Tag Archive for: United States of America

AUKUS Update #1: May 2022

On the 16th of September 2021, the leaders of Australia, the UK and the US announced the creation of a new trilateral security partnership called ‘AUKUS’—Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The three national leaders stated, ‘We will foster deeper integration of security and defense-related science, technology, industrial bases, and supply chains. And in particular, we will significantly deepen cooperation on a range of security and defense capabilities.’

At a time of rapidly increasing strategic uncertainty, when it’s increasingly clear that authoritarian regimes are willing to use military power to achieve their goals, it’s important to monitor the implementation of AUKUS so that governments and the public can assess whether it’s achieving the goal of accelerating the fielding of crucial military technologies.

To track the implementation of AUKUS, ASPI will publish regular updates on progress. This is the first of those updates.

Meeting Antarctica’s diplomatic challenges: Joint approaches for Australia and the United States

This report describes current security and environmental policy challenges related to Antarctica and proposes options for Australia and the United States to address them. It assesses the current and potential future actions of strategic competitors like China and Russia, and proposes policy responses.

It suggests ways in which the US and Australian governments can work more closely to protect and promote the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), advancing support for an approach to governance that the two nations have felt for decades is in their respective national interests. This requires both countries (as well as others) to make a clear-eyed assessment of current and future fault lines and move more quickly to address political and environmental challenges that have implications well beyond Antarctica. In particular, this involves determining when it’s necessary to counter the ambitions of strategic competitors, such as China and Russia, in the Antarctic context, and when cooperation may be the more appropriate objective.

The current Antarctic governance regime, while far from perfect… achieves a great deal that’s in the long-term national interests of Australia and the US. The ATS shouldn’t be dismissed as out of date; it can still be effective in addressing core regional concerns of both countries. Both countries can use their influence to insist on the implementation by all countries of ATS rules and can invoke those rules to fight for environmental protection and policies that support scientists. It’s unlikely that a more effective set of treaties could be negotiated today. Australia and the US should spend more time at both senior and working levels to coordinate positions and on outreach to other governments on Antarctic issues.

What is AUKUS and what is it not?

What IS the new AUKUS partnership between the US, the UK and Australia? How does it fit with the Quad, ASEAN and other new forums like the government-tech Sydney Dialogue?

This new ASPI Insight sets out what AUKUS is—a technology accelerator that’s’ about shifting the military balance in the Indo Pacific. Just as importantly, it sets out what AUKUS it isn’t, to reset some of the discussion that has made some assumptions here. AUKUS isn’t a new alliance structure, a competitor to the Quad between Australia, India, Japan and the US, or a signal of decreased commitment to ASEAN forums by the AUKUS members.

And the Insight proposes some focus areas for implementation of this new ‘minilateral’ technology accelerator, including having  a single empowered person in each nation charged with implementation and ‘obstacle busting’. This is to break through the institutional, political and corporate permafrost that has prevented such rapid technological adoption by our militaries in recent decades. As is the case with James Miller in the US, this person should report to their national leader, not from inside the defence bureaucracies of the three nations.

On purpose and urgency, the report identifies a simple performance metric for AUKUS implementers over the next three years. On 20 January 2025, when the Australian prime minister calls whoever is the US president on that day, AUKUS has become such a successful piece of the furniture, with tangible results that have generated broad institutional, political and corporate support that, regardless of how warm or testy this leaders’ phone call is (think Turnbull-Trump in January 2016), AUKUS’s momentum continues.

Collaborative and agile. Intelligence community collaboration insights from the United Kingdom and the United States

The central aim of this report is to generate insights from the US and UK intelligence communities’ collaboration efforts. It identifies insights so that members of Australia’s national intelligence community, including the ONI, can use them to enhance the community’s collaboration and agility for the purpose of giving Australian decision-makers an insight edge over others. We acknowledge that agencies must contextualise those insights to Australia’s specific circumstances, and we’ve sought to do some of that in this report. The report isn’t intended as an academic think piece but as a guide-and goad-to actions that can advance and protect Australia’s wellbeing, prosperity and security.

This report doesn’t seek to second-guess the internal insights that it explores. Instead, it takes an external perspective, informed by experience in relevant agencies and by perspectives from intelligence-community partners and analysts in the UK and the US.

ANZUS at 70: The past, present and future of the alliance

The ANZUS Treaty was signed on 1 September 1951 in San Francisco. It was the product of energetic Australian lobbying to secure a formal US commitment to Australian and New Zealand security. At the time, the shape of Asian security after World War II was still developing. Canberra worried that a ‘soft’ peace treaty with Japan might one day allow a return of a militarised regime to threaten the region.

ANZUS at 70 explores the past, present and future of the alliance relationship, drawing on a wide range of authors with deep professional interest in the alliance. Our aim is to provide lively and comprehensible analysis of key historical points in the life of the treaty and indeed of the broader Australia–US bilateral relationship, which traces its defence origins back to before World War I.

ANZUS today encompasses much more than defence and intelligence cooperation. Newer areas of collaboration include work on cybersecurity, space, supply chains, industrial production, rare earths, emerging science and technology areas such as quantum computing, climate change and wider engagement with countries and institutions beyond ANZUS’s initial scope or intention.

The treaty remains a core component of wider and deeper relations between Australia and the US. This study aims to show the range of those ties, to understand the many and varied challenges we face today and to understand how ANZUS might be shaped to meet future events.

Watch the launch webinar here.

To deter the PRC …

This Strategic Insights report is the first in a series of essays, workshops and events seeking to better understand the nature of deterrence, particularly from the viewpoint of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The series is a joint project between the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI).

Over the coming months, ASPI and CASI, along with our research associates, will examine the concept of deterrence, how both democratic countries and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) approach deterrence, what liberal democracies are doing to deter China and what China is doing to deter them, and assess the impacts of those efforts.

The series will culminate in an in-person conference that will put forward policy options for Australia, the US and our allies and partners. These publications will draw heavily from original PRC and PLA documents, as well as interviews and personal experiences, to help understand the framework that the PRC uses when it thinks about what we call here ‘deterrence’.

Stronger Together: US force posture in Australia’s north—a US perspective on Australia’s strategic geography

Stronger together: US force posture in Australia’s north—a US perspective on Australia’s strategic geography

This report argues why, and analyses how, Australia’s defence force capabilities and strategic geography can enable US force posture initiatives in the Indo-Pacific to promote greater regional cooperation in ways that advance US and Australian national interests.

Lieutenant Colonel Hanks writes that there are ‘practical and tangible areas for US-Australia cooperation and growth which include: 1) expanding the Australian defence industrial base while securing and hardening supply chains; 2) increasing US Army force posture in northern Australia; 3) increasing multinational training opportunities; and 4) in conjunction with Australia, expanding the defence partnership with Indonesia.’ ‘The US now relies on increased cooperation from partners and allies to regain the initiative from the PRC in the Indo-Pacific. Australia’s defence strategy and policies are better aligned with US defence strategy and policies today, than ever before.’

The report argues that military modernization alone will not effectively expand the competitive space and disrupt PRC grey-zone decision cycles. Thinking asymmetrically, Australia can use its strategic geography and defence capabilities to enable US force posture initiatives in the Indo-Pacific to promote greater regional cooperation and, through greater deterrent posture and capability, reduce the risk of conflict.

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist

North of 26° south and the security of Australia’, a new report by ASPI’s The North and Australia’s Security Program, presents a series of articles by a range of trusted and up and coming authors exploring the continued importance of Northern Australia to national security and defence strategy.

The last time real attention was paid to what our regional environment means for defence in the north of Australia was in Paul Dibb’s 1986 Review of Defence Capabilities and the 1987 Defence White Paper. Following that work, the Australian government invested billions of dollars in bases and bare base infrastructure in the north, with a real focus on the Northern Territory.

The strategic environment since then has changed dramatically.

First, regional nations continue to get richer and more capable, including in their ability to project military power within and beyond their own territories—meaning that near-region partners like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are becoming more important in Australia’s security and diplomacy.

Second, great-power competition and potential conflict have returned to the forefront of world affairs. China and the US are now actively engaged in deep strategic competition and arm-wrestling over political, economic and strategic relationships and technological dominance across our Indo-Pacific region.

There are credible prospects of a major military conflict between these great powers over the next couple of decades, which, if it happens, will most likely spill beyond a bilateral conflict into a wider regional war.

Northern Australia’s dispersed critical infrastructure and primary resources remain vulnerable to traditional and non-traditional national security threats. Modern weapon systems put these resources within striking distance of conventional weapons, and they’re also susceptible to hybrid warfare strategies like that used by Russia in Ukraine.

While Australia has a long-term defence capability plan, we need to continue to test our assumptions about the defence of northern Australia and the north’s significance to national security. On paper, government has made a strong declaratory commitment to northern Australia. But there is evidence of a widening gap between declaratory policy and Defence’s activities in the North.

This report provides much needed contemporary analysis of the criticality of the North to Australia’s national security and defence.

America’s ‘Maginot Line’: A study of static border security in an age of agile and innovative threats

Borders and border security are once again becoming increasingly important to the nation state. Many take a default position that our coastline is our border and that border security involves merely police, security guards and immigration or customs officials. But Australia’s geography no longer provides the physical barrier from the outside world that it once did.

This strategy provides a case study analysis of post-9/11 changes to US border security policies. It examines each of America’s different borders: the friendly northern borders, maritime borders, and the militarised southern border. It provides recommendations for Australia’s border security.

Preserving the knowledge edge: Surveillance cooperation and the US–Australia alliance in Asia

The US–Australia alliance is the bedrock of Australia’s defence policy. Successive governments have looked to the alliance for access to military technology, intelligence and training, as well as a promise of support against direct threats to Australia.

However, Australia, the US and other regional allies today face a rapidly changing strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific. The American ‘rebalance’ to Asia represents recognition by the US that it needs to give greater priority to its management of the changing balance—an effort firmly endorsed by President Obama in his address at theUniversity of Queensland.

Acting alone, Australia couldn’t possibly achieve the level of awareness that the evolving strategic environment demands. In alliance, it has the resources to ‘fill the gaps’ that remain in the US’s coverage of the region. This is why the C4ISR relationship with the US in the Indo-Pacific provides such a critical benefit to both members in the alliance. US–Australian C4ISR cooperation will be essential to the success of the US rebalance, but also to Australia’s own immediate security in a strategic environment in which more and more countries operate high-technology platforms that once used to be the preserve of Australia and its allies.

Tag Archive for: United States of America

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