Perhaps we can draw some small comfort from the fact that procurement failures occur in foreign militaries as well as our own.

What does all this mean for Australian defence planning? Is the tank now obsolete? The war seems to have provided new impetus to the discussion of the replacement of the Australian Army’s fleets of obsolete armoured cavalry vehicles and armoured personnel carriers, as well as the purchase of updated Abrams main battle tanks.

The acquisition of new tanks, heavy armoured combat reconnaissance vehicles, heavy infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled guns has received some robust criticism from commentators, including Greg Sheridan in The Australian. Curiously, there has been little or no rebuttal from either the government or the Australian Army.

In order to learn the lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian war, we must first be confident about what those lessons actually are. Here are some that I would suggest are relevant to armoured forces.

Ubiquitous uncrewed aerial systems ensure a transparent battlefield. The increased availability of real-time overhead surveillance and target acquisition (plus direct engagement in the case of armed drones like the Bayraktar TB2) have strengthened the trend towards dispersal, deception and camouflage (including of thermal and electromagnetic signatures).

Massed area fires, multiple-launch rocket systems, and the proliferation of anti-tank guided missiles with tandem warheads (Javelin has a range of up to 4 kilometres) have all produced a new level of lethality and intensity in modern conventional combat.

Full-spectrum electronic surveillance of emissions and communications has been integrated with artillery fires. All emissions are targetable. In Ukraine, electronic warfare capabilities have been applied to electronic support (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), active electronic protection (counter-drone operations) and electronic attack (jamming). Effective electronic warfare may help explain why Russian generals are being killed at such an extraordinary rate. State-of-the-art electronic warfare systems have implications for high-technology armies that find themselves fighting in a GPS-denied environment with degraded communications.

High-intensity combat on a low-density battlefield favours decisiveness. The increased range and lethality of massed fires and precision strike has driven ever-greater dispersal on the battlefield, with heightened emphasis on camouflage, depth and deception. Perhaps ironically, high-intensity fires and low force-to-space ratios favour decisive manoeuvre. Light infantry in defence still require armoured forces for counterattack to avoid being outflanked, isolated and defeated by enemy armour.

Lighter fighting vehicles that have prioritised mobility and firepower over survivability are extremely vulnerable to the increased lethality of artillery munitions, anti-tank weapons and the medium-calibre (30-millimetre) automatic cannons mounted on other light armoured vehicles. These lighter armoured vehicles are extremely vulnerable to artillery submunitions and thermobaric warheads—weapons that Australia is treaty-bound not to deploy under the UN Convention on Cluster Munitions, but which remain in the arsenals of Russia, China and others.

Successful tank assaults require the increased survivability of mechanised infantry. Given that the lethality of lighter armoured vehicles is disproportionate to the vehicles’ protection, they tend to be used in an overwatch suppressive fire mode rather than fighting onto and through the objective. Assaults are therefore conducted by dismounted rather than mounted infantry. As a consequence, tank attacks are less effective because they no longer have accompanying mechanised infantry with equal mobility to protect tanks from enemy infantry. Motorised infantry don’t survive in the direct fire zone; assaulting infantry need to be mechanised.

Main battle tanks, combat reconnaissance vehicles and heavy infantry fighting vehicles are only truly effective if they are part of a combined-arms approach, deploying all of the land, air, maritime, electronic warfare, cyber and information capabilities that are relevant to the mission.

So, what do these lessons mean for the Australian Army’s acquisition of armoured vehicles?

The Australian Army is acquiring the armour that is required to confront a peer or near-peer adversary in close combat. Land 400 is no simple vehicle replacement project.

The increased lethality of the battlefield means that land forces must rely on either prepared defences (fortifications, mines and fires) or, if they need to manoeuvre to launch an attack or counterattack, heavy armour and mobility.

Lighter armoured vehicles and unsupported tanks don’t survive in conventional combat. Land forces that intend to manoeuvre and engage in close combat to fight onto and through an objective must have mechanised infantry that are protected by heavy armour, so that survivability is combined with mobility. Upgraded armour, effective night or all-weather vision, active-armour defence systems and vehicle-mounted anti-tank guided missiles (such as Rafael’s Spike) are valuable additions to the Australian Army’s vehicles.

A lighter force would be easier to support logistically, simpler to sustain, more readily sea- or air-lifted into Australia’s neighbourhood, and better suited to conduct regional stability operations. But all that is trumped by the fact that a lighter force would be swiftly wrecked on the battlefield by a peer or near-peer enemy.

Unlike with the Russian military, we trust that the Australian Defence Force has the professionalism and experience needed to conduct combined-arms warfare. The army’s armoured force will possess sensors and networks for situational awareness, firepower, mobility and force protection; be supported by effective communications, surveillance and reconnaissance; and possess a joint fires team that can effectively coordinate and control artillery, mortars, precision strikes, close air support and naval gunfire.

Possessing the combined-arms battle group necessary to manoeuvre and engage in close combat on the modern battlefield inevitably creates other challenges. Where does the Australian government envisage such a force fighting? What is the ADF’s capacity to transport such a force? And to sustain it? How is such a force consistent with Australia’s professed ‘maritime strategy’?

Redesigning the Australian Army for an uncertain future

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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.