Waiting longer for more—project timelines then and now

The Nautilus being launched.

In his recent ASPI lunchtime address, David Gould—DMO’s General Manager Submarines—observed that the Collins submarine project ‘delivered a class of six submarines of unique design in a shade under 20 years’. He added that the project that produced Britain’s nuclear Astute class submarines has delivered two boats since it began 17 years ago, and ‘will comfortably exceed 20 years to complete all seven’.

Those numbers weren’t a surprise, and the ones Mark Thomson and I used in our calculations of projected Australian submarine availability last year were very similar. Likewise if we look at the aerospace world. The development contract for the Joint Strike Fighter program was signed in 1996, with Lockheed Martin and Boeing receiving approval to build competing designs. Lockheed’s X-35 prototype was selected for further development ahead of Boeing’s X-32 design (incidentally the world’s ugliest fighter aeroplane) and the Pentagon awarded a contract for System Development and Demonstration in late 2001. On current plans, the (now) F-35 will enter service with the US Air Force in 2016—two decades after the program began. Read more

The sun never sets on the Anglosphere

Sunrise in Singapore

Jousting with Hugh White on international structures is both fun and a deeply Anglospheric thing to do, but I make no concessions about the longevity of the Anglosphere. That’s because I see the term as largely synonymous with the accepted global international order. The term Anglosphere is no more about the English than the Panama Canal is about hats. Rather it points to the historic origins of many of the rules of the road that structure international society. One thinks of the Monty Python sketch asking ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’? The list of what the Anglosphere has delivered includes the UN, Bretton-Woods, NATO, ANZUS, the English language, international law, support for human rights, the internet, fast food and precision-guided munitions. Oh yes, and they brought peace after World War II, which is the basis for—among many other benefits—economic growth in Asia.

Hugh asks: ‘whether this grouping will do much for us in the future when wealth and power will no longer be so strongly concentrated in Anglo-Saxon hands,’ but the critical point is not ethnicity but rather the framework of international rules. The willingness of the group of nations that subscribe to those rules to intervene in conflicts to protect international order is, however, an important feature of the broader Anglospheric approach to international society. No other combination of states is likely to provide such an international order-setting orientation any time soon. This is a much broader point than simply acknowledging the military capabilities of the five eyes countries and their like-minded friends—as both Hugh and I do. Read more

Australia’s quixotic quest for defence self-reliance: time to move on?

Richard Nixon in Boston. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

At a 6:30pm talk with reporters at the (now old) Officers Club in Guam on the 25 July 1969, President Nixon changed Australian defence policy. He announced that in future countries fighting internal threats should provide the bulk of the defending armed forces. America would provide logistic support and sell the necessary arms, but the threatened nation should now primarily rely on its own combat forces not those of America. In short, it should be self-reliant.

And so, after due allowance for consideration and inertia, Australia decided to embrace this new Guam (or Nixon) Doctrine. While Nixon’s declaration was a bit vague about combat support forces, the need to now provide the bulk of the actual combat forces for self-defence seemed plain enough. Such is the big impact of big allies. But has the Guam Doctrine passed its used by date and is the Doctrine’s concept of self-reliance still a sensible basis on which to construct modern Australian defence policies? Read more

The Defence White Paper’s Parliamentary no-show

The Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith presents the details of the 2013 Defence White Paper at Fairbairn Defence Establishment Canberra, on May 3, 2013.The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, made a telling mistake in Singapore recently when proclaiming the strategic openness displayed by the publication of Australia’s Defence White Paper. At the Shangri-La dialogue, Smith began his speech by saying the new White Paper had been ‘tabled for transparency purposes’.

But in using the word ‘tabled’, Smith was adopting Parliamentary language and nodding to Parliamentary customs that have been ignored by his Government. The Defence White Paper is a public document (here), but it was never tabled in Parliament. So it’s a public document but only in the sense that it was released and published by the executive. It isn’t a paper of the Parliament because it was never presented or tabled in Parliament by the Defence Minister.

When I mentioned to someone from Defence that Smith hadn’t tabled the White Paper, the response was a pithy expressions of the acid washing around Russell Hill about their now departing Minister: “He obviously treats Parliament with the same contempt he treats the Defence Department’. Read more

Cyber wrap

cyber logoWelcome to the first weekly roundup of cyber security news. Each week we’ll be providing a list of selected articles on cyber threats, policy developments and technologies from around the world so that policy makers, industry figures and the public can keep more broadly informed on what’s taking place in this rapidly evolving area.

The biggest news of the week is the first meeting of the US-China Cyber Security Working Group, which is intended to act as a preliminary meeting to an annual high-level forum between the two heavyweights. To be a fly on the wall at this meeting would prove interesting, after a year of US anger at Chinese infiltration of its systems and theft of important defence information. Yet, one can sense that there would be more than a few questions raised from the Chinese about the US ‘Prism’ programme and claims from whistle-blower Ed Snowden that the US has been combing through Chinese systems as well as those of many of its allies. Watch this space to see how this dialogue progresses. Read more

Sunset for the Anglosphere?

Sunset on the Anglosphere?

Peter Jennings has sprung to defend the Anglosphere from my disparagement. But before battle begins, let’s clarify what exactly he’s defending, because Peter uses the term ‘Anglosphere’ in several rather different ways. Some of them I wouldn’t dream of disparaging, and others I suspect he wouldn’t really want to defend.

The sense of ‘Anglosphere’ that I would least want to disparage is what we might call the Tennysonian one. This sense clearly looms large for Tony Abbott. In the Heritage Foundation speech mentioned in my column, Abbott quoted lines from Tennyson that I’ve always loved, which describe Britain [or perhaps England] as ‘a land of just and old renown/ where freedom broadens slowly down/ from precedent to precedent’. If the Anglosphere means nothing more than reverence for Britain’s deep-rooted legal and constitutional traditions then I wouldn’t disparage it for a moment.

Nor do I disparage the second sense which Peter attributes to the Anglosphere when he identifies it with the ‘five-eyes’ Anglo-Saxon intelligence sharing arrangements from which Australia benefits so handsomely. I’m all for that. Read more

RAMSI tenth anniversary: thinking about intervention and amphibs

Lambi village children gather on the beach to see the rare sight of HMAS Manoora anchored in Lambi Bay. Some of the villagers took to small craft to take closer look at the warship in their sheltered bay.

Shortly after dawn on 24 July 2003, the first Hercules touched down in Honiara with lead elements of the 1,400 troops, 300 police, and officials from the nine Pacific Forum countries initially comprising the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). Four years of ethnic, social and criminal disorder had cost 200 lives, caused a near collapse of the national government and economy and 20,000 people to flee their homes—prompting ASPI’s call for action. At the same time as the Hercules landed, the amphibious ship HMAS Manoora loomed off the coast. Manoora’s heavy presence and the rapid build-up of overwhelming force signalled change was coming. Within the year, warring militias had been disarmed, and economic stability, more effective governance and personal security were returning.

A major milestone passed quietly with the conclusion of Operation ANODE—the military component of RAMSI—on 1 July, just three weeks ahead of the mission’s tenth anniversary. And although transition toward Solomon Islands’ full normalisation is continuing, RAMSI is a success story, despite the April 2006 riots, 2006–07 tensions with the host Government, and only incremental state-building progress. It’s also come at a cost to the Australian government of over $2 billion (including $350 million military expenses) and two Australian operational fatalities so far. Read more

Where, exactly, is the Anglosphere?

Capture and burning of Washington by the British, in 1814.There are all sorts of reasons that the Persian Emperor Darius I finally decided he’d had enough and prepared to invade Greece. After all, it was probably just a matter of time before the noisy, quarrelsome inhabitants of that rugged, mountainous and impoverished backwater finally came to the attention of the most powerful man the world had ever seen.

Today we think of Darius the Great as Persian but, as ruler of the Achaemenid Empire, he was hailed as ruler throughout the known world—from Egypt to Iran; from Thrace to Scythia. The key primary source ‘document’ of his reign is actually a massive inscription carved, high up on a rock cliff, on the old road to Babylon. It’s 15 metres high by 25 meters wide—but the key point for us is that, just like the Rosetta Stone, it’s a proclamation in three languages: Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. Darius’ Empire was so great that translation was necessary to ensure that he was understood. Read more

Lessons learned? Australia’s new Customs and Border Protection Reforms

Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare at the ASPI-HP lunchtime seminar in Sydney, 3 July 2013Last week at an ASPI lunch in Sydney, Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare presented reforms to the Customs and Border Protection Service which are intended to fight corruption, modernise its workforce and streamline processes for travellers and businesses. The Blueprint for Reform document contains a five year plan to create a more comprehensive and joined-up approach to guarding Australia’s borders. It introduced various new measures intended to not only increase security but improve the overall passenger and business experience at Australia’s borders. These included:

  • the creation of a strategic border command with authority to coordinate the deployment of people and technology to risks at the borders
  • establishing a National Border Targeting Centre which will eventually to bring together the various agencies under one roof, which it is intended will allow for greater data sharing, and joint planning of operations
  • the introduction of an electronic data reporting system for all goods arriving in and leaving Australia
  • working closer with industry to create trusted partnership schemes to allow quicker goods export and import
  • an expansion of the SmartGates system for travellers from Australia and New Zealand so that they can process themselves at the border, along with an expansion of the scheme to other nationalities holding e-passports—including China, the United States and the United Kingdom.  The plan is for 90% of travelling passengers to use this system by 2020
  • various enhanced training schemes for personnel to create a more dynamic working environment. Read more

Beijing and Washington: share first, trust later

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the beginning of a bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on April 13, 2013. The gathering’s theme was ‘Security and Cooperation in the Asia Pacific Region,’ yet the US–China relationship dominated. The symposium run by the China Institute for International Strategic Studies was free of academic mumbo-jumbo. The sessions, at which Bob Hawke and I were the two Australian participants, seemed under a spell cast by Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. Even the Southeast Asian voices adopted the Eagle–Dragon focus, though not willingly. Said a Malaysian scholar: ‘Why do you Chinese engage with the US all the time and never with us, especially at the military level? The result is we don’t really know where China is headed.’

The Chinese were frustrated that their goals came across as unclear. But ‘peace and development’ is a vague definition of a rising superpower’s aims. The real goal was implied by a smart Chinese military officer: ‘Security mechanisms in the region have the mark of the Cold War and are exclusive and not conducive to trust’. The message is clear: China wants US security pacts in the Pacific ended or weakened. Kevin Rudd will find Beijing tougher on this matter now than during 2007–2010. Read more