Our special forces and the next white paper

Australian Special Forces soldiers and Afghan National Police Special Response Team members board an American Chinook helicopter at the airfield in Tarin Kot.

To look at recent defence white papers you wouldn’t know that Australia’s special forces (SF) had been deeply involved in the 9/11 wars and have suffered half the killed in action losses. Indeed, looking across the 1994, 2000, 2009 and 2013 white papers, the post-Cold War era seemingly continues as far as our SF are concerned. The reality is starkly different. The SF have become a highly valued, well-resourced and sizeable part of the ADF force structure. For this to continue—and the strategic threat environment suggests it should—the next white paper needs to include a considered discussion of the role and future shape of our SF.

Today’s SF force structure is a response to the non-state actor, violent extremist network threat. Before the 9/11 attacks, the SF was a boutique arm, typically intended to undertake long range, long duration surveillance and reconnaissance tasks. But the demands of combat operations during the last decade have transformed the way SF are now used operationally, especially in three areas: working with friendly airpower to win wars, the tight integration of operations and intelligence and the return to favour of combat advisers. Read more

Vietnam’s foreign policy tightrope

Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of Vietnam

Vietnam’s new foreign policy approach, which some analysts have labelled ‘more friends, fewer enemies’, reflects its precarious position as a bird on the wire caught between China and the United States.

In the past few months, Vietnamese officials have held a number of high-level meetings with leaders of both states. At the end of July, President Truong Tan Sang travelled to Washington to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership with President Barack Obama, highlighting the improved relations between the former foes under America’s increasingly Asia-focused strategy. A little over a month later, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and reiterated the Vietnamese Party and State’s long-lasting and consistent policy of consolidating and strengthening neighbourliness and cooperation with China. Read more

Reader response: is Australia a pivotal power?

Judging by his output, ASPI’s Anthony Bergin likes nothing more than to test ideas in relation to Australia’s strategic positioning. His recent proposition that Australia is not so much a ‘middle power’ but a ‘pivotal power’ is a case in point.

Bergin’s argument is that the common strategic descriptor for Australia as a ‘middle power’ doesn’t accurately reflect its military size or capability, the size of its economy or its strategic reach. In each of these he is correct.

However, the term ‘pivotal power’ is complex and has some existing meaning. One understanding has it meaning more than just being relatively strategically strong. One such approach defines it not as a quantitative assessment of strategic power but as being a geographic arbiter. Read more

Nuclear deterrence, what is it good for?

A nuclear-related surface shot is fired at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1956.Prof Paul Dibb’s revisiting of exactly how close we came to nuclear war in 1983 reminded me of my own small role in propelling the world towards nuclear Armageddon at that time.

Armed with the arrogance of youth, in the same year I’d become extremely disillusioned with the calibre of the lecturers in Arts/Law at Sydney University. I had finally been forced to recognise reality: they weren’t going to lift their game. Naturally they protested that things would ‘change for the better’ and that the course really would become ‘interesting’; but the die was cast. I decided to head over to the UK, consoling myself that my time hadn’t been entirely wasted.

After all, if University was a fountain of knowledge I’d often drunk deeply at the well. I’d also obtained a commission in the Army Reserve. Indeed, often the two activities didn’t appear to be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, I decided the time had come to better myself. Careful perusal of the available photographic evidence (this was in the days before the Internet) confirmed beyond doubt that British Cavalry uniforms were far more fetching than the rather drab Australian variety. So I decided to wangle myself a transfer to the Westminster Dragoons. Read more

China’s Achilles’ heel in Southeast Asia

Dying Achilles Sculpture in Achilleion Gardens, Corfu.Recent commentary on US President Barack Obama’s last minute cancellation of his trips to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Bali and the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Brunei overwhelmingly reflected classical ‘zero-sum’ thinking. The common reading is that the credibility of the US ‘pivot’ has been further undermined, and that China used Obama’s absence to boost its position with the ASEAN nations.

However, international politics hardly follows such binary dynamics. Indeed, for many reasons, Beijing’s goal to bolster its position in Southeast Asia at Washington’s expense is very likely to fail. First, regional leaders understand very well that one cancelled presidential trip to Southeast Asia doesn’t equal a change in the US’s Asia strategy. Key regional powers such as Malaysia and Indonesia acknowledged Obama’s imperative to stay at home. Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry attended both meetings and delivered the key message Southeast Asian countries wanted to hear: America expects China and its neighbours to peacefully resolve their territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Read more

Is Australia a pivotal power?

My former ASPI colleague Carl Ungerer has pointed out that Doc Evatt first used the term ‘middle power’ at the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations in April 1945. In a recent op-ed I questioned the accuracy and utility of this label for Australia. My thoughts were prompted by a new international grouping launched last month known as MIKTA on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly by a meeting of foreign ministers of ‘middle-power’ countries. But you’ll have to go the foreign ministry websites of South Korea and Turkey to find out about it, because there’s nothing on the DFAT or the Australian Foreign Minister’s websites.

‘MIKTA’ is an acronym for an informal collaboration platform between Mexico, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Turkey and Australia. According to South Korea’s foreign ministry:

[a]t the meeting, the five foreign ministers shared the view that in the current situation where challenges facing the international community are becoming more diverse and complex, middle-power countries, which have the willingness and capabilities to contribute to the development of the international community, need to create a cooperation mechanism to address the challenges. They agreed to hold the meeting of middle-power countries’ foreign ministers on a regular basis.

Read more

Taiwan: the missing piece in the rebalance puzzle

In the wake of the US President’s decision to pull out of any engagements in Asia surrounding the APEC summit in Bali last week, critics of the US rebalance to Asia policy have exploited his absence as evidence of US regional strategic bluster.

For the most part, the Chinese media avoided the temptation of hubris, taking a more conciliatory tone and played up the central role of China’s regional economic engagement at the summit. Chinese leaders will have recalled the abrupt departure by Hu Jintao from the G8 summit in Italy in 2009 as insurrection broke out in troubled Xinjiang.

The US has been very quick off the mark with rebuttals, proclaiming the Asia pivot to be firmly rooted in Washington DC’s foreign policy. Standing in for the President, Secretary of State Kerry’s presence in Bali was a notable exception to his predisposition for the quagmire in the Middle East, viewed by many as another counterweight to the Asia pivot. Read more

ARF, and how to change the tune of the cyber debate

There’s no underestimating the significance of the first ever ASEAN Regional Forum workshop on cyber security held in China, which I was fortunate enough to be part of. So frequently the accused protagonist in cyberspace, China was now co-hosting a workshop with Malaysia to try and work through potential cooperative paths to deal with cyber challenges. Or at least that’s what the premise of the workshop was.

The title of the workshop; ‘Measures to Enhance Cyber Security—Legal and Cultural Aspects’ hinted that this was going to be a challenging discussion—China has different views to many western nations on how the Internet should be governed. Its preference is a strict, state-led legal framework, and discussions of culture are always going to be polarising. In his opening remarks to the workshop Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang said:

Everything is connected in the cyber world. In the face of the challenges of cyber security, countries are all interdependent in a ‘community of common destiny’, and no country can stay immune… To tackle cyber security challenges requires the coordinated efforts of the international community.

Read more

Kenya, partitioning Somalia, and al-Shabaab’s response

Soldiers of the Somali National Army (SNA) walk at dusk under a rising crescent moon near the outskirts of Afgooye, a town to the west of Somali capital Mogadishu. On the third day of the SNA’s joint offensive with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), dubbed “Operation Free Shabelle”, troops have advanced to almost two kilometres outside the strategically important town, having captured along the way swathes of territory previously under the control of the Al Shabaab insurgent group. Photo ID 515019. 24/05/2012. Somalia. UN Photo/Stuart Price

The result of al-Shabaab’s gruesome strike in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi has been international condemnation. It will be followed by a beef up in security around Kenya (this is already happening), and more resources will be pumped in the Global War on Terror’s East Africa/Somalia theatre (this might already be happening). Not much is being said about the reasons that al-Shabaab decided to strike in Kenya, save for that it is in retaliation of Kenya’s support for the Federal Government of Somalia in its fight against al-Shabaab. But Kenya was a target of al-Shabaab activity for a range of reasons beyond that.

Somalia is often painted as the failed state par excellence, and currently ranks as the most failed state on this planet—more ‘failed’ than other warring hotspots such as the Congo, Sudan, Chad, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet this ranking doesn’t tell us much about Somalia. In particular, it doesn’t tell us why and how Somalia got to where it is, and it doesn’t tell us anything about existing governance structures in the country. And contrary to news reports, there are existing governance structures in Somalia. Al-Shabaab is one of them and the Federal Government of Somalia claims to be one of them. Read more

Of aid and wombats

Pallets of emergency aid supplies lined up and ready to be dispatched to a No. 36 Squadron C-17A Globemaster for delivery to cyclone ravaged Fiji in 2012. In ordering administrative upheaval in Foreign Affairs and Trade, Tony Abbott finally killed off an aid consensus that had lasted for a brief political moment, while quietly breaking an Iron Law of politics that ruled for seven decades.

The Iron Law was that when the Coalition was in power, the junior party in the form of the wombat tribe (the Country-turned-National Party) always got Trade. But no longer. That change marks an interesting turn in Australian trade and international thinking, which the next column will return to.

First, let’s adopt the standard Canberra custom and follow the money and the power. In integrating AusAID into Foreign, the Abbott government is trying to bring the cash and the cachet closer together: AusAID has had the money while Foreign has had the power. The mismatch was getting out of hand and something had to change. Read more