Many believe attacks on Russian warships by Ukrainian forces using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) represent a fundamental shift in warfare at sea. Hugh White has argued that ‘surface ships these days are just inherently very vulnerable’ and that the drone attacks prove plans for the Royal Australian Navy are on the wrong track.

Retired US Navy admiral James Stavridis remarked that the attacks are a seminal moment in military history, like Agincourt or Pearl Harbor. ‘As cheap drones go to sea in serious numbers, expensive manned surface warships will be threatened.’

Claims about the novelty and impact of these small attack drones miss the wider picture. Asymmetric threats to major surface combatants are not new. The arms race between such  threats and the ability of major warships to counter them is a recurrent theme of modern naval history.

In 1914 Admiral Percy Scott infamously argued that submarines had rendered major surface combatants redundant. Following World War II, airpower enthusiasts were so confident in their technology that some claimed that ‘by the inexorable logic of military progress, the navy as a separate entity will cease to exist’. Similar concerns over the vulnerability of surface combatants shaped debates in the 1970s, and have recurred with China’s development of A2AD technologies.

Despite these threats, surface combatants have remained essential to modern naval power, and will continue to be as long as we need to make use of the sea. This does not mean new technology like these USVs is not significant. Instead, it focuses attention on how navies should adapt and respond.

It’s useful to look back at the case study of the earliest of the modern asymmetric threats to surface combatants, namely torpedo boats. Until the middle of the 19th century the only effective counter to a major enemy warship was a ship of your own of equal size and strength. This changed dramatically in the 1870s due to the invention of the Whitehead torpedo and its integration into new fast launches—the first torpedo boats. Suddenly, the largest battleship could be sunk by the most insignificant craft.

As today, the potential of this asymmetric technology was apparent to all, and it left major navies with two key questions. The first was how to counter this technology and protect major warships. The second was how to adapt a technology that seemed suited to coastal states seeking sea denial to further their strategic purposes. These are the same challenges currently facing blue water navies over small attack USV technology.

There were numerous different responses from major navies to the torpedo boat threat. The most significant and successful in the short term was the proliferation of smaller calibre quick firing artillery which could engage the fast-moving torpedo boats. It took time for this to roll out across major surface combatants, but within a decade this was seen as offering a good degree of protection for fleets operating in the littorals. The other natural approach to any new technological challenge is to attempt to adapt that technology to provide a symmetrical capability. This saw the development of fast small craft described as torpedo boat destroyers which rapidly became an essential component of any fleet, screening the heavy vessels against attack.

We are already seeing a similar process in response to threats from fast inshore attack craft (FIAC), including drones. This has been under development for over 20 years, dating back to attack on the USS Cole. The adaption of the close-in weapon system to target surface threats, and development of lightweight missiles such as the Marlet provide significant protection. There remain questions over the degree to which drones, especially ‘swarming’ drones, may be able to overwhelm such defences, but this approach is set to be the foundation of short-term responses.

We are also beginning to see ideas mirroring the second response to torpedo boats. The US Navy is one of a number that have tentatively suggested that USVs might be able to escort larger crewed vessels operating inshore, protecting against threats such as FIAC. While this process is frequently presented as a radically new development in crewed/uncrewed teaming, it follows a long history of adopting and adapting a threatening technology to provide a symmetrical capability.

Another major response to the development of torpedo boats was a focus on harbour defence. The threat posed by a torpedo boat, or later a submarine, getting among an anchored fleet was obvious, and navies devoted huge resources to protecting anchorages. Despite this, there were major issues at the beginning of both world wars.

The potential for USVs and UUVs to operate in a similar way is obvious, as exemplified by Ukraine’s attacks on Sevastopol. So far there has been limited public discussion of the security of Western naval bases against such attacks, but it’s likely that this issue will need to be addressed.

The question of how to exploit torpedo boat technology proved an even greater challenge for 19th century navies than how to counter it. Like the small USVs of today, torpedo boats lacked the range or seaworthiness to fit into the existing concept of operations for a blue water navy. One innovative approach was the development of an early mothership, HMS Hecla, designed to carry torpedo boats into theatre where they could then support the fleet in confined waters.

This approach may have proved highly effective for a short period, but as technology developed the focus shifted onto larger ocean-going torpedo boats. These continued to grow, largely due to range and seakeeping issues, until they merged with the torpedo boat destroyers designed to counter them. This birth of the modern destroyer is a classic example of how navies adopt and adapt disruptive or asymmetric technologies. However, in doing so they tend to grow in size, complexity and cost, undermining elements of their advantage.

There is an irony in the fact that the antecedents of today’s major surface combatants that are derided as being obsolete were the product of a previous round of asymmetric innovation that were themselves supposed to drive major surface combatants from the seas. It is too early to tell if we will see similar trends in the development of attack drone style USVs and UUVs, but it seems far more likely that these will evolve into the surface combatants of the future than rendering surface combatants obsolete.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin showcased a seductive but dangerous myth.

Carlson got the reaction he deserved from most mainstream foreign affairs commentators: ridicule at his Dorothy Dixers to a master manipulator of information and narrative. Over two hours, Putin systematically hit his talking points aimed at turning MAGA supporters and similarly disgruntled European voters against Western support for Ukraine.

Many of Carlson’s fellow populist conservatives, meanwhile, backed him on the grounds that the Western public will be better informed, and hence better able to judge their governments’ policies on Russia and Ukraine, if we hear from all sides. By letting Putin talk freely, they argued, Carlson filled in a piece of the picture that was missing. Audiences could then judge for themselves.

If it were just one sacked cable host fawning before a dictator, it wouldn’t be worth all the talk. But the pernicious myth from which the episode drew its strength has a much wider base. It is the so-called free market of ideas, whereby we encourage all points of view into the digital town square and let them thrash it out according to the natural laws of competition. Good ideas will flourish, and bad ones will sink.

Elon Musk cites the free marketplace, or what he terms ‘ free speech absolutism’, as the ostensible grounds for gutting content moderation on Twitter, now X—which is also Carlson’s publishing platform of choice. The idea seems to have lingering appeal in the laissez-faire sections of Silicon Valley, notwithstanding hesitant steps the big platforms have made towards better moderation, not all of which have been sustained. It’s also popular among political conservatives angry at what they believe is left-wing bias across major platforms, from news media to Facebook, which they argue should be hosting free speech.

But the wrongheadedness of this idea needs to be called out. The number one reason it’s dangerous is that the creators of information are not all equal players on a level field. Big producers of content, with the resources to shape the information environment through their superior skill, scale and tools, have disproportionate influence. Information in a globally connected environment can be pushed, aggregated and manipulated by the powerful operators.

And those who have no ethics have a disproportionate malign influence by not just flooding the space but polluting and corrupting it. That includes Russian troll farms, China’s ‘spamouflage’  networks and propagandist state television networks, though it also includes well-organised non-state movements that push often hateful political views using a keen understanding of algorithms to influence, shape and disrupt debates, often aggressively. This can create fear, encourage silence and effectively censor online users with whose views they disagree.

Nor are Western commercial outlets blameless; there’s a reason close to four in 10 Americans believe or suspect Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election fair and square, according to reliable polls.

Powerful players can make bad ideas stick more effectively than real people talking about real things.

Second, we don’t receive ideas rationally and based on their quality—with quality defined as the honest, accurate and impartial application of facts to reach some insight. Humans are frequently irrational, distracted, biased, poorly informed and lacking in context. And we’re therefore highly vulnerable to manipulation.

All markets can be distorted but a marketplace of ideas particularly so because an idea is not just any product. It’s a crackle of electricity between neurons that fixes pathways based on perceptions of facts in a new logical string—a process even cognitive science doesn’t properly understand.

Third, markets only work when there are rules and norms of exchange. We invent rules and norms because not everyone does the right thing all the time—and this applies to ideas as much as it does to road laws and consumer protection legislation for cars.

A malign and well-resourced media manipulator walking into a utopian paradise full of well-intentioned, truthful people championing good ideas, eschewing bad ones and claiming perfect common sense—well that’s just going to be carnage. And that’s what we had with Carlson’s interview with Putin. The wolf ate the baby rabbit.

Plenty of legitimate entities have outsized power in the information environment—governments, big companies, the news media and expert bodies. But they are subject to standards and expectations that deter them from lying outright and impose reputational consequences if they do.

Elected governments face a free press doing the job that Carlson so woefully failed to do, as well as opposition parties. For corporations, we have watchdogs to crack down on false advertising. For big institutions, we have various ethics and integrity bodies. We have, in other words, some rules. We have checks and balances that intervene in the market.

A few days after the Moscow interview, Carlson justified his approach by saying he didn’t want to ask all the questions that other journalists would ask. He wanted to give the Russian dictator the most possible time to express whatever he wanted to express.

‘I want to hear Vladimir Putin talk so that people in my country can assess what’s happening,’ Carlson told the World Government Summit in Dubai. And in a separate spiel he urged his followers to watch the interview because ‘you should know as much as you can and then, like a free citizen and not a slave, you can decide for yourself’.

And it’s having an effect, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week from the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the premier organisation representing Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. A 35-year-old attendee, Kristin Bocanegra, told the Journal: ‘Putin in the Tucker interview was really-eye opening. We got to hear his side, his motives. He’s like a teacher. We’re told by the media that Russia is really bad, but young people today are doing our own research, not just believing what we’re being told.’

Pat O’Brien, 67, told the same reporter: ‘The war is the fault of the US. We have no business encouraging Ukraine to join NATO. That’s what triggered this whole thing.’ The Journal article made it clear this was a prevailing view at CPAC.

Finding solutions can seem overwhelming—and there are no single answers—but that can’t put us off.

First, let’s harness the fact that most people don’t want to live in a world where they can’t trust anything anymore. We can’t become paralysed by the growing view that we are coalescing in echo chambers of political polarisation, plagued by cynicism and unable to agree on common sets of facts to hold reasonable debates in good faith. Let’s move on from that.

Broadly speaking—and not everyone will love hearing this—the collective needs to intervene more heavily. We need to do so both in the consumption and the production of ideas.

On the consumption side, we must strengthen critical thinking across audiences, empowering individuals to wrestle with, and critically examine, the ideas they come across. That means education, civics, digital literacy, starting from birth and continuing through life. Governments tend to put this work in the too-hard basket because it spans many portfolios but they need to accept that it’s their job. Finland is a rare country that has done so, with counter-misinformation classes in schools that help it routinely rank as the number one country in Europe for resilience against misinformation.

The production and transmission sides are trickier because defining good and bad ideas is subjective. People are entitled to argue that military aid to Ukraine could be better spent at home. Or that supporting Ukraine is forestalling, at the cost of Ukrainian lives, a negotiated end that is inevitable.

Trying to measure the utility of an idea based on whether it improves or diminishes a society depends on your definition of a good society. But we can ask, is it fact-based? Is it transparent about its origins. How is it being shared between people? Are the intentions of the person sharing the idea clear? Is the idea at least aimed at improving the well-being of a society even if we might disagree with it?

We should stop tolerating lies. Democracies need to be better than other political systems that ingrain and accept manipulation. And at the moment, we’re not always setting much of an example. We should mark down and punish politicians and institutions that lie and bend reality, at the ballot box, with our wallets or using whatever other levers we have.

This still leaves plenty of room for rhetoricians to debate issues, but we can’t let that be a race to the bottom. Big players need to be more accountable.

The aim is not to neutralise the power of all large actors in the information environment. While connectivity has been wonderfully democratising, we’re not all experts on everything, and we need trusted institutions to give us authoritative information, whether governments, the news media, medical bodies or indeed a proven large language model.

In short, this is an unashamed argument for a heavier hand of the collective to protect our information environment and, therefore, the individual. In democracies, that should include the state, which should support public interest journalism and could even find ways to give audiences incentives to consume more diverse media.

Where we don’t want governments making judgements about fact and truth, they should create independent watchdog agencies and fund civil society groups like fact-checkers that can earn and keep the trust of the public. Taiwan, bombarded by Beijing’s disinformation, is a role model for supporting civil society.

Companies that lie or—in the case of digital platforms—fail to stop the pollution of the information environment should face pressure from public advocacy organisations that encourage boycotts. If we’re worried, as we should be, about X as a platform, then our concern about a platform like TikTok, which is massively influential with our children and is subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party, should be an order of magnitude greater.

Finally, the collective effort should extend globally. Japan to its credit elevated fighting disinformation to a top priority when it hosted the G7 last year. This should be continued and extended across all democratic multilateral groups.

Cleaning up the information environment should be an election issue, rather than just assuming a free market will sort it out for us. The aim must be to allow healthy competition without a free-for-all environment that is vulnerable to monopolies and manipulation. One person’s moderation will always be another’s censorship, but we can’t let that intimidate us. We need to ignore the slippery slope arguments on the right and the left. We need to do the hard work.

The aerial target is coming at you or your friends. It can kill any kind of vehicle, including a tank, or hit an ammunition store, command post or even a surface-to-air battery worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Or it may go after a single soldier.

Your challenge is that the target, a quadcopter drone, is really small, manoeuvrable and hard to detect.

None of that is the biggest challenge. Rather, the confounding problem is that the thing is incredibly cheap, having cost the enemy some low multiple of $1000—far less than the usual cost of shooting down anything. If you use expensive means to knock down such a drone, the other side’s easy answer is just to build more of them and exhaust your budget.

The sudden proliferation of inexpensive drones in Ukraine is a revolution in warfare. While they vary in size and capability, the  economics of defence are particularly stressed by the very cheapest ones, those adapted from civilian models or made with commercially available components.

What follows is a look at the difficulties in engaging a little civil-derivative quadcopter. This article in the series particularly focusses on the challenge in developing and making counter-drone systems that use cannon to achieve more range than is available from machine guns—to increase the area that can be defended and the time available for engagement. Another article will look at other tools for defeating cheap drones, such as lasers and jamming.

Northrop Grumman of the US, MSI-DS in Britain, and Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS) are among manufacturers offering systems with cannon.

Two issues arise: such weapons need a multiplicity of expensive sensors to do the job, and they must be built with high precision to hold down ammunition expenditure. So, they cannot be cheap. We can understand this if we follow their engagement sequence.

First, the defender must detect the drone. For longest-range detection, use of a search radar may be preferred—at the risk of the enemy picking up its transmissions, determining its location and attacking it.

The drone is made mostly of plastic, a poor reflector of radio energy, so the radar needs to be sensitive. It must also be set for detection of targets moving as slowly as tens of kilometres per hour, which means it will have to be clever enough to ignore reflections from birds.

In fact, a radar may be able to do that and indeed to use the characteristics of radio reflections to work out a drone’s model—handy information for avoiding destruction of friendly aerial objects.

A search radar may pick up a little drone at 5km if it has a sufficient line of sight, then classification occurs at a closer range. Such a sensor probably costs at least hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Optical detection is an alternative to radar in reasonably clear daylight but probably doesn’t offer such long range and warning time. The Mark I eyeball is particularly challenged in noticing a distant quadcopter, but a weapon system’s electro-optical and infrared cameras might be used in scan mode.

Once the drone has been detected, it must be tracked. And here we begin to deal with the problem of achieving high precision and the tight and costly manufacturing standards that it demands.

Tracking means finely measuring the drone’s position and movement. Again, a suitably high-performance radar may be used, at the risk of detection, or the weapon system can rely on its electro-optic and infrared cameras and its laser rangefinder. Taking the required data from them means knowing exactly the angles at which they are pointing.

They need to be slewed in the target’s direction very quickly, preferably automatically, to begin their work and minimise engagement time.

Tracking may need to begin at a range of several kilometres. The greater the range, the greater the distortion of observed angles by atmospheric conditions. To some extent those errors can be reduced with software.

If everything is working, the fire-control computer now knows pretty well where the little target is and how it’s moving. It can work out a future position at which the drone and a round of ammunition can come together.

The gun must now point at exactly the angles that the fire-control computer has calculated for it. Nothing in the apparatus can be wobbly.

If confident that the weapon is tracking well and that no friendly object will be hit, the gunner will fire. In the case of EOS’s Slinger counter-drone weapon, the gunner could reasonably hope to hit at 1500 metres, the company says.

If such a weapon is using 30mm proximity-fused shells, which explode when they sense something close to them, it had better knock down a quadcopter with a single round. Each shell costs something like US$1000, so using a few could easily cost more than the drone (and take more time).

Here, however, there’s an advantage for the defender. A flimsy quadcopter can cope with hardly any damage and a fragment from an exploding shell is very likely to bring it down.

The probability of hitting will vary with ranges and weather, and also from system to system. EOS says the Slinger has at least a 95% chance of downing a quadcopter with one 30mm proximity-fused round in standard daylight conditions at 1000 metres. If solid ammunition is used instead of shells, the cost per round will be much lower, but the gunner will probably have to fire a burst of several.

Cannons might also use time-fused shells, which explode at the calculated moment of interception.

The point of using cannons is to engage at a distance, but if the drone has managed to close to around 500 metres, the gunner will switch to the system’s machine gun. A burst of bullets may cost only a few dollars, and one hit will do the trick.

That sounds good, but the defender will strongly prefer that the drone never gets so close. And if the drone has escaped cannon fire in going for a target that’s too far for the machine gun to cover, then the defence has already failed.

The exact prices for these systems are not known. EOS has said that  three Slingers sold last year cost less than $2 million (US$1.3 million). The ABC has reported a price of less than US$1 million per system.

That would not include the search radar, nor, perhaps, training and an initial stock of ammunition and spares, all needed to achieve operational capability.

Then there’s the question of how many such systems must be bought. If the defender needs to cover a front line and the effective weapon range is 1000 metres, then the systems will have to be spaced at less than 2km intervals, even assuming clear lines of sight.

And more will be needed in the rear, to cover other equipment and installations, and maybe more again to deal with larger drones that could reach such facilities as power stations and hospitals. If swarm drone attacks are expected, and they probably should be, defensive weapons will have to be placed thickly, reinforcing each other.

Consider, too, that crews will be needed for all those systems.

The drones are cheap, so killing them must also be cheap. But equipping an army for the task cannot be.

Civil defence has been crucial to Ukraine’s survival since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Russian aggressors in Ukraine have already killed, injured, raped and robbed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, displaced millions of civilians and destroyed substantial non-military infrastructure.

According to the latest UN statistics, Ukraine has suffered 27,149 civilian casualties so far in the war, comprising 9,614 killed and 17,535 injured. But these figures count only the victims the UN has been able to confirm, and it acknowledges that the actual civilian casualty toll is likely much higher. The dead from still-occupied areas, including the tens of thousands killed in still-occupied Mariupol alone, are yet to be counted.

Other grim statistics include more than 120,000 civilian buildings destroyed and 105,000 war crimes registered. The fighting has displaced at least 13 million Ukrainians, and an estimated 174,000 square kilometres of land has been contaminated by unexploded ordnance.

In this war, there are several threats to Ukrainian civilians, primarily from the air, but also from land and water.

Russian missiles, bombs, artillery rockets and shells, and kamikaze drones affect Ukrainians daily. Russia has repeatedly targeted civilian areas far from the frontline, including with missile strikes on targets as far afield as Lviv, near Ukraine’s western border with Poland.

The only densely populated area reasonably protected from this is the capital Kyiv, where a missile-defence system, including the latest generation of Patriot interceptors, can thwart Russian attacks. But even this cannot guarantee complete protection—falling debris still regularly threatens Kyiv’s inhabitants and damages infrastructure.

In some regions, more deadly and immediate threats come from the land. Mines are being left in battlefields and unexploded munitions litter the territories closest to the fighting.

Water-based threats include Russia’s targeting of dams, which has caused intense flooding, destroying communities and drowning civilians and their animals. Russian naval mines in the Black Sea and Ukrainian anti-amphibious minefields on the coast near Odessa claim further victims.

The long-term impacts of these threats include environmental damage—such as the destruction of forests and pollution—and damage to the critical infrastructure supporting key services like education and health care.

The war is a challenge of a magnitude that Ukraine’s civil-defence system wasn’t designed to handle. Few believed such a large-scale and destructive war would come to Ukraine, and Russia’s aggression has exposed many weaknesses in Ukraine’s civilian defence.

Shelter is one such issue. After independence, the Ukrainian government found that most of the shelters inherited from the Soviet era were poorly maintained and sold them to private enterprise. Before this war, Ukraine’s civil protection planning focused on scenarios that involved evacuations and rescues in a temporary emergency, rather than shelters for defence and survival in a war.

The invasion has shown that air defence is essential to civil defence, and Ukraine was unprepared to defend the population and critical infrastructure. The Russian military has targeted civilian electricity, heating and water infrastructure throughout the war. At the outset of the invasion, strikes on fuel depots worsened acute shortages, and at the height of the bombing campaign last winter, more than 50% of Ukraine’s energy sector was hit, causing widespread temporary blackouts.

Notwithstanding its pre-war deficiencies, Ukraine’s civil defence has shown resilience.

The government has demonstrated its ability to maintain general control over the war effort and to coordinate the interior ministry’s specialised teams with the efforts of Ukrainian communities.

Substantial digitalisation of public services has allowed the government, local authorities and other providers of critical services to function adequately throughout the war. The stability of mobile phone and internet services has played an important role as a lifeline for civil-defence control and coordination. As the war escalated, private providers quickly established independent power supplies to keep access continuous and stable.

Digitalisation has also given financial institutions the stability they need to operate, and the readiness of Ukrainian cyber systems to withstand Russian attacks was crucial to this. Ukraine’s transportation system also proved resilient, at least enough to support evacuations and conceal military logistics.

Ukraine’s air-raid alert system has provided timely warning all over the country, apart from areas closest to the frontline. Soon after the start of aggression, Ukraine adopted an early warning system similar to Israel’s, combining radar, optical and other signals to detect incoming threats. Further mapping of these signals culminated in systems that warn citizens through mobile phones, the media and sirens.

Ukraine has also been working to combat Russia’s toxic disinformation campaign. Ukrainian authorities strive to maintain a careful balance between ensuring the freedom of the press and strong information-security measures and have significantly inhibited the success of Russian propaganda.

As Russia continues to target civilian populations and infrastructure across Ukraine, the resilience of these measures is crucial. Since the invasion, traditional civil-defence functions, including state emergency services, the national police and local authorities, have demonstrated a high capacity to coordinate and expand their efforts.

During the first year of the war, Ukraine brought together seven new state emergency units for chemical, biological and radiological protection and 15 new rescue units. It also established 24 new fire departments and more than 1,000 volunteer fire brigades in cooperation with local authorities.

The government made changes to enable local authorities to take radical measures for the safety of local populations in residential areas, and amended construction documentation requirements to introduce compulsory civil-defence measures for buildings that permanently house more than 50 people or temporarily accommodate more than 100 workers or visitors. It raced to develop more sophisticated shelter systems that better protect civilians, especially those studying and working, and supported evacuation efforts.

Landmine removal efforts are ramping up too. While Ukraine’s partners provided significant transport assistance and equipment, it was impossible to meet the demand rapidly and the government sought help from local businesses and the defence industry. The personnel numbers in demining units have increased by the hundreds.

Particular attention was paid to people with higher needs, especially children. Except in schools near the frontlines, formal education has continued in areas with suitable air-raid shelters. In areas where that’s not the case, children receive their lessons online. In addition to normal schooling, the military, police, rescuers, public organisations and charitable foundations have been offering a selection of courses and lessons on how to behave in extreme conditions. For example, Ukraine’s emergency services now provide online safety classes for children that teach them practical skills for responding in emergencies.

The testing of civil-defence systems in Ukraine has naturally led to important discussions about how to protect civilians in war. Whether it be maintaining air defences, removing landmines, handling chemical or biological hazards, firefighting, providing shelters and stable supplies, or ensuring transport systems can handle evacuations, the war in Ukraine has shown how important it is to be prepared. With Ukraine hoping to welcome millions of evacuated Ukrainians back home after the war, robust civil defence must remain a top priority and will be a key factor in Ukraine’s future.

Recent strategic developments have led the Australian government to take several steps to reshape defence policy. The AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine venture is not just a massive long-term investment but, at last, the cornerstone of a significant shift in strategic direction.

However, Defence is still telling the Australian people what capabilities we need while saying little about why we need them. The narrative that this is due to having to respond to ‘governments of the day’ is spurious, given the bipartisan political support Defence’s recommendations typically enjoy.

The recent defence strategic review didn’t change this behaviour either; it reinforced it. The DSR is yet another attempt at self-reformation when several past efforts have yielded mixed results at best. It’s a detailed, broad strategic framework, but it isn’t a strategy. The general disconnection of the public from the security debate may have permitted this, but it doesn’t excuse it. It’s time to develop a clear, shared public vision for Australian defence strategy.

Another telling sign of strategic weakness is a persistent overreliance on technology instead of strategic thought. Defence’s definition of capability is ‘the capacity or ability to achieve an operational effect’, where ‘an operational effect may be defined or described in terms of the nature of the effect and of how, when, where and for how long it is produced’.

This definition is both too narrow to be complete and too prescriptive to achieve the practical purposes of developing capabilities and enabling public awareness. It ignores the stark realities of conflict and is servile to having a ‘technological edge’ over other aspects of capability.

We aren’t alone in this phenomenon. Like many Western nations, Australia has fallen in love with technical advantage as an intellectual sunscreen against the harsh light of warfare. That aversion has led us to frame fighting concepts around technical capability, to hide from war’s visceral nature and to ignore other important aspects of warfare in which we may feel we have less of an advantage, such as raw access to warfighting resources, including manpower. Technical language has sanitised descriptions of war. Most of the time, ‘operational effects’ involve destruction and suffering.

Acknowledging this doesn’t mean downplaying the complexity of materiel procurement. However, the idea that a capability’s justification can simply follow a golden thread of logic back to strategic guidance is tenuous. The conduct of war is chaotic. Seeking high levels of certainty before a profoundly uncertain event is fraught. That doesn’t mean the best possible equipment shouldn’t be pursued, but procurement must be based on a rigorous analysis of conflicts and trends, not just a quest for leading-edge concepts or wonder weapons.

Australia’s loose strategic framework is leveraged to be all things to everyone, all at once, so using a ‘how, when, where and for how long’ definition of higher capability creates inconsistency. Useful procurement has occurred without this, too. Defence procurements on near-ministerial edict have proven as effective as long-drawn-out acquisitions, and in some cases—such as with the C-17A Globemaster—only one strong option is available to fulfil a unique defence need anyway.

There are two ways to resolve this inadequacy of definition. The first is to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of capability. The second is to accept that most military capabilities are operationally ambivalent.

For the first task, Stephen Biddle provides perhaps some of the most rigorous studies of military capability in state and non-state warfare. Biddle’s understanding of capability is broader and far more profound than Defence’s definition, though he concedes it’s still a work in progress. His later work even considers social issues, such the marked effect internal politics among non-state actors can have on military capability. This may be too complex a theory for easy application to a bureaucracy, but it’s still worth considering his conclusions. If nothing else, it raises an important point: where is the focus on non-technical factors when we discuss capability?

As for the operational ambivalence of military capabilities, we can look to the past and the present. The rediscovery of self-propelled anti-aircraft weapons—which the Australian Defence Force has always neglected—to help defeat the drone threat in Ukraine is an excellent case study. Initially designed for the Cold War, these systems are highly effective against off-the-shelf, military-grade drones they were never planned to counter. The DSR ignored this lesson, so something is amiss. Another example is the use of ADF maritime patrol capability to provide surveillance support to ground troops in urban operations in Iraq. Imagination and permission are the only limitations to employing military capability. In many cases, those in combat won’t even seek permission.

A capability’s effectiveness is not decided solely by its technological sophistication. It may be that we need a capability that can’t technically be ‘optimally employed’ in a particular conflict, because that is moot if it gives combatants the best chance of success in the worst environment. Capabilities don’t care if they ‘project forward’, ‘manoeuvre littorally’, ‘partner with allies’, ‘fight for shared values’ or sit in the splendid isolation of continental defence. To use an adage, ‘If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.’

We can discuss capability without a solely technical lens. Asking what we want the ADF to do is necessary to stabilise deeply polarised capability debates, which are too often narrow and ill-informed, including no broader consideration of capability.

The geographic fixation of Australian strategic thought could also be recast to provide a new perspective in the capability debate. It looms as a strategic constant of Tolkienian magnitude (one to rule them all … you know the rest). Geography matters greatly, but so do policy, tactics and strategy. Geography doesn’t tell us what to do; it provides limits and opportunities.

Our understanding of military capability is too constrained to face the realities of warfare, and it lacks the nuance of a thorough approach to justification and acquisition. We need to be deeply aware of this deficiency.

That we have a mostly undebated strategic approach is grounds for concern. We are setting down a road with fewer forks than before, and while it may be the right path, that is not readily apparent. This vacuity is symptomatic of Australia’s historical difficulty in acknowledging the massive uncertainties involved in war. In the past, alliances transferred this grand strategic risk to others, but those times are likely passing. A greater diversity of ideas in this most difficult of times would be prudent, and, at the very least, we must improve public understanding of the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ so we can strengthen the ‘how’ and ‘how much’.