ASPI suggests

How does the region perceive the US pivot? Here’s one perspective from Jakarta:

Asia would welcome a US policy that will, of necessity, be vastly different from the 2011 pivot, and one that is more realistic and less gung-ho.

The authors are senior editors of The Jakarta Post, one a former Ambassador to Australia, both of whom were educated in the US.

Strategist contributor Iain Henry responds to Harry White in The National Interest on why the US shouldn’t double down on the Senkaku Islands. Iain argues that a US security guarantee could provoke rather than deter China and might embolden Japan to escalate the issue further.

US special forces recently conducted simultaneous counterterrorism raids against Islamist terrorists in Somalia and Libya. James Kitfield over at Defense One has five takeaways from the special operations raids, including this point on the relationship between the US and Pentagon:

The fact that both of the recent strikes were made by U.S. Special Operations Forces, and not CIA paramilitary units, suggests to some observers that the center of gravity for counterterrorism may be shifting.

Read more

The logic and ethics of nuclear reliance

Paper cranes (Senbazuru) at Hiroshima and Nagasaki peace memorial in Ueno Park, TokyoPaul Dibb’s account of the 1983 Able Archer incident (and blog posts here and here) is disturbing—as much for the questions it doesn’t raise as for the details of the misperceptions that nearly led to a nuclear exchange. His account does two things well: it highlights some of the dangers inherent in nuclear deterrence towards the end of the Cold War, at a time when numerous crisis stability mechanisms were in place, and it draws out lessons for the evolving US–China relationship. But it doesn’t ask the most important questions. First, is continuing reliance on nuclear deterrence by the nuclear weapon possessors and their allies, including Australia, a wise strategic choice? And, second, are officials, political leaders, and analysts being honest with themselves and the public regarding the ethical dilemmas associated with nuclear weapons?

 As Dibb admits in his article, ‘we shouldn’t be complacent when it comes to contemplating the risk of nuclear weapons being used one day’. In my opinion, failing to at least raise these questions is an example of just such complacency.

Deterrence proponents justify the retention of nuclear weapons using the theory that they help prevent major conventional wars—wars that could engulf the world, as happened twice last century, causing immense destruction and suffering. It’s often argued that these weapons are a necessary evil, that we’re all safer with them than we would be without them. But is this actually true, or is it part of a mythology that has been built and sustained by influential nuclear proponents? The historic record of the nuclear age, which is being painstakingly pieced together using freedom of information requests, provides concrete evidence that the world has come extremely close to nuclear catastrophe on numerous occasions. The record also shows that most of these incidents have been kept hushed up for decades due to official concern that they could undermine public faith in nuclear deterrence. Is this responsible and ethical behaviour? Surely not—and those who continue to claim that nuclear weapons, including weapons on high alert, pose acceptable levels of risk need to take a long hard look at their arguments. Read more

Process makes perfect: easy steps to white paper happiness

At the Sea Power Conference in Sydney I set out a number of steps that the new Government should take in developing the promised 2015 defence white paper. In my last post, I discussed what white papers need in terms of content but here I’d like to focus on process. Let’s start with the basics: government should emphasise a strong commitment to what could be called the ‘five Cs’: base work on classified assessments; use Cabinet as a direction-setting forum; make choices; consult widely within official circles; and finally, engage the broader community.

Using classified assessments as the basis for decision-making is a critical way to focus government on the difficult and hard-edged judgements about strategic developments. Equally, governments need access to realistic assessments about the strengths and weaknesses of ADF capabilities. The unclassified white paper statement explains policy to a wide audience, but it should only be the final stage of a more through-going process. Likewise, Cabinet’s deep involvement is important, to make sure that key minsters have the opportunity to talk issues through and decide on outcomes they’re prepared to commit to. Read more

Not dead yet: White Paper 2013 clings on

Australian War Ships sail through Sydney Harbour and pass by HMAS Leeuwin to be reviewed by Her Excellency, The Honourable Quentin Bryce, AC, CVO, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, during the International Fleet Review 2013.

Speaking at the Sea Power Conference earlier this week, an apology was necessary to Shakespeare when I mangled his line in Julius Caesar: ‘I come to bury the 2013 White Paper, not to praise it.’ The organisers asked me to evaluate the White Paper and to say what parts of it might survive the change of government. In this, the first of two blog posts, I set out the positives and negatives of the 2013 statement. In the second post I’ll offer some thoughts on how the Abbott government should develop a new defence white paper.

Released in May, the 2013 defence white paper always seemed destined to have a short shelf-life. We knew the government was heading for a September 14 election. Opinion polls suggested a Labor defeat was likely which meant the white paper was likely to appear as a legacy statement. Read more

1983: on the brink (part 2)

President Ronald Reagan and Oleg GordievskyThis post is part two of an extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released later today.

As I explained in yesterday’s post, the world came uncomfortably close to a nuclear war in 1983, over nothing more sinister than a NATO exercise that was misinterpreted by a highly-suspicious Soviet Union. It’s worth understanding what happened then—and what could have been done to avoid it—when we contemplate the growing strategic competition between the nuclear-armed United States and China in our region today.

The big lesson to be learned here is how a country such as America, with all the vast intelligence resources it poured into the Soviet military target, could get it so badly wrong. The fact is that the failure by the US to interpret intelligence indicators and warnings accurately in 1983 could have led to full-scale nuclear war. Misreading Soviet overreactions as being nothing more than a scare tactic may also have led the West to underestimate another threat—a Soviet pre-emptive nuclear strike, either as a result of miscalculation or by design to alter ‘the correlation of forces’ decisively in its favour. Read more

1983: on the brink (part 1)

Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov during his September 9, 1983 press conference on the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007

This post is part one of a two part extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released tomorrow.

The last crisis of 1983 was one of the most dangerous episodes of the Cold War. At the moment of maximum stress in the US-Soviet relationship, following a sequence of events that included the shooting down of a Korean civilian airliner by Soviet air defences, and a NATO command post exercise called ‘Able Archer’.

During 7-11 November 1983, the NATO exercise practised nuclear release procedures and was the culmination of NATO’s annual ‘Autumn Forge’ exercise from August to mid-November, which involved 60,000 NATO and US troops. But the 1983 version included crucial new changes. First, it was planned to involve high-level officials, including the US Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Second, the exercise included a practice drill that took NATO forces through high spectrum nuclear warfare and a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons against the Warsaw Pact. Moreover, the procedures and message formats used in the transition from conventional to nuclear war were different from those used before and in this exercise the NATO forces went through all of the alert phases from normal readiness to war alert. Read more

For the bookshelf: ‘Arsenals of Folly: the making of the nuclear arms race’ and ‘The making of the atomic bomb’

Arsenals of Folly: the making of the nuclear arms race (2007) and The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), by Richard Rhodes.

Tomorrow ASPI will publish a short paper by Professor Paul Dibb which describes the 1983 nuclear war scare. (Yes, there was such a thing, and if you haven’t heard this story before, be ready to be surprised by just how dire the situation became.) Later today The Strategist will publish an extract from that paper, and we’ll follow up tomorrow with some reflections on the danger of ignoring nuclear weapons in our current strategic assessments and planning.

After reading Paul’s paper, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down what I think is a pretty good single volume on the evolution of the American and Soviet Cold War nuclear arsenals. Written by Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly was published in 2007 and was the third in Rhodes’ ‘doomsday trilogy’ about nuclear weapons, following books on the atomic bombs of WWII and the hydrogen bomb of the 1950s. Read more

Happy Birthday Navy!

Sydney Opera HouseWell, she certainly doesn’t look a hundred. Indeed, it’s rather more as if the Navy’s developed something of the sophisticated allure of an older woman; after all, she was painting her ships 50 shades of grey long before an erotic book popularised the look.

As well as that, the spectacle of a good water view has always possessed its own attraction. They never go out of style, and that’s why no one was really fooled, during the recent election campaign, when the politicians pretended the fleet was going to be moved north for ‘operational reasons’. Everyone knew they had their greedy little eyes on the picture-perfect Sydney Harbour-side property bonanza that would become available. And who can blame them! Read more

Translating Maritime Confidence Building Measures into action

I was in Malaysia last week at the 2nd Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum, and on Friday I reported on the outcomes of the Conference on Maritime Confidence Building Measures (MCBMs) in the South China Sea that ASPI hosted in Sydney in August this year.

The Sydney Conference was attended by 62 participants from 16 different member countries of the East Asia Summit. The objective was to develop actionable proposals for prospective MCBMs for the South China Sea (SCS). As Gareth Evans’ speech last Wednesday shows, the SCS is blessed with a complex set of issues that includes territorial disputes, resource competition and no consensus on what freedom of navigation means. The major challenge is to build a stable maritime regime that provides for good order at sea, eases tensions and reduces the risk of conflict. Read more

The intractable South China Sea

South China Sea from 30000 ftThe South China Sea is ‘probably the world’s single most complex, and intractable, international relations problem’. Gareth Evans, in proclaiming the South China Sea as the biggest and most complex headache, didn’t mention any of the other contenders. Iran’s nuclear program, North Korea and Syria jumped to my mind as I heard the  line from Australia’s longest serving Labor Foreign Minister and the President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group.

As a man who wields words with precision and force, Evans would have considered all of those and more before giving the South China Sea the dark honour of being the ‘single most complex’ issue confronting the globe. And he’d enjoy arguing the merits of the various cases. Read more