The electric storm that rages around the Defence White Paper has big elements of ritual politics and tacit consensus, despite the intense arguments over plans, priorities and projections.

This is standard Oz politics played as a contact sport. As Churchill observed to Menzies: ‘My goodness, you Australians do seem to play your politics with a fine 18th Century flair’. The senior President George Bush made the same comment on the vigour of our pollies when he arrived in Canberra to visit his mate, Bob Hawke, only to be greeted by the new leader, Paul Keating, still wiping the blood from his toga.

The stakes are high and they play for keeps, but not all the noise is genuine. The White Paper has generated a tempest of tough tackles and verbal roundarms among the political class, but not too far beneath the uproar resides a broad measure of tacit agreement. Read more

The future relationship between the United States and China will significantly define Asia’s strategic future. For Australia, there’s no more important question than how Washington and Beijing will manage their relationship. So it’s great to see that the government’s new Defence White Paper (DWP) introduces a much more nuanced assessment of the emerging US–China strategic balance and its implications for Australian defence policy.

The 2009 DWP was very strong in pointing to Chinese military assertiveness as a major source of concern for Australian defence policy, but the new document states that the government ‘does not approach China as an adversary’. It also recognises Beijing’s military modernisation as a ‘natural and legitimate outcome of its economic growth’. This reflects the reality that China’s military rise doesn’t automatically mean greater instability in Asia. Read more

The 2013 Defence White Paper will be launched tomorrow. There’s always a chance that it’ll take a more austere approach to force structuring, but all the indications are that it will stick to the guns of the previous one, while failing to adequately explain how the proposed force structure will be funded. If so, it will merely put off the hard decisions to another day.

In my previous two posts in this series I explained how an extended period of lean defence budgets would inevitably lead to a serious decline in defence capability over time, unless accompanied by adjustments in strategy and tough decisions on force structure. One of my premises is that Australia’s budget situation won’t return to the halcyon days of 2000–2008. Mark Thomson will say much more about this in his budget brief later in the month, but serious economists are talking about a structural deficit which will take ‘a substantial level of financial discipline’ on the behalf of future governments to deal with.

In the absence of a substantial external shock, Defence shouldn’t hold its breath waiting for more money. Like it or not, we need to find ways to provide defence capability and capacity with spending levels not too different from today’s. I think that’s doable, but acknowledge in advance that the levels of risk we’ll have to accept will rise—the good news being that they are currently very low and aren’t likely to substantially increase. Read more

Hard times are upon Defence again, which will have implications for the way the nation’s military capability evolves. As Andrew Davies pointed out recently, much of the ADF’s capability today is thanks to a ramping up of spending after the 2000 Defence White Paper. During the 80s and 90s Australian defence spending was held roughly constant in real terms resulting in a steady decline in the size, technical sophistication and preparedness of the ADF. By the end of the 1990s, there were significant shortcomings across the entire force. Much of the Air Force and Navy could not be deployed in other than benign environments, and the Army had to pull out all stops to accomplish the INTERFET mission to East Timor in 1999.

As we apparently enter another era of defence austerity, many are concerned that we are headed down the same road again. Perhaps it was to head off this fear that the Minister promised not only to keep all of the ‘core capabilities’ of the 2009 White Paper but also to maintain the present number of military personnel.

As reassuring as this might sound, it creates a dilemma for those trying to pull together the 2013 White Paper. There probably wasn’t enough money to deliver Force 2030 to start with, and now the government says that it wants most of what was planned but isn’t going to pay the bill. It’s no doubt a frustrating time for Defence’s planners. Read more

Australia’s leaders from both sides of politics have been paying greater attention to Indonesia; there’s been more official engagement, as well as new diplomatic and defence initiatives in the past year. And we’ve been describing Indonesia, as our Defence Minister has during his Jakarta visit last week, in more important terms like ‘strategic partner’.

But it looks like that there’s some way to go before ‘strategic partner’ becomes more than just a term of endearment. If we look at the 2009 Defence White Paper (for the time being still the government’s defence strategic policy), we find a curious ambivalence towards Indonesia. According to the White Paper, we have a ‘fundamental interest in controlling the air and sea approaches to our continent’ (paragraph 5.5). But in reference to a secure immediate neighbourhood, it says we should prevent or mitigate ‘nearby states [from] develop[ing] the capacity to undertake sustained military operations within our approaches’ (paragraph 5.8). There’s a contradiction there; as Hugh White notes in his Security Challenges essay (PDF), it may very well be those same capabilities Indonesia requires to ensure its own security in its northern approaches that could be instrumental in both Indonesia and Australia securing their strategic interests.

In short, the language of the 2009 Defence White Paper simply doesn’t match our statements of Indonesia as a strategic partner. Read more