The Royal Canadian Navy in the Pacific – a look at capabilities

PEARL HARBOR (Jul. 29, 2010) - The Canadian navy Iroquios-class guided missile destroyer HMAS Algonquin (DDG 283) returns to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam after participating in Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2010 exercises. RIMPAC is a biennial, multinational exercise designed to strengthen regional partnerships and improve multinational interoperability.Canada could benefit from expanding its military presence in the Asia-Pacific. As I described in a previous Strategist post, the government faces certain budgetary constraints likely to limit the size of its future naval presence and capacity for maritime diplomacy. Yet such a challenge isn’t insurmountable. To ensure sufficient fleet funding, Canada has the option of placing greater priority on the capital portion of the defence budget—even if it comes at the expense of personnel and operations/maintenance spending.

Such a move would offer Ottawa some leverage to join the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus. More importantly, Canada would have a means to help augment America’s naval power in the region, which is expected to be under increasing strain as a result of defence cutbacks—at a time when China is expanding its own naval fleet and showing greater assertiveness in its maritime disputes with its neighbours. Read more

Piracy down but not out

The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Farragut (DDG 99) passes by the smoke from a suspected pirate skiff it had just destroyed. USS Farragut is part of Combined Task Force 151, a multinational task force established to conduct anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden.In some recent good news, the Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) noted that the number of recorded sea piracy attacks worldwide was down by a third in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2012: 66 down from 102.

For the whole of 2012, the PRC recorded 297 ships attacked—down from 439 in 2011, constituting a five-year low. A major contributor to the drop was fewer attacks from pirates based in Somalia. The international navy patrols are clearly having an effect, as is the number of ships carrying private armed guards. Ships are being more careful about keeping a proper watch in piracy-prone areas and a number of countries appear to have overcome their reluctance to put captured pirates in prison. Read more

Reflections on Thailand, Myanmar and the US pivot

U.S. President Barack Obama poses for the ASEAN-United States Leaders' Meeting family photo at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 19, 2012. President Obama is the first U.S. President to visit Cambodia. [State Department photo by William Ng/ Public Domain]

Myanmar and Thailand have much in common and this is on display now more than ever. Apart from being similar in geographic and population size, they’re the two most prominent Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asian countries. Thailand’s level of development is the envy of Myanmar and a major spur to the opening up that they hope will draw commensurate economic benefits. Historically, border issues and the memories of ancient Burmese invasions have kept a chill in relations, but there’s recently been a warming. Despite different points of departure on relations with China and the United States, a convergence is becoming evident.

In Thailand, the US Cold War vintage treaty remains the foundation of bilateral security relations, and they source military hardware and procedures from the US. There’s little incentive today for drastic changes, but there are few signs of the treaty having much vitality either. Sure, the military exercise Cobra Gold is conducted annually and many regional security partners participate. But in broad terms there’s a sense of strategic drift. Thailand is relaxed—perhaps too relaxed—about the strategic space created by the US alliance. There are reasons for this on both sides. Read more

Cyber wrap

cyber logoAs a Strategist post earlier this week reported, former CIA head Michael Hayden has accused Chinese Telecommunications company Huawei of snooping for the Chinese Government. Huawei isn’t new to controversy, after being blocked from working on the NBN due to ‘security concerns’ in 2012. But this story is significant as it’s the first time a senior official has categorically and publicly implicated the company in spying. This news rounds off a bad week for Huawei after the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) handed down a report outlining concerns with Huawei’s Cyber Security Evaluations Centre. In what the ISC sees as a direct conflict of interest, the Huawei staffed cell is responsible for providing security assurance on Huawei products. The ISC is now calling for GCHQ to staff the centre.

China’s Ambassador to Australia Chen Yuming has responded to the allegations, calling General Hayden’s comments a politically motivated attack. The Ambassador went on to distance both Huawei and the Chinese Government from cyber espionage, saying “There may be some people doing things the article referred to, but it is not Huawei or China for sure.” Read more

ASPI suggests—tenth anniversary of RAMSI

Our Failing Neighbour

A decade ago today, lead elements of the nearly 2,000 troops, police, and officials from the nine Pacific Islands Forum countries initially comprising the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) arrived to begin their stabilisation efforts.

Six weeks before, an ASPI report, on Australia and the future of Solomon Islands, had concluded that “… a failing state on our doorstep engages Australia’s interests at many levels, from short-term economic, consular and humanitarian concerns to our most enduring strategic imperatives. … [Australia should] initiate and support a sustained and comprehensive multinational effort, which, with the consent of Solomon Islands, would undertake a two-phase program to rehabilitate the country.” Read more

How to manage long project timelines? (part one)

An F/A-18F Super Hornet catches the early morning rays of a Territory sunrise on the flightline at RAAF Base Darwin.

Andrew Davies’s recent post about long project timelines highlights issues that everyone accepts but rarely factors into the planning and management of the future force structure; modern projects take an unconscionably long time to actually get anywhere. The new submarine is an example: first announced seriously in the 2009 White Paper, it now seems that the first new boat might enter service around 2030 or so. Such lengthy gestation periods hold not just for Australian-built systems. Retired USMC General ‘Hoss’ Cartwright recently recalled being involved in writing the JSF requirement back in 1979 but the aircraft won’t be in operational service with the Corps until December 2015, and even then only in a limited capability form.

But so what? At the tactical level it means that the warfighters only get their hands on truly modern equipment every few decades when some new major platform enters service. At a strategic level this makes the technological capabilities of your force somewhat easier to predict and counter. Thinking adversaries could plan the timing and the nature of a future conflict to favour their equipment cycle but be at a really bad time for yours. Moreover, with commercial technology rapidly advancing, long-lead times might inadvertently cede advantages to non-state actor adversaries, who are able to quickly access contemporary civilian technologies that our state-sponsored defence force with its long-lead times can’t. Read more

Joe Biden on the rebalance

8156716546_e2c4253286_zLate last week US Vice President Joe Biden spoke at George Washington University In Washington DC about why and how the US was pursuing ‘its announced policy of elevated engagement in the Asia Pacific’. If this formulation sounds abstract, that’s because it is. Washington has struggled to find a quick short-hand description of its current Asia policy. It began life as a ‘pivot’, but rapidly morphed into a ‘rebalance’, in part to avoid the connotation that the US was turning its back on other parts of the world. The term ‘rebalance’ endures—and the core elements of the policy show high levels of continuity since its 2011 inception.

In this speech, Biden outlined the economic and strategic underpinnings for the American decision to direct more resources and attention towards the Asia-Pacific region:

Because imagine what can happen if growing Asia-Pacific middle classes help lift the global economy even more than they already are; if nations reject the temptations of zero-sum thinking and rise peacefully together; if progress toward greater rights and freedoms proves that no country has to make a choice between democracy and development, which is a false choice.

Let me put it slightly differently: Just imagine what will happen if those things don’t come to pass. We’ll all be in a world of trouble.

Read more

The Anglosphere and Oz

Chinese New Year, Sydney 2008.

Australia’s referendum tick for the monarchy and constant opinion poll support for the US alliance suggest the voters are happy with both the traditional and treaty elements of the Anglosphere. The temperature of popular sentiment must carry weight in The Strategist‘s discussion of the significance of the Anglosphere, but I suspect that few Australians would reach for ‘The Anglosphere’ as their preferred term to describe our present situation or future strategic choices.

Sentiment always counts, and often glitters on the surface, but it can conceal a much larger seam of pragmatic Oz self-interest. The hard-headed view of self-interest is one constant in an Australia that’s changed dramatically since Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952. Looking back, it’s legitimate to observe—in the words of Tony Abbott’s former Jesuit teacher—that in the earlier versions of the Australian nation, ‘the English made the laws, the Scots made the money, and the Irish made the songs’!

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The scale of the cyber problem: ex-CIA Director shines a light on key issues

Former Director of the CIA, Michael HaydenLast Friday saw the publication of the full transcript of an interview conducted with the former Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden. The interview gave us insight into US intelligence and strategic thinking which don’t often make it out into the public domain. It’s not so much that everything he said was groundbreaking, rather the importance is in the fact that a person with his professional background said it, and with a degree of frankness and directness not often associated with ex-intelligence chiefs, at least in public.

The interview should be read in its entirety to understand the wide range of topics it covers (beyond further negative publicity for Huawei): US strategic relations in the Asia-Pacific region, the growing intelligence battles that are taking place, especially in the cyber domain, and what the Edward Snowden revelations mean for the US intelligence agencies and their relationships. Most stark are his warnings that we’re entering a new era of cyber threats:

We are moving from a world in which most cyber problems are mainly about stealing your data to a world in which cyber is being used to deliberately create direct kinetic consequences: effects on your information, effects on your networks, and other adverse physical effects on assets that are valuable to you. As surely as night follows day, these cyber security risks are going to expand over time.

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Australia as a Southern Hemisphere ‘soft power’

5310613293_4849c5e670_zAustralian strategic analysts don’t spend much time thinking about ‘soft power’—Harvard academic Joe Nye’s pithy label for the range of cultural, educational, and other forms of influence that states can use, through attraction rather than coercion, to achieve its objectives.

The US is the best exponent of soft power, with a global image machine in Hollywood, the world’s best universities, and a history of social mobility and innovation luring millions of potential immigrants each year.

China, by contrast, seems to have relatively little soft power. The richness of its culture and history can’t overcome the fundamental unattractiveness of its socio-political model. How many people dream of migrating to China or having their kids educated in Chinese universities? Read more