Gamechanger: Australian leadership for all-season air access to Antarctica

Next year, the Australian Government will decide on whether to commit funding for a proposed year-round, paved aerodrome near the Australian Davis research station in East Antarctica. An all-weather, year-round, paved runway near Davis would have huge positive impacts on Antarctic science and logistics in East Antarctica, where there are no equivalent facilities. It would be the only paved runway in Antarctica.

As with any major piece of infrastructure development, there’ll be inevitable environmental impacts from the construction and operation of the Davis aerodrome. However, we believe that with care, it should be possible to design, construct and operate a facility that satisfies both operational requirements and environmental obligations under the Madrid Protocol and relevant Australian legislation.

If Australia doesn’t proceed with the aerodrome, another country may step into our shoes and take a similar proposal forward. It might be a country with lower standards of environmental assessment and a lesser track record of environmental protection in Antarctica. The Davis aerodrome project requires long-term funding and political commitment.

Failing to proceed with the proposal would weaken our influence in Antarctica: it would allow other states to take advantage of the opportunity for logistical and scientific leadership in East Antarctica. The proposed Davis aerodrome will increase Australia’s strategic weight in Antarctica, where we claim 42% of the continent.

The impact of quantum technologies on secure communications

This ASPI report examines the impact of quantum technologies on secure communications. It provides an overview of the key technologies and the status of the field in Australia and internationally (including escalating recent developments in both the US and China), and captures counterpart US, UK and Canadian reports and recommendations to those nations’ defence departments that have recently been released publicly.

The report is structured into six sections: an introduction that provides a stand-alone overview and sets out both the threat and the opportunity of quantum technologies for communications security, and more detailed sections that span quantum computing, quantum encryption, the quantum internet, and post-quantum cryptography. The last section of the report makes five substantive recommendations in the Australian context that are implementable and in the national interest.

A key message on quantum technologies relates to urgency. Escalating international progress is opening a widening gap in relation to Australia’s status in this field. It is critical that, in addition to its own initiatives, the Defence Department transitions from a largely watching brief on progress across the university sector and start-up companies to a leadership role—to coordinate, resource and harness the full potential of a most capable Australian quantum technologies community to support Defence’s objectives.

Island voices and Covid-19: Vulnerability and resilience Views from The Strategist

This Strategic Insights report is being published as part of an ASPI project that focuses on the vulnerabilities of Indo-Pacific island states in the Covid-19 era. It presents a series of views on ways that insiders and external observers have viewed the vulnerabilities and resilience of island countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

All of these contributions have appeared as posts on The Strategist. They don’t try to offer a sequential account of events or perceptions but represent a collection of responses to the crisis. The authors were not asked to address a single issue but, rather, were encouraged to focus on issues of relevance to them. The result is a mosaic rather than a portrait of nearly a year of living with the tensions posed by the pandemic. Two key themes do tend to dominate this mosaic. One concerns the way vulnerabilities are expressed as challenges. The second identifies the opportunities that resilience can create.

Next step in the step up: The ADF’s role in building health security in Pacific Island states

The ADF has long had an important role in providing humanitarian assistance to Pacific island countries (PICs). The force has extraordinary capabilities—people, expertise, training and equipment—in delivering necessary assistance quickly and efficiently.

From Australia’s perspective, the ADF is one of our most important agencies in engaging with our PIC partners, particularly in helping them to develop capabilities to address a range of security challenges. In Australia’s new strategic environment, the ADF can also play an important role in helping to build regional health security as part of a new phase in Australia’s Pacific Step-up.

This paper argues that the Australian Government should consider a new role for the ADF in the Pacific through developing mutually beneficial enduring military health partnerships.3 That would involve the regular rotation of ADF health professionals through partner medical facilities where they would have the opportunity to gain unique frontline experience from local experts, while also sharing their own knowledge and skills. The mutuality of benefits inherent in such an arrangement means that they shouldn’t be considered as traditional humanitarian assistance.

An enhanced role for the ADF in regional health security, properly structured, might ultimately come to be seen alongside the Pacific Patrol Boat Program as a successful example of mutually beneficial partnerships between the ADF and our Pacific neighbours.

Coming ready or not: Hypersonic weapons

This report analyses the future impact that hypersonic weaponry will have on global affairs.

Hypersonic systems include anything that travels faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. We may be on the cusp of seeing hypersonic weapons proliferate around the world, with Russia, China and the US all in the process of developing and testing them. By 2030 they are likely to be in the inventory of all of the major powers. And Australia might well join them – we have some world class researchers and have been active in joint programs with the US for over 20 years. The government has added hypersonic weapons to its defence acquisition plan. It’s a topic we should be interested in and better informed about.

It’s always hard to predict exactly how much will change when a new technology enters the battlefield, but Australia is investing tens of billions of dollars in advanced sensors and combat systems to defend its surface vessels against subsonic and supersonic weapons. It’s not clear that they will be effective enough against hypersonic weapons. On the plus side for our defence forces, hypersonic strike weapons with ranges of thousands of kilometres could return a strike capability to the ADF that has been missing since the F-111 was retired a decade ago.

There are some strategic stability issues to be wrestled with as well. The US is developing a ‘prompt global strike’ system that would allow it hit a target pretty much anywhere on Earth in 20 minutes. Russian and Chinese systems are being developed with a nuclear or conventional warhead capability. The combination of short warning times and nuclear warhead ambiguity is potentially highly destabilising.

After Covid-19 Volume 3: Voices from federal parliament

For this volume of ASPI’s After Covid-19 series, we asked Australia’s federal parliamentarians to consider the world after the crisis and discuss policy and solutions that could drive Australian prosperity through one of the most difficult periods in living memory. The 49 contributions in this volume are the authentic voices of our elected representatives.

For policymakers, this volume offers a window into thinking from all sides of the House of Representatives and Senate, providing insights to inform their work in creating further policy in service of the Australian public. For the broader public, this is an opportunity to see policy fleshed out by politicians on their own terms and engage with policy thinking that isn’t often seen on the front pages of major news outlets.

The new space age – Four Corners

The new space age: The race to colonise outer space

“It’s not just a boom. It’s a frenzy. Suddenly every government department is a space department in one way or another. All industry sectors somehow are dabbling in space…It truly has become a frenzy.” Space academic

Sixty years ago, the world watched in wonder at the dawning of the space age. Humankind’s first flights into space and the landing on the moon showed the seemingly impossible was achievable.

Now we are on the brink of a new space revolution.

ASPI’s Dr Malcolm Davis is interviewed for the ABC’s Four Corners special; The new space age.

You can watch the program here: https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/the-new-space-age/12613242.

The Truth about 5g – ABC Four Corners

“If you are not currently working to stop 5G this means you don’t understand it. Nothing else matters anymore.”  Leading activist

Around Australia a vocal band of activists have joined a worldwide protest movement against the arrival of the next generation in wireless technology known as 5G. 

“I don’t want to be a human lab rat. Because that’s what’s happening. They’re just using us to see if it’s going to be okay. And if we die, well, we’ve got so many of us, what does it matter?”  Protestor

Activists claim 5G is an invisible and potentially deadly health hazard, blaming the radiation emitted by the technology for a range of long-term health problems.

ASPI’s Dr Huong Le Thu is interviewed on ABC’s Four Corners special: The truth about 5G

You can watch the program here: https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/the-truth-about-5g/12519392.

2020 Defence Strategic Update & Force Structure Plan

ASPI warmly invites you to view the 2020 Defence Strategic Update Announcement by the Minister for Defence.

When: 12:30pm-1:30pm, Thursday 2 July 2020
Where: Watch live at ASPICanberra

In October 2019 Minister for Defence, Senator the Hon. Linda Reynolds CSC, announced the Defence Department was conducting a strategic review that would reassess the strategic underpinnings of the 2016 Defence White Paper, with the outcomes to be considered by Government in 2020.

Senator Reynolds will make a public address at ASPI that will expand on the announcements made the previous day. Her 30 minute address will offer more detail on the 2020 Force Structure Plan in particular.

The Minister will then be joined by General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Defence Force, and Mr Greg Moriarty, Secretary of Defence, for a panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Peter Jennings, ASPI’s Executive Director.

Watch the announcement here.

Michael Shoebridge on the end of lockdown in Wuhan

After 76 days, the lockdown of Wuhan in China has come to an end.

ASPI’s Michael Shoebridge discusses the ramifications of this decision with Tim Lester on 7 News.