The physical dimensions of cyber security are as important as the virtual ones, but are often overlooked. Australia is actively working towards building its cyber resilience; the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyberattacks. But there is a significant hole in the protection of our physical cyber infrastructure.
Scattered across the ocean floor in intricate webs, submarine cables transfer high data volumes between onshore nodes. Five main international cables connect Australia to cyberspace and global voice networks. They carry 99% of Australia’s total internet traffic, dwarfing the capacity of satellites. Submarine cables are vital to our communications, economic prosperity, and national security. They also tend to break. A lot. Read more
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are about to enjoy their annual week of speechifying and Asian strategic star-gazing, driven by copious amounts of coffee and conversation. Perhaps only in Southeast Asia could two ‘unofficial’ back-to-back conferences be so firmly embedded into the diaries and habits of Asia’s officials and officers. The Shangri-La security summit in Singapore and the KL Asia Pacific Roundtable express some Asian habits of mind as well as diplomatic and security aspirations.
Starting tonight and running over the weekend, the 12th annual Shangri-La dialogue (named after the host hotel, not the fictional faraway la-la land) is run by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. To pursue the ‘perhaps only in Southeast Asia’ theme, this is the Defence Ministers’ summit run by a London think-tank in partnership with Singapore. Or this is the summit that’s also designated as a dialogue.
Shangri-La has the trappings of a summit, not least the rings of security around the venue (there’s always a certain style in being guarded by Singapore’s Praetorian Guard, the Ghurkas). And this year, for the first time, the event had a lead-up Sherpa’s conference. Because it’s also just a dialogue, Shangri-La doesn’t need a communiqué from ministers at the end. They meet, they orate, they talk and even negotiate, but they don’t have to formally agree on anything. Read more
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What a difference a year can make. Twelve months ago, it looked like the government had all but abandoned the ambitious plans set out for the ADF in the 2009 Defence White Paper. More than $20 billion of promised defence funding had been cut or deferred over the preceding three years. Last year, funding fell in real terms by more than 10% pushing the defence share of GDP to 1.6%—the lowest level since 1938.
This year things look very different. Defence spending is again on the rise, and the government has released a new Defence White Paper essentially recommitting itself to the capability goals of 2009 and then some. On current plans, the defence budget will increase in real terms by 2.3% next year to reach $25.4 billion, and then continue to grow for another three years to $28.6 billion (all measured in today’s dollars) to deliver an average of 3.6% real growth over four years.
But that’s only the start. If the government makes good on the $220 billion of financial guidance for the six years that follow, there’s enough money available to grow the defence budget to $33.2 billion by 2022 at an annual real rate of growth of 2.5% per annum.
But don’t pop the champagne corks just yet. The seemingly impressive growth is coming from a low base. In the 48 months between the release of the 2009 and 2013 Defence White Papers, around $20 billion of promised funding was lost in the headlong rush to get the Commonwealth’s books out of the red. As things stand, it will be two more years before defence spending rises out of the hole that was dug in search of a surplus. Read more
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Every year I get to watch Mark Thomson pull off a remarkable feat of ‘extreme analysis’, as he cranks out 260 pages of the annual Cost of Defence report in the couple of weeks after the federal budget is released. (It’s a bit like extreme ironing, but with fewer shirts and more graphs.) You’ll be able to read the executive summary of the report on The Strategist from 12:30 today, and download the entire report from ASPI’s home page a little later.
Until then, here’s a potted summary of the chapter of the budget brief that I have responsibility for—the ‘Selected Defence Projects’ chapter. The idea of the chapter is very simple—to provide a ‘one-stop’ look at selected defence projects that provides a compendium of facts and figures, along with a short commentary. There’s a tendency for some revisionism to sneak into the reporting of defence projects, such as reporting progress against a rebaselined schedule, or measuring achieved expenditure against additional estimates only a couple of months old at budget time instead of against the projections from a year previous. Since we think that transparency is a fine thing, we’ve included as much original data as we can.
This year saw the addition of a couple of significant new projects to our list—the first explicitly funded work on the future submarine project, and the acquisition of 12 new EA-18G Growler aircraft. Both of those were announced when the Defence white paper was released earlier in the month. They seem to be the only major procurement announcements made in the twelve months since the last budget brief. But that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been more work done in getting projects approved—Chapter 3 of the Cost of Defence report records 21 approvals in total (five first pass and 11 second pass) and examines the progress made in delivering the Defence Capability Plan. Read more
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In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert Art and Robert Jervis wrote about the late Kenneth Waltz’s unique contribution to the field of international politics. One of the things Waltz brought to his research was an interest in economics and, as Art and Jervis note, that interest made Waltz focus on incentives. So let’s have a look at the incentives on the current North Korean nuclear issue.
At the moment, we hold out to Pyongyang the incentive that it can have a proper economy and become a fully-fledged member of the international community if it renounces its nuclear program. We pair that incentive with a matching disincentive: that if North Korea proceeds down the nuclear path it will find itself subjected to increasingly stringent sanctions and international isolation.
That incentive structure hasn’t changed much over the last two decades. But any observer of North Korean behaviour over that time would have to conclude that those incentives don’t seem to be delivering the desired outcome. North Korea has now conducted three nuclear tests, all of small but gradually increasing yield, and has opened a second pathway—uranium enrichment—to the production of fissile material, alongside its earlier plutonium reprocessing efforts. It has constructed a missile that can put a satellite into orbit. True, the satellite’s probably pretty lightweight, but the launch vehicle is clearly the basis of an intercontinental delivery system. Read more
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Like the term Asia-Pacific, the Indo-Pacific is such a large concept that it conceals as much as it conveys.
Why is the idea of the Indo-Pacific so powerful that it is a key motif of the Defence White Paper? This column will lead you to an ASPI interview with a Canberra luminary who is both a wise owl and a hard head: Ric Smith.
To understand the significance of the new Indo-Pacific construct, first, consider the official prominence Defence gives it in the White Paper’s Strategic Outlook chapter. The Indo-Pacific is ranked second behind the ‘critical’ issue of the US–China relationship among the forces that will shape the strategic environment over coming decades. Defence is all about hierarchy in the way it structures and organises and thinks, and ranking the Indo-Pacific that high is a big call. Read more
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Australia has made many important contributions to the non-proliferation regime over the years, helping draw attention to the dangers inherent in the spread of nuclear weapons. At the international and regional levels, it’s provided diplomatic and technical support to states and organisations involved in preventing and monitoring the spread of sensitive nuclear materials and technologies. At the national level, it’s taken precautionary steps to ensure that it doesn’t assist sensitive transfers to third parties. Canberra has been consistent in these efforts, with the notable exceptions of the decision to negotiate on selling Australian uranium to India and the work on proliferation-sensitive laser enrichment technology that Australian-owned Silex Systems has sold to GE-Hitachi. Commercial interests in both cases (along with strategic aspirations in the former) appear to have trumped other considerations. Despite these failings, Australia is internationally respected for its non-proliferation record and is regarded as a staunch advocate of non-proliferation norms.
The same can’t be said for Australia’s disarmament diplomacy, which fundamentally conflicts with its defence posture. On one hand, Canberra claims to uphold disarmament norms by ruling out the indigenous development of nuclear weapons, but on the other it relies on US nuclear weapons for its defence and security. This inevitably poses difficulties for Australia on the diplomatic circuit, especially in the context of UN disarmament negotiations, when the wide gap between what Australia’s diplomats preach and what its defence officials practice becomes all too evident.
Today, this conflict is more apparent than ever, despite the carefully crafted language and what appears to be a subtle doctrinal shift in the 2013 Defence White Paper (PDF). This is because Australia, in coalition with nine other states (Canada, Chile, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates) is being much more vocal about nuclear dangers than it has in the past, shining a light on the appalling consequences of nuclear use, and calling for a reduced role for nuclear weapons in strategic doctrines. It doesn’t help that most of the other members of the coalition—known as the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI)—also rely on US extended nuclear assurance or on nuclear-sharing arrangements, making their joint statements on disarmament appear insincere to many non-nuclear weapon states. These perceptions were heightened recently when the coalition failed to sign up to the Joint Statement on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons at last month’s NPT PrepCom—a disarmament initiative that attracted support from 78 countries seeking to highlight the uniquely destructive nature of nuclear weapons. Read more
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The 2013 Defence White Paper says that: ‘There is no credible risk of Australia’s national interests in the Southern Ocean and the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) being challenged in ways that might require substantial military responses over the next few decades’. But in the decades to come, major military conflict between the major powers could well have an Antarctic dimension, given the possible role of Antarctic bases in surveillance and satellite monitoring. There’s also the possible scenario where we might have to deal with illegal, unreported or unregulated resource exploitation in our territory or elsewhere in Antarctica.
Over recent weeks, contributors to The Strategist have looked at a range of issues relating to our Antarctic policy, and have set out a cluster of major national interests that we pursue in the Antarctic. These include sustaining opportunities for critical scientific research and cooperation, resource conservation and environmental protection, and geostrategic interests that involve economic and security considerations. The last relates to maintaining a stable political and legal order in the region, especially the demilitarisation of the continent, that’s dependent on the preservation of the Antarctic treaty.
The Antarctic treaty is the international vehicle through which we pursue our polar interests. It continues to serve our national interests well, particularly in offsetting any latent conflicts over territorial claims. This year’s Defence White Paper points out that in coming decades the Antarctic treaty might come under pressure as resources become scarcer elsewhere. The Madrid Protocol forbids exploration and exploitation of Antarctic minerals but, as Pat Quilty’s post noted, ‘Ultimately, resources of sufficient strategic or economic value will be exploited for a resource hungry world. International agreements can always be re-negotiated’. Our diplomatic efforts to protect and advance the Antarctic treaty are being diminished by shrinking resources in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has responsibility for leading our delegations in treaty meetings. (This year’s budget subjects DFAT to significant efficiency measures.) Read more
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen some impressive photographs and the naming ceremony of the first of the 27,000 tonne Canberra class landing helicopter docks (LHDs) coming together in the BAE shipyards in Williamstown. These vessels will do much more than replace the Manoora and Kinimbla amphibious ships retired precipitously in 2011. They’ll greatly expand the capability of the ADF to deliver people and equipment around Australian or onto foreign shores.
In turn, this new capability will provide future governments with a wider range of military options during times of crisis—although perhaps not as substantial a boost as might be expected. The problem with amphibious operations is that they become much more demanding when there’s any significant opposition.
If we look at the recent Defence white paper, we can get some insight into current defence thinking. The notion of amphibious operations in support of combat activities is still there from the 2009 paper:
The ADF would seek to undertake operations against an adversary’s bases and forces in transit, as far from Australia as possible. This might involve using strike capabilities and the sustained projection of power by joint task forces, including amphibious operations in some circumstances.
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Tanya Ogilvie-White’s reading of the 2013 Defence White Paper suggests significant changes in the role nuclear weapons play in Australian strategic policy, which give grounds for optimism. Yet all might not be as it seems.
She notes that the 2009 White Paper stated that ‘the best defence against WMD proliferation will continue to be found in security assurances, including US extended deterrence’, suggesting that US nuclear protection was intended to cover chemical and biological weapons threats, as well as nuclear ones. By contrast, she writes, the 2013 statement:
…specifically limits Australian reliance on US nuclear weapons to circumstances in which Australia is threatened with a nuclear attack: ‘we rely on the nuclear forces of the United States to deter nuclear attack on Australia.
Unfortunately, the 2009 White Paper said virtually the same thing, almost word for word. There wasn’t a change of policy, just the delinquent sloppiness and incoherence of the 2009 White Paper. Read more
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The physical dimensions of cyber security are as important as the virtual ones, but are often overlooked. Australia is actively working towards building its cyber resilience; the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyberattacks. But there is a significant hole in the protection of our physical cyber infrastructure.
