Australia, according to an unremarkable line item in the May federal budget, is making its first purchase of new tanks in almost 15 years with the upgrade of the army’s M1 Abrams tank fleet. While the new purchase has ignited some debate about the utility of tanks for Australia’s defence, it is also indicative of the wider strategic quagmire modern armoured vehicles are stuck in.

Australia’s modest $2.5 billion upgrade to the fleet will see its 75 M1A1 Abrams tanks replaced with the most up-to-date model, the M1A2 SEPv3, as well new engineering and recovery vehicles based on the M1 Abrams chassis. The SEPv3 model boasts a suite of new hardware, including a ‘smart’ gun that can fire programmable munitions, better sensor and communications equipment, and a remote-controlled turret.

The tanks sold to Australia will also include an as-yet-unknown ‘unique’ armour package ditching the standard depleted uranium armour for something more politically and environmentally friendly. The SEPv3s also use both explosive reactive armour and the Israeli-made Trophy active protection system. Explosive armour is widely used on most modern tanks and deflects hits by exploding outward when impacted, while the Trophy system protects armoured vehicles from missiles and rockets by detecting and intercepting incoming threats with a blast of small projectiles.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan has led the criticism of the purchase based on the argument that the army simply doesn’t use tanks. Australia’s last deployment of tanks was in the Vietnam War and tanks won’t be useful in a major conflict in the Asia–Pacific, which will likely be fought mainly by air and naval assets.

Compounding the issue is that at 70 tonnes the Abrams tanks are notoriously heavy—and the SEPv3 models are even heavier. They’re too heavy for our amphibious landing boats and for many of the underdeveloped or degraded roads and bridges in our near region, as well as in large parts of northern Australia.

But, as Liberal senator and former general Jim Molan points out, infantry also can’t go without tanks. Armoured vehicles provide valuable direct fire support capabilities that other platforms, even infantry fighting vehicles, can’t replicate. Molan rightly criticises Australia’s decision not to deploy them to Afghanistan, even as Canadian and Danish tanks proved highly valuable against insurgents—although, to be fair to the army, even the US didn’t deploy tanks in Afghanistan until 2010, and then only a small contingent.

As much as I agree with Sheridan’s criticism of the dogged inflexibility and strategic delusion of Australia’s defence planners, the ‘steady as she goes’ decision to upgrade but otherwise not change Australia’s tanks and their use doctrine is part of a wider holding pattern that tanks as a platform are stuck in.

The M1A2 SEPv3 is just the latest in a line of life-extension upgrades for the M1 Abrams platform, which is expected to be in service in the US until at least 2030, with further upgrades planned. Other countries are taking half-steps or beginning slow development processes. The French and Germans are in the early stages of development of a ‘main ground combat system’ to replace their respective Leclerc and Leopard 2 platforms by 2040. It so far appears to be a consolidation of current capabilities but may have an unmanned component. The British have just announced that they’re upgrading their Challenger 2 tanks to ‘Challenger 3’ status, with improved targeting and data systems, and a NATO-standard smooth-bore cannon, but this will just be a conversion of existing tanks, rather than the development of a new platform. Australia’s purchase of upgraded models fits this trend as militaries await development of new technologies and assess the new tactical environment tanks will operate in.

A key attribute of future tanks will be the ability to operate as unmanned platforms. An unmanned version of Russia’s T-14 Armata tank is apparently in development, and the new European tank may have both an unmanned and a drone-launching capability. The UK’s Challenger 3 will have significant updates to its electronic and data bandwidths to allow for potential future upgrades to include an unmanned component. Crucially for Australia’s tank purchase, the M1A2 SEPv3 doesn’t have an unmanned capability.

Future tank platforms may be split between different units, with a manned control unit accompanied by unmanned ‘loyal tankmen’ providing most, if not all, of the firepower. Such platforms have barely entered the concept phase and do little to solve the current challenge of how to deploy today’s heavy tanks.

Sheridan’s critique of the opportunity cost of purchasing the SEPv3 models is valid, notwithstanding Australia’s continued need for the direct-fire support capabilities that tanks provide. Australia’s M1A1s were initially intended to operate until 2035, and it seems likely this upgrade will push the platform’s operating life in Australia out to at least the 2040s. While the army should continue to operate a tank platform, the Abrams is simply too heavy for Australia’s needs, and Defence has missed an opportunity to consider lighter alternatives, such as the US Army’s light tank ‘mobile protected firepower’ program, which is set to deploy its first units by 2025.

The M1A2 SEPv3 is a continuation of the army’s tank capabilities: fast, powerful, reliable and overkill and overweight for Australia’s needs, with little room to manoeuvre for future developments. Australia isn’t alone maintaining the status quo with its tanks until new technologies and doctrines emerge, but in the complex and challenging new international security environment Australia faces we must be doing more than just treading water.

The Defence Department’s decisions on acquiring tanks and the next generation of armoured vehicles are contentious and seem to always generate passionate responses.

In 2018, former major general and now senator Jim Molan duked it out with ASPI’s Marcus Hellyer in The Strategist over armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs). Both put some great arguments forward, and the matter rested there for a while.

In 2019, James Rickard and I stepped into the fray, addressing rumours that Defence was planning that the Darwin-based 1st Brigade’s infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) be located in Adelaide to allow for year-round training. We argued that for the strategic and tactical value of IFVs to be realised, they’d need to operate across the length and breadth of Australia, regardless of the season or the weather. The article generated a storm of social media commentary arguing that mobility limitations were a result of peacetime environmental factors rather than vehicle design.

Earlier this month, kindred defence hawks and friends Molan and The Australian’s Greg Sheridan locked horns over Defence’s decision to buy 75 tanks at a cost of more than $2 billion.

To date, all of this debate has centred on two themes: a claimed obsolescence of armour in modern warfare and the need for the army to have mobility, protection and firepower. We’ll leave the first argument to one side for now and discuss the mobility implications of Defence’s IFV choices. We argue that if Australia’s IFVs, AFVs and tanks operate in Australia or the near region, they’ll need to watch their weight. Otherwise, road conditions will severely restrict the Australian Defence Force’s armoured mobility.

The M113 armoured personnel carrier, in service since the 1970s, weighs 18 tonnes. Its shortlisted replacements, the Hanwha Redback and Rheinmetall KF41 Lynx, weigh more than double that, at 42 and 44 tonnes, respectively.

The Australian Army’s ASLAV, in service since the early 1990s, weighs 13.5 tonnes. The ASLAV’s planned replacement, the Rheinmetall Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicle, is almost three times heavier, weighing around 38 tonnes depending on its configuration.

Ben Coleman highlighted how the Boxer’s extra weight detracted from strategic deployability and tactical mobility in an ASPI report. Coleman focused outside Australia’s borders and noted the challenge of airlifting those vehicles to countries in our neighbourhood. He also raised concerns about the impact on the region’s poor-quality roads and bridges.

However, there’s a problem much closer to home. The current state of road and bridge infrastructure in Australia’s north poses a more immediate mobility challenge for these weighty vehicles. Using data from the Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics, Shojaeddin Jamali points out that just over half the bridges in Australia are built to a T44 design standard, meaning they can hold a 44-tonne semi-trailer load. The remainder are largely built to an MS18 standard or lower, designed to carry 33 tonnes or less. That’s far below SM1600 standards, which have been in place since 2004 and are designed for a load weight of up to 144 tonnes.

In Australia’s north, the issue is compounded by ageing road and bridge infrastructure in many places and the limited number of sealed main roads.

In the Northern Territory, 70% of the road network is unsealed and vulnerable to flooding during the wet season, restricting access to regional and remote communities. While the territory’s national highways are sealed, over 40% of the national highway network’s road surface is more than 40 years old. The design life of pavement is usually 40 to 50 years, so many highways will soon need maintenance or reconstruction work. The average age of bridges on the NT’s road network is 35 and more than a quarter of them are on the Stuart Highway, the single major road connecting the territory and South Australia.

With the state of Australia’s northern regional infrastructure in mind, the prospect of deploying new armoured vehicles two to three times heavier than their predecessors across an ageing road and bridge network, most not designed for loads exceeding 44 tonnes, should ring alarm bells for Australia’s strategic thinkers. It’s not hard to imagine how much worse the road situation would be across much of the Indo-Pacific, including Papua New Guinea, the Pacific islands and parts of Southeast Asia.

There are two broad options if we want to realise the strategic and tactical mobility benefits of AFVs, IFVs and tanks. One is to make a substantial investment in upgrading roads and bridges across northern Australia, though that won’t help for offshore deployments. Alternatively, the army could get lighter armoured vehicles, trading off some protection for greater mobility. (To head off complaints, we’d note that armour protection can save soldiers’ lives only if the vehicles have the mobility to be used in the first place.) Both options come with hefty price tags.

Refurbishing and upgrading the north’s roads and bridges would provide Australia with economic and social benefits beyond tactical mobility and deployability. Such upgrades would generate new economic opportunities in both the short and long terms. Improved infrastructure would reduce operating costs for industry. Well-maintained road and bridge networks would help support growing demand for freight from new mining projects and ensure year-round access to ports for the livestock industry. They would also connect NT residents to essential education, health and emergency services.

In the budget, the federal government announced an additional $15.2 billion for infrastructure, of which only $3.2 billion was allocated to Australia’s northern states and territories, with just $150 million committed to upgrading the NT’s highway networks over the next 10 years. It appears there’s no real plan to increase mobility through infrastructure investment in northern Australia. Defence may need a rethink on its armoured behemoths.

Given the scale of the threats Australia may face in an uncertain future, the nation needs to seriously reconsider how it will defend itself, strategist Albert Palazzo has warned.

That will mean a major switch in the nation’s thinking—from preparing its military to win a war, to ensuring that if Australia is forced into a conflict, it does not lose, Palazzo says. It will do that by making an adversary’s attack too costly to be continued.

The director of war studies at the Australian Army Research Centre, Palazzo has set out his concerns in a confronting paper, Planning to not lose: The Australian Army’s new philosophy of war.

He says the choice is simple: ‘Embrace change or accept defeat.’

The world is becoming more challenging and dangerous than Australia has ever experienced, Palazzo argues, and he sets out in his paper a detailed outline of the kind of land force he believes it requires and the philosophy under which it will fight in a future conflict.

What Palazzo describes as ‘forces bearing down on the planet, the region and Australia’ include a reordering of the global balance of power as China threatens to overturn the existing order, the acceleration of technology resulting from the information revolution, humanity’s inability to rein in the emission of greenhouse gases causing climate change, and a global population reaching 10 billion by mid-century.

Regionally, Australia will lose its wealth advantage as the economies of nearby countries grow faster than its own and its neighbours achieve technological parity.

Domestically, an ageing Australian population consumes a greater share of national wealth while reducing the percentage of the population from which the Australian Defence Force can recruit while the nation deals with the increasing strain and destabilising pressure caused by worsening wealth inequality.

‘In combination, these factors will produce a more dangerous and violent world whose severity may place the future sovereignty of Australia at risk,’ Palazzo says.

In that context, it’s crucial for Australia to think about how it will defend itself.

‘Success in war requires superiority in mass, depth, technology or other factors that provide advantage over adversaries,’ Palazzo says. ‘Consequently, the Australian Army, the ADF, the government and Australian society need to accept that it is highly unlikely that Australia can succeed in its future wars. To be frank, the best that Australia can hope to achieve in a future war is to not lose.’

This will come as a culture shock to the military and to Australian society, which holds its military in high esteem and expects it to win, Palazzo says.

But he makes the point that long-range precision missiles and sensors have swung the balance between the offensive and the defensive in favour of the defender, who now enjoys a battlefield advantage.

‘This has led to the growth of anti-access and area denial systems that protect the approaches to a country’s borders, sometimes out to ranges in the thousands of kilometres, a reality that the 2020 Defence Strategic Update acknowledges. In fact, the greatest tactical challenge that an aggressor currently faces is being able to manoeuvre in the face of such defensive systems.’

Modern conventional weapons can already strike at immense distances, while better sensors make it more difficult to hide. Palazzo notes that China has developed a missile with a range of about 4,000 kilometres, bringing US military bases on Guam within range; and that the islands Beijing has built and militarised in the South China Sea bring its power-projection ability further south.

To ensure its security, Australia needs to similarly be able to launch defensive strikes over a vast area covering its northern approaches.

To do this, says Palazzo, the ADF will need to project itself forward, to continue to be expeditionary in mentality and to acquire the equipment and skills necessary to operate in a littoral environment in cooperation with regional partners and allies. This does not mean that the entire ADF must surge northwards. Only the capabilities needed to secure the desired effect need deploy. Nor does it mean that deployed capabilities must remain forward. In an age of pervasive surveillance, a combatant either hides or stealthily shifts position, including by returning to Australia.

Military leaders should avoid battle unless on very favourable terms. Their forces should aim to avoid detection, unless they want to be found, and fight not for territory but for time and space to delay and frustrate an adversary’s plans. Long-range strike weapons, kinetic and non-kinetic, can disrupt the enemy’s intentions.

A stronger adversary can absorb greater losses than Australia can afford to sacrifice and aiming to destroy the enemy would expose Australia’s forces to a potentially painful counterstrike.

But, says Palazzo, a military philosophy of not losing does not mean that Australian soldiers cannot be aggressive, take the initiative and strike before being struck.

‘Equally, there would be no expectation that soldiers would have to stay where they are sent and take a pounding without responding. Nor does utilising the natural superiority of the defence mean that Australian forces will not inflict blows of their own. A defender who only passively defends is guaranteed to be slowly crushed. The obligation of the Australian soldier will remain the eternal one in war: “to kill without being killed” and “to will without being willed”.’

Soldiers should be ready to pounce on the enemy’s mistakes, Palazzo says. ‘If the enemy exposes a detachment, and Australian forces can achieve a local superiority, they should be quick to eliminate it. The conduct of raids on enemy weak points or vulnerable infrastructure should also be undertaken, and distractions and deceptions actively pursued to confuse the opposition.’

However, Australian forces should avoid escalating a conflict because that might encourage the stronger power to deploy more of its superior strength.

If Australia unexpectedly finds itself in a position to crush utterly the enemy’s forces it must let that opportunity pass, Palazzo says.

‘If a state which possesses nuclear weapons fears its defeat, it could decide that its best option is to cross the nuclear threshold. The result may be the annihilation of Australia’s population centres.’

Palazzo identifies Switzerland and Singapore as two countries which aim to be too difficult, painful and dangerous to consume to be worth a predator’s time and effort—Switzerland as a ‘porcupine’ and Singapore with its ‘poisoned shrimp’ security doctrine.

Maintaining a forward and enduring presence, ‘political warfare’, and disaster relief and stabilisation missions do not involve the military using violence, and those functions are vital, says Palazzo.

To build up fellowship and friendship across the region, and to show Australia as a friendly neighbour in a dangerous neighbourhood, the army must develop strong relationships with, and knowledge about, its neighbours. Other government departments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, have crucial parts to play.

The army needs to develop soldiers who are specialists in a particular country, fluent in the local language or languages, absorbed in the local culture, and spend considerable periods of time either studying or working in the country of their focus.

Establishing a ‘forward and enduring presence’ should be treated as an operational function involving this new stream of specialist soldiers who should expect to spend long periods in their target country.

And there needs to be much more open discussion of strategic issues among service personnel to throw up ideas. Palazzo compares the encouragement given members of the United States armed forces to debate issues such as why their nation has won or lost wars with the relative silence on such issues from serving members of the ADF. That includes Australian soldiers who have served alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hallmark of a true professional military organisation is a willingness to think, learn and change, he says. Silence is the response of those without the vision to advance the profession of arms.

Palazzo concludes that Australia’s defence organisation lacks the mechanisms to foster disruptive thinking, and soldiers lack the opportunity and encouragement to reflect deeply on the art of war.

He says that while there is no formal prohibition on professional debate in the Australian Army, it seems to have inherited an anti-intellectual bias from the British Army. Further, it’s not helpful for the promotion of free and frank debate that Defence policy requires anyone writing for publication to receive the approval of their commander.

‘I believe that the Australian Army and the wider ADF, if not all of Australian society, need to think deeply on the requirements of future security and the role of the land force—and Defence—in protecting the nation’s sovereignty. Such thinking should be a whole-of-nation activity so that the nation’s citizenry understands what is at stake and accepts and supports the need for change.’

Palazzo says Australia must dramatically change how it prepares for and thinks about war if it is to remain a sovereign nation.

All of the ADF would benefit from a free and frank debate, he says.

Followers of The Strategist may have seen the recent dialogue on the Defence Department’s Project LAND 400 between Marcus Hellyer and Jim Molan.

Few subjects generate more emotion inside Defence than force structures, especially when it comes to capabilities perceived as ‘core’. That may be because we humans are all creatures of our own experience and want to ensure we can do better in the future at the sorts of challenges we have faced in the past. No one wants their link in the chain to be the weak one.

Consciously or otherwise, we are less concerned about what effect overinvestment in our own area might have on other links in the chain, notwithstanding the fact that, if the chain breaks, all the intact links do no good whatsoever. That is the argument sometimes employed for a ‘balanced force’, but balanced to do what? Any attempt to be strong everywhere overstretches resources and ends up being weak everywhere. The art is in deciding where to focus and where to accept risk.

Before Defence implemented the first principles review, key force structure review debates usually occurred mainly at the tactical level. The tactical fight would be set at some future point at which the planned force structure was known in a scenario loosely derived from strategic policy. Then the operational concept would be developed, and that’s where the linear thinking set in.

Because the concept had to employ the planned force structure, that’s exactly what it would be optimised for. Any future capability ‘needs’ identified would, therefore, assume that concept of operations. The result would be a force designed to win that particular campaign plan at the tactical level, without much questioning of strategic alternatives.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, apart from the fact that we have been winning battles and losing wars since Vietnam, it has resulted in an incoherent joint force structure. The RAAF’s ability to provide fast jet cover to the RAN at the distances at which the navy needs to operate is questionable. The navy’s ability to project and support land forces any significant distance from mainland Australia in a contested environment is questionable, even if suitable commercial shipping could be obtained, which is also questionable.

As for forward basing of airpower beyond the Australian mainland in a contested environment, the challenges of fuel supply are probably insurmountable and base security is questionable. Mathematically speaking, questionable cubed times probably insurmountable isn’t good. The ADF’s planned future force structure solves none of these problems and actually exacerbates most. By concentrating on getting better at what they already do well, the army, navy and air force risk missing the point, like whales trying to solve their problems by getting bigger or cheetahs by getting faster.

The next force structure review will be the first since implementation of the first principles review. The first principles review demanded strategy-led force design, but what does that mean? Academics differ on the definitions of levels of strategy, but what’s more important for force design is that the levels join up to each other and to operational concepts. In the past it has been all too easy for the single services to design a force around their own tactical considerations without rigorous examination of how relevant they are to strategy or allowing the red team (enemy) to respond imaginatively at the strategic level.

Let me illustrate with just one of many historical examples. The Crimean War was not decided in Crimea. The British threat to St Petersburg, Rostov and Russian Alaska forced the Russians to cede. Our past force structure review processes would not permit that possibility either by us or against us.

Jim Molan argues that LAND 400 is an important capability for winning a land fight, but no one has ever won an archipelagic conflict on a single landmass. Archipelagic warfare depends upon manoeuvre of land forces by sea, and the future structure as currently envisaged, including LAND 400 and LAND 121, is ill-suited to that.

The strategic question for the next force structure review is, should we care more about whether we can win on a single landmass or whether we can win across an archipelago? Or to recast the question, where can we least afford to lose?