In this episode, ASPI’s Bec Shrimpton speaks to Chris Maier from the US Department of Defense about the origin of special operations forces, the role they play in integrated deterrence and their ability to work across multiple domains. They also discuss the history of cooperation between Australian and US special operations forces and the importance of wargaming to force design.

Recently, ASPI’s US Army War College fellow, Alan Throop, released the report Impactful mateship, which focuses on strengthening the US–Australia defence relationship at a vital time as it develops in complexity and builds towards the ambitions of AUKUS. ASPI’s Jennifer Parker speaks to Colonel Throop about his fellowship at ASPI and the report’s recommendations, including more training for inbound US personnel and conducting allied-centric training.

We’re at an important inflection point on the AUKUS timeline.

Now that a roadmap for Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is in place under the banner of AUKUS Pillar 1, all three members are turning greater attention to building out Pillar 2 and its focus on advanced capabilities and technologies.

To be sure, the AUKUS partners have yet to demonstrate proof of concept for Pillar 2. But at the very least, the testing of an AUKUS artificial intelligence and autonomy capability in the United Kingdom in April certainly demonstrated proof of life in the Pillar 2 enterprise.

It’s through these sorts of projects that Australia’s latent technological advantages can come into their own. After all, Pillar 2 isn’t simply about accessing US technologies, though that’s certainly part of the appeal. It’s also about Australia making valuable—and valued—contributions to developing the capabilities that will help the AUKUS partners achieve shared objectives in the Indo-Pacific.

For Pillar 2 to truly succeed, Australia will need as much faith in the capacity of our AUKUS partners to safeguard our advantages as they will need in us to do the same. In other words, the three countries need to think creatively about how they will protect their shared advantages, not just how they will develop them, as part of the partnership’s greater architecture.

Evidence suggests that this is where the conversation is headed. Testimony from two senior White House officials before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee last month indicated that discussions about the requirements for a fully functioning AUKUS are evolving in the right direction.

The hearing in question ostensibly focused on ‘modernising US arms exports for a stronger AUKUS’, an issue of critical importance to Australia—and the subject of a major report published by the United States Studies Centre that I coauthored with William Greenwalt, titled Breaking the barriers. On this, there were encouraging signs of progress. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategies, Plans and Capabilities Mara Karlin and Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Jessica Lewis both outlined how Washington intends to modernise and streamline export control regimes for AUKUS countries.

As Karlin said, ‘This historic opportunity requires historic change.’

Importantly, however, the hearing raised other questions about how the three countries will protect their military-technological advantages from prying eyes and ears.

On this issue, Lewis said that the US would also seek commitments from Australia and Britain ‘on shared standards for the protection of defense information and materials’ consistent with US regulations. Doing so, she claimed, would ensure that US export control standards ‘serve as a shield for our trilateral defence technological advantage’.

Kickstarting the discussion about how the AUKUS partners will protect their shared defence technology advantages is a good move. It will help to set the conditions for seamless collaboration on advanced military capabilities in the long term. After all, that’s what AUKUS requires: rethinking the way in which Australia, the UK and the US cooperate on defence industry and technology.

But for Australia, the solution is not a wholesale adoption of the American model. To truly reflect the spirit of AUKUS, the partners need a genuinely trilateral approach to developing common procedures and protections for shared advantages.

This will be essential for establishing a mutually trusted community of commercial and defence companies to help deliver AUKUS projects. The current approach—where the three countries adjudicate the trustworthiness of these entities independently—is not fit for that purpose and will create problems down the line if left untouched.

Addressing these requirements trilaterally will also put to bed the perennial trust issues that have shadowed AUKUS since its inception.

Australians might have assumed that our Five Eyes membership and already-intimate defence relationship with America would make sharing information and technology through AUKUS Pillar 2 relatively easy.

In reality, things haven’t been that simple. In private, US interlocutors have increasingly voiced reservations around the integrity of Australian and UK information and technology protections. But until recently, those concerns were rarely articulated with the detail or specificity that would help Australia to understand the issues, let alone address them.

That led many across the Australian defence landscape to consider the trust discussion a bit of a red herring.

This isn’t to say that Australia doesn’t have work to do. Yes, there’s a good news story to tell about measures already taken in areas like foreign interference and investment screening. Yet as the AUKUS partners gear up to deliver Pillars 1 and 2, Australia will likely need to consider further reforms to things like workforce vetting procedures, digital platform security and security clearance checks.

At the same time, these reforms won’t always mirror US practices and procedures. Australia’s painful experience with US export controls is a good example of why simply bringing allies ‘up to speed’ with American technology protections isn’t always the optimal solution.

What’s more, allies could point to the leakiness of Washington’s own defence technology ecosystem as grounds for their own concerns. Reporting in October 2022 revealed that front companies connected to the Chinese military had harvested troves of US software products with potential military applications. Evidence suggests that some of these products supported China’s October 2021 hypersonic missile test, dubbed a ‘Sputnik moment’ by US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

But this isn’t about pointing fingers; it’s about underscoring the requirement for a truly collaborative approach to developing technology protections that incorporate the preferences and best practices of all three countries. The mutual trust and spirit of collaboration that AUKUS is supposed to reflect will only be realised if all three partners contribute to setting the terms for new forms of cooperation. A genuinely trilateral approach to developing AUKUS-grade technology protections is the best way to foster—and to keep—that trust.

The US Naval War College’s James Holmes, a strategist of serious stature, has suggested that the US Navy should establish a ‘massive’ base in Australia. This isn’t Holmes’s first stab at this. His initial proposal, back in 2011, apparently received the ‘gimlet-eye’ treatment from the would-be hosts.

Maybe there’s a touch of tongue-in-cheek to the ‘massive’ framing? If Holmes was hoping to provoke a rise from Down Under, the reaction from Australian commentators this time around has been more deadpan than gimlet-eyed. But a proposal this bold deserves a response.

I’ll have a go then.

Australians pride themselves on their reputation as a dependable ally on the battlefield. But they are more reluctant to yield up slices of their plentiful territory for foreign military use. The only enduring US base on Australian soil is the joint intelligence facility at Pine Gap. The secret to its longevity is that it is rooted in an equitable burden-sharing arrangement.

That mutually beneficial arrangement has underpinned bipartisan support and enabled successive governments to argue that the national interest is served and sovereignty maintained. Australia also plays host to a sizeable Singaporean military contingent, for training purposes. Singapore pays its way and has incrementally acquired a reputation for respecting sovereignty.

Training is one thing. Hosting combat forces is another matter. In 2011, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of a rotational US Marine Corps detachment at Darwin. This was a political initiative designed to underscore the US rebalancing commitment to the Indo-Pacific. It has taken almost a decade to realise the modest total of 2,500 marines originally envisioned, and there have been torturous cost-sharing negotiations along the way.

The result is an expensive and somewhat attenuated Marine Corps presence that is neither fish nor fowl. The Northern Territory offers useful training opportunities, but less strategic value than widely assumed. Without sealift, the Darwin detachment is hobbled as an amphibious force.

If the US were to invest in a new naval facility in Australia, a port near Darwin—without Chinese leaseholders this time—would be an obvious candidate and useful to the Australian Defence Force besides. However, well-placed US defence sources say that recent media claims that Washington is constructing a new naval base in the Top End are wide of the mark. The US is investing substantial sums in joint infrastructure, following the plan laid out under the force posture initiative. But none of it is specifically earmarked for naval use. Meanwhile, Australia’s Defence Department is investing exclusively in upgrading existing naval facilities in the Northern Territory.

New US bases in Australia are not part of the current alliance conversation. Instead, access and adaptability are the watchwords at a military level. The US and Australia already conduct large joint exercises, like Talisman Sabre. The US Air Force has sent visiting detachments of increasing complexity, including an F-22 squadron complete with embedded Australian pilot. And the marines are in Darwin for half the year.

But the US military is likely to move away from concentrating high-value assets in fixed locations, as portended by the current Marine Corps planning and guidance. Building a big facility in Australia would be going against the strategic grain, not to mention budgetary realities.

Holmes is on the money in emphasising the importance of Australia’s geography, as a central Indo-Pacific anchor point. Australia offers extensive Indian Ocean and Pacific frontage and proximity to Southeast Asia. But it remains infrastructure-poor, while the terrain beyond the more habitable southeast and southwestern corners is challenging.

If Australia was willing to offer up territory for a base, in response to an American request, the US Navy would face the same challenges that have deterred generations of Australians from developing the country’s northern half. The Royal Australian Navy itself remains decidedly bottom-heavy, dividing its fleet between Sydney and Perth, despite periodic calls for more dispersed basing. These bases lie much closer to the Southern Ocean than to likely areas of US strategic interest further north.

Even the new joint base being developed by Australia and Papua New Guinea on Manus Island, on the site of a former American fleet base no less, offers only marginal positional advantage for the US Navy, despite Washington’s interest in joining as a partner. Manus will matter more as a hub for regional engagement and capacity building with Pacific island nations than for classical power projection.

Holmes correctly identifies Australia as occupying a sweet spot: not too far from the focal points of US strategic attention in the Western Pacific, nor too close to China’s layered defences for sea and air denial.

Yet he also contends that Australia lies ‘just outside’ the South China Sea. Darwin, Australia’s jumping-off point into the archipelago, is 2,600 kilometres from the South China Sea—roughly the distance between Los Angeles and New Orleans. Moreover, navigating across Indonesia can throw up knottier obstacles for warships than just the tyranny of distance.

To be sure, in wartime, or full-blown crisis, Australia’s relative remoteness would be a valuable asset for US forces looking to disperse and obtain in-theatre support. But since Canberra would be likely to grant access to Australian facilities, it’s not clear that the outlays for a new stand-alone US base would be justified.

Politically, the Morrison government evinces little appetite for quantitative or qualitative enhancements to the US military footprint here, even as Australia’s geostrategic stock has risen in US eyes. Even assuming Washington wanted to stretch its sea legs, Canberra would still be extremely cautious about the reaction from Beijing.

In August, the prime minister appeared to rule out of consideration the deployment of US land-based ballistic missiles. That may be the US’s fault for starting post-INF hares running prematurely. But the PM’s hasty response nonetheless suggests an underlying nervousness about hosting ‘permanent’ US strike capabilities. And nothing says permanent quite like a massive military base.

Australia’s alliance with the US is at an odd disjuncture. Militarily, the trend is towards closer force integration and defence technology cooperation, creating capability uplift. Yet questioning among US military allies about Washington’s political commitment has never been so intense. Canberra’s diplomatic hedging and extreme sensitivity about offending China raise US eyebrows too.

State premiers might actually be more inclined than sailors or cabinet ministers to welcome a new naval base and all its associated goodies—provided Uncle Sam is paying the overheads, of course. Then again, nobody throws gimlet eyes quite like the purse-holders up on Capitol Hill.

Sorry, James. Personally, I’d love to see the US Navy back in Melbourne. Third time lucky?

A renewed sense of urgency over European defence has come only after a cumulative series of strategic shocks. The European powers have long resisted supranational defence institutions, instead depending heavily on NATO and the US. Prior to 1989, Western European and US strategic interests converged as the trans-Atlantic powers faced a hostile Soviet Union. After the Cold War, the Europeans failed to assume responsibility for the peace and security of their own continent. Can they now?

Europe’s buoyant post–Cold War mood was shattered by the brutal Bosnian War (1992–1995), Russia’s employment of force in Georgia (1991–1993), and then war in Kosovo (1998–1999). Those shocks catalysed an intense turn-of-the-century debate over Europe’s capacity to manage its own security affairs. Impotence over Kosovo, in particular, highlighted the problem, though little actual progress occurred as a result.

The debate was reinvigorated by Russia’s violations of territorial sovereignty in Georgia (2008) and in Ukraine, and the occupation and annexation of Crimea (2014). It was exacerbated by mass migration from Africa and the Middle East, domestic extremist violence, and the Brexit referendum (2016). President Donald Trump’s ambiguity about the US commitment to NATO and policy cleavages over the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal helped precipitate the latest movement on European defence.

Even before Trump’s election, analysts considered that ‘the ability of the EU to collectively ensure its security and defence is in serious doubt’ and that ‘security and defence have become the new front lines of the European project’. The EU’s 2016 global strategy stated that ‘investment in security and defence is a matter of urgency’, arguing that ‘full spectrum defence capabilities are necessary to respond to external crises, [to] build our partners’ capacities, and to guarantee Europe’s safety’. It stressed that ‘capabilities should be developed with maximum interoperability’.

The 2007 Lisbon Treaty sought to ‘enable tangible progress on the level of investment expenditure on defence equipment, collaborative capability development goals and the availability of deployable defence capabilities for combined missions and operations acknowledging the single set of forces principle’. Permanent structured cooperation (PeSCO) was the intended vehicle.

Only ‘limited progress’ has been made on PeSCO. Participation in PeSCO is restricted to EU member states that satisfy the criteria in Protocol 10 to the Lisbon Treaty. Contrary to the EU’s norm of unanimity, the European Council (EC) decided to require a qualified majority vote on PeSCO-related issues to avoid matters being blocked by dissenting members.

A joint notification on PeSCO was presented to the EC by 23 member states in November 2017. It set out 20 commitments, including increasing defence budgets to 2% of GDP in real terms, increasing defence investment expenditure to 20% of total defence spending, engaging more in joint and collaborative strategic defence capabilities projects, developing the interoperability of their forces, optimising multinational structures, and using the European Defence Agency (EDA) as the forum for joint capability development.

PeSCO will be closely tied to the new coordinated annual review on defence, an EDA initiative that systematically monitors national defence spending plans, and the European Defence Fund, which is currently being developed. The initial PeSCO projects will be put to the EC for endorsement in early 2018 and will address ‘training, capability development and operational readiness’.

As the impetus towards greater cooperation, coordination and interoperability on defence builds, the countervailing forces are asserting themselves. The fate of achieving effective defence policy integration may depend on the growing reaction to European integration in general in other policy domains. European voters are increasingly concerned that loss of sovereignty and the dilution of national culture will result in the politicisation of European integration. Brexit is the exemplar of that phenomenon.

Moreover, national defence and the exercise of sovereign rights are integral to nation-states. The 2017 French strategic review strongly emphasised this, insisting that ‘maintaining the model of a full-spectrum and balanced military is critical for France’s national independence, strategic autonomy and freedom of action’. In the economic sphere, the review declared that ‘pursuing a high level of ambition in the manufacturing and technology fields is a matter of sovereignty and a pillar of our strategic autonomy’. That stands in contrast to President Emmanuel Macron’s views on national sovereignty and EU integration in general.

The French review’s nod towards ‘permanent structured cooperation and the European Defence Fund’ belies the tension between strategic autonomy and the meaningful integration of the EU’s most powerful military into a supranational institution. Similarly, Italy, another major European power, speaks in its 2015 white paper of focusing ‘on those geographical areas that are a priority for national interests’ and ‘pushing into the background other crises’. Germany’s Social Democrats oppose increasing defence expenditure to 2% and their inclusion in a new coalition government would pose problems for PeSCO.

Achieving effective interoperability, capability development and readiness—and unity of command—across 23 sovereign nations will be a herculean task. The historical legacy of dissimilar national approaches to capability will need to be addressed, and inevitably diverging national interests will arise based on straightforward geography. In Eastern Europe, the Russian threat looms large, while nations facing the Mediterranean will concentrate more on the Middle East chaos and the ungovernable spaces of North Africa. Issues of domestic politics, especially the prevalence of Euroscepticism, and the effects of strategic culture will also need to be overcome.

That new life has been injected into the issue of European defence is a symptom and recognition of the tectonic shifts taking place in international power relationships. Still, even when confronted with new and serious strategic challenges, there’s no guarantee that the national interests of its members will aggregate into a set of common EU defence interests. The engagement in PeSCO is encouraging, but there’s a long way to go before Europe can expect to effectively defend Europe.

The Abbott government has promised to write a new Defence White Paper within 18 months, and one of the key challenges it will face is considering the place of Indonesia in Australian defence thinking. As the fear of a direct Indonesian threat retreats into the past, it is being replaced by a view of Indonesia as a potential ‘buffer’ separating Australia from the vagaries of the East Asian system. But when the new government considers Australia’s defence options in the next century, it’d do well to remember that Indonesia gets a vote in the role it plays in defending Australia.

Historically, Indonesia has comprised an important, though unclear, element in Australia’s strategic environment. When Australia looks at its neighbourhood in isolation, Indonesia’s proximity and strategic potential makes it appear as a liability. But if the lens is widened to encompass the entire Asia-Pacific strategic system, a strong Indonesia looks more like an asset. During the Cold War Australia’s security concerns about Indonesia revolved around threats associated with Konfrontasi, communism and state collapse, with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Sukarno regime menacing briefly in 1965. But as early as the 1970s, Defence was also conducting studies of possible regional contingencies which involved Indonesia as an ally in achieving regional security. So recognition of our mutual strategic interests coexisted with security concerns about Indonesia. Read more