From the archives

It’s another public holiday here in sunny Canberra, but we thought these posts from our archives would be topical to revisit.

First up, submarines: last week saw Cameron Stewart publish articles on the prospects for life extension program for the Collins class submarines. Below is what we had to say about the public statements on the program last year.

Second is a look at Tony Abbott’s view of Australia’s foreign policy in the middle of last year, from a speech he gave to to the Heritage Foundation. Read more

ASPI suggests

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel meet with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo on October 3, 2013. The US and Japan agreed to expand defence cooperation during Secretaries Kerry and Hagel’s visit to Tokyo this week. Hagel said:

Our bilateral defense cooperation, including America’s commitment to the security of Japan, is a critical component of our overall relationship, and to the Obama administration’s rebalance to Asia-Pacific.

And it’s not that hard to see why some people might doubt the Executive’s continued focus on the rebalance: Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer noted the following breakdown for country mention’s in Obama’s UN Speech:

  • Iran 25
  • Syria 20
  • Israel 15
  • Palestine 11
  • China 1
  • Japan 0
  • India 0
  • Koreas 0
  • [Editor’s inclusion: Australia got no mentiones either, and “Asia” was mentioned in passing twice] Read more

Cyber wrap

Online security firm Symantec has released a report detailing the activities of an online ‘hackers-for hire’ group it has dubbed ‘Hidden Lynx’. The company claims the group possesses levels of capability and sophistication not seen in other well-known groups such as APT1. Hidden Lynx is said to essentially operate as an online hacking consultancy. It has been tied to high-level attacks against Google, Adobe, Lockheed Martin and others. The organisation, linked to a base in China, has a history of stealing information that would be beneficial to both government and corporate entities. Interestingly, the report reveals that Australia was one of the top 10 regions targeted by the group.

Telstra has become the first Australian ISP to step up and introduce ‘malware protection technology’ on its internet subscription services to private residences and small businesses. The technology is designed to prevent the spread of botnet malware by preventing personal computers from accessing pre-identified malicious servers. These steps can’t come soon enough, if a report last week by cybersecurity company Trend Micro is anyhting to go by. The report revealed that 32% of targeted cyberattacks in the second quarter of 2013 made use of a compromised computer in Australia. These computers were used, unbeknown to their owners, in cyberattacks after they’d been co-opted by hackers using malware or trojan horses. Read more

Westgate: a means not an end

Smoke rising above the Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, during the recent terrorist attack.

The attacks on Westgate mall in Nairobi provide a number of insights into the decision making cycle of a terrorist organisation, some of which we tend to pay insufficient attention to.  The targeting of a shopping mall was as much a decision about base line tactical and operational aspects of the attack as it was about symbolism and the media attention that the targeting would achieve. While a shopping mall or similar facility offers a number of tactical benefits, such as a delimited and defendable operating environment and a contained target population, in this particular instance it also offered communicative value.

As a representation of the burgeoning middle class in Kenya, and Africa more broadly, frequented as much by foreigners—specifically Westerners—as it was by locals, the shopping mall also served as a representation of the claimed Western influence on African society. It also provided a relatable target for engaging a Western audience. The broader target audience is able to imagine themselves at a shopping mall, and the intended fear and terror is more easily transmittable. Read more

India: the cat comes in from the cold

a Bengal tiger

At a time when Australian attention obsesses with China to the dangerous exclusion of much else, one of the quiet success stories in growing bilateral relations has been between the United States and India. In Washington on 27 September, President Barak Obama and India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held their third summit meeting. The statement from the meeting points to a remarkable growth in ties over the last few years, including the five-fold growth in two-way trade since 2001, which is now worth nearly US$100 billion.

Obama can’t take the credit for initiating closer relations. That break-through moment was when President George W. Bush agreed to establish a civil nuclear power agreement with India. This was a momentous move, tacitly acknowledging India’s arrival as a recognised nuclear weapons power, as well as giving the US an in on Indian civil nuclear power development. Indian and US companies are now developing a nuclear power plant in Gujarat, with more to follow.

Some further points of US-India collaboration emerge from the Obama-Singh statement: Read more

Black Hawk Down: 20 years on

A Ugandan soldier serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) holds a rocket-propelled grenade at sunrise, on the frontline in Maslah Town, on the northern city limit of Mogadishu.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of recent history’s best known small-scale battle, immortalised in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down. An attempt by a small US special operations force to apprehend two of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid’s lieutenants went disastrously wrong when militiamen shot down two US helicopters. The result was a running fight that cost the lives of 18 US service personnel, two UN peacekeepers and hundreds (exact numbers are unknown) of Somali militia.

Less well known is the context in which the battle took place and what its outcomes mean for stabilisation operations and the fight against extremists like al-Shabaab today. An amalgam of two former European colonies, Somalia achieved independence in 1960, and from 1969 was ruled by Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, a brutal dictator backed first by the Soviets and then the United States. After the US withdrew its support, Barre could no longer suppress his many opponents, and in January 1991 fled into exile. He left behind a clan-based civil war which, together with a severe drought, led to a humanitarian crisis. Read more

Four models in search of a tailor

LGM-118A Peacekeeper missile system being tested at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.At a seminar in the Stimson Center in late August, Brad Roberts, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, canvassed the future of US extended deterrence and strategic stability in Northeast Asia. In an attempt to wrestle with the question of whether or not extended deterrence needed further ‘tailoring’ in the region, Roberts sketched out four alternative models for the future. (The associated paper is here (PDF).)

The four models can be briefly summarised as follows:

  1. a continuation of the current system, whereby US nuclear weapons are only forward deployed into the region during times of crisis
  2. a return to the system in vogue during the Cold War, when US nuclear weapons were routinely deployed in the region, both on land and at sea
  3. a NATO-like system whereby allies carry more responsibility for the stationing of warheads and provision of delivery systems, and are engaged in a high-level Nuclear Planning Group
  4. the emergence of a set of independent national nuclear arsenals that replicate British and French proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s. Read more

The South China Sea and Australia’s regional security environment

Scarborough Shoal in the South China SeaThis morning Professor Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University, launched a new National Security College publication on the South China Sea and Australia’s regional security environment, Occasional Paper No 5, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, Canberra, 2 October 2013, to be available here. The following paragraphs are excerpted from Professor Evans’ introductory remarks:

For foreign policy wonks, both practising and academic, foreign correspondents and international lawyers, the South China Sea is the gift that goes on giving. It has everything:

  • multiple states making territorial claims of varying degrees of historical plausibility;
  • competition for hydro-carbon resources;
  • competition for fisheries resources;
  • controversies about freedom of navigation; and
  • a history of potentially explosive physical confrontations over all of the above, which have not all been easy or quick to defuse. Read more

Violent Islamism hasn’t been defeated—there’s more to be done

Boots are aligned against a wall while U.S. Marines (not shown) with 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion (2d LAR), Task Force Mech (TF Mech), Multi-National Force - West (MNF-W), Ground Combat Element (GCE), visit with an Iraqi National Sheik (not shown) to discuss the current situation of his tribe in the Jazeerah Desert, Iraq July 3, 2008. TF Mech is conducting disruption operations in part of Operation Defeat al Qaeda in the North (Op DAN) to deny enemy sanctuary and prevent foreign fighter entry into the area. (U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Sgt. Jason W. Fudge/Released)

Speaking to Marines who’ve borne the brunt of combat in Afghanistan, President Obama said last month that the core of al-Qaeda (AQ) is on the way to defeat. But after the appalling terrorist violence we’ve seen over the last few weeks it’s hard to accept that the forces of Islamist terrorism are really on the run.

Whilst there’s active terrorist groups that aren’t religious, like the Communist Party of India (Maoists) and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the most prolific religious terrorist groups are almost exclusively Islamists.

Many are AQ franchises and affiliates and have their own local battles, but AQ has influence and the AQ brand is still very powerful for these groups. The Director General of the UK Security Service has pointed out that al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel have become more dangerous and we’re seeing increasing levels of cooperation between al-Qaeda groups in various parts of the world. He noted that AQ is active in Syria, and that parts of the Arab world have once more become a permissive environment for al-Qaeda. (See here for an interactive map that shows terrorism according to the number of terrorist incidents, fatalities, injuries and the level of property damage.) Read more

Paths to victory in the Australian defence and security context

Corporal Aspen Williams gives local children presents for Christmas in a small village on the out skirts of Honiara in the Solomon Islands.

RAND has just released Paths to Victory: lessons from modern insurgencies, a report that uses case studies of the 71 insurgencies completed since World War II to (among other things) identify the approaches that give a government the best prospects for defeating an insurgency. I’m the principal investigator and lead author, and I’ll speak on the study’s results at ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre on Friday 4 October at noon. I look forward to my visit to Canberra, not only for the chance to share findings but also for the opportunity to consider those findings in the context of Australian defence and security. Details on the study’s methodology can be found in the report. Here, I review the study’s primary findings, and I encourage readers of The Strategist to share their thoughts.

The first major finding is that good counterinsurgent practices ‘run in packs.’ That is, governments that defeat insurgencies don’t just do one or two things right, they do many things right, and they do many more things right than they do wrong. Read more