Strategist Article Archives - Page 1140 of 1186

Defence deal with PNG sharpens our South Pacific focus

13 May 2013

Coming just a week after the inaugural South Pacific Defence Ministers Meeting in Tonga, Friday’s Australia–Papua New Guinea Defence Cooperation Arrangement helps cement the new Defence White Paper’s emphasis on security cooperation in our near neighbourhood.

The arrangement was signed during Julia Gillard’s first trip to PNG as prime minister—a visit aimed at updating trade, aid, education, police, immigration and other links as much as our defence ties.

The elevation of a defence deliverable Minister Smith would probably have enjoyed announcing himself (he’s driven this initiative and similar formal instruments with other partners), and its use in a prime ministerial visit not lacking other substance, helps signal the strength of the White Paper’s renewed focus on ‘the backyard’. Given PNG’s central place in the South Pacific, the deal showcases our commitment to regional security, stability and cohesion; gives concrete effect to deepening our strategic partnership with an important neighbour; and offers a possible centrepiece for region-wide joint training opportunities under the new regional exercise framework. Read more

Is Papua the next East Timor? Part II

13 May 2013

In my previous post, I explained how separatist attempts throughout Indonesia’s history have led to Indonesian sensitivities over Papuan separatism today. We take every opportunity to earnestly reassure the Indonesian side of our unwavering support for Indonesian territorial sovereignty, as enshrined in the Lombok Treaty. For their part, the Indonesians pretend to believe us. Of course, they don’t. Why should they? After all, we were the only nation on the planet in 1975 to recognise Indonesian sway over East Timor, a mantra we intoned for more than 20 years, until we were forced to change our tune.

Indonesians see an inherent disconnect between our stated support for Indonesian rule over Papua and our actions, like the granting of asylum to 43 Papuans in 2006, which was enough to see a furious Jakarta recall its ambassador to Canberra. There are sophisticated and educated members of the ruling elite in Jakarta who genuinely believe the bizarre fiction that agents of influence from Australian government agencies are engaged in a covert campaign to destabilise Indonesian rule in Papua. Read more

Waiting on Fiji

12 May 2013

To see how difficult it is to do normal business with Fiji’s military regime, consider the problem of getting the new Australian High Commissioner into Suva. Wednesday will mark the six-month point in a diplomatic dance in which Suva mixes moments of promise with large doses of denial. The symbolic and the silly intermingle. Important elements of diplomatic engagement are at stake but the shenanigans demonstrate the Bainimarama regime’s recurrent tendency to veer towards the petty and the capricious.

Back on December 15 last year, the Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, announced what was welcomed as a diplomatic breakthrough with Fiji. His statement started like this:

Foreign Minister Bob Carr today announced Ms Margaret Twomey as Australia’s High Commissioner to Fiji, ending a three-year hiatus caused by the expulsion of Australia’s previous High Commissioner in 2009. Senator Carr said the decision to restore an Australian High Commissioner to Fiji was an agreed outcome of trilateral talks with Fiji and New Zealand in Sydney in July 2012… [Ms Twomey] is expected to take up her appointment in February 2013. Read more

The 2013 nuclear negotiations: fantasy and reality

10 May 2013

Last week, a major UN conference on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament (known as the 2013 NPT PrepCom) wrapped up in Geneva. The outcome? Yet another frustratingly weak factual summary, reflecting the seemingly irreconcilable positions of deterrence and disarmament advocates. With the exception of a dramatic and unprecedented walkout by the Egyptian delegation, which withdrew due to its frustration over the indefinite postponement of the Helsinki Conference, it was business as usual, with states agreeing to disagree over some of the most critical issues affecting humanity.

For the civil society participants with the patience and dedication to sit through the two weeks of negotiations, it must have been an intensely disappointing experience. It led Rebecca Johnson—usually a glass half full person—to conclude that, as nuclear weapons continue to proliferate and many remain on high alert, the NPT has become ‘toothless in the face of real world dangers’. She also coined my favourite quote of the conference, stating that the NPT seems ‘locked inside a bubble of diplomatic fantasy’. It’s hard to reach any other conclusion, after watching so many diplomats spend weeks earnestly debating the precise wording of non-proliferation and disarmament commitments that they know or suspect their governments will not honour. Read more

Elephant in the room: is Papua the next East Timor?

10 May 2013

One issue, above all others, starkly differentiates the jobs of Indonesian President and Australian Prime Minister. When our Prime Minister wakes each morning, the first question she asks isn’t: “Do I still have a whole country to govern today?”

The challenge of maintaining national sovereignty and territorial integrity has beset incumbents of Jakarta’s presidential palace since the earliest days of the Indonesian republic. Not all Indonesians were as enthusiastic about a macro Indonesian state as the mostly Javanese and Sumatran nationalist leaders who declared and struggled for independence from 1945. Insurrection and separatism have been constant features of the Indonesian experience since the 1950s.

In the west of the archipelago, disaffected elements of the Indonesian Army formed an anti-Jakarta revolutionary government in Sumatra, which was quashed in 1957. Separate attempts to create an Islamic state in Aceh began in 1953, inflamed as much by oil and gas revenues as by religious zeal—it took the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and the persistence of former Vice President Jusuf Kalla, to bring a lasting peace with the Free Aceh Movement. Read more

Not a lot atoll

9 May 2013

You can do a lot with a coral atoll. The US uses the leased UK territory of Diego Garcia ‘To provide forward support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf…’. That includes logistical support for naval and air forces, and makes Washington’s job of projecting power into the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf regions far simpler than it otherwise would be.

View Larger Map

The new Defence White Paper confirms the implementation of the ADF Posture Review recommendations to make military use of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which lie about 1100 km from Indonesia, and 2100 km from Australia’s North West Cape.

The government will be…

…expanding the capacity of infrastructure to meet Navy’s future basing requirements; and upgrading airbases to better support aircraft operations, including for P-8A maritime surveillance operations from Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Of course the Cocos are smaller than Diego Garcia. There isn’t the space to provide the same level of logistic support, so we probably won’t see major and permanent bases there. Nevertheless, the position of the atoll will make it a useful operational asset as the Indian Ocean and South East Asian sea lanes take on greater significance.

Andrew Davies is a senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of The Strategist. Harry White is an analyst at ASPI.

Beyond the once-over analysis and partisan waffle

9 May 2013

Defence White Paper 2013 is well written and largely internally coherent, except for the absence of an investment plan to execute its policy and strategy objectives. It often tries making virtues out of necessities politically, particularly with convenient international schedule delays such as the troubled JSF program.

Much commentary has inevitably concentrated on its recent fiscal and current party-political contexts or, superficially, on major equipment proposals. There is really little substantial change to the major ADF capabilities originally planned in the 2003 Defence Capability Review that updated and corrected the 2000 White Paper.

More tactful and ostensibly optimistic about China than its predecessor, this paper has unfortunately dropped mention of China’s lack of strategic transparency as a cause of instability globally and regionally. It also logically continues the post-Indonesia focus of its 2009 predecessor. Read more

Antarctica: agreeing on principles, depending on price

9 May 2013

Guest editor Anthony Bergin

The issue of Antarctic geologically based resources hasn’t been discussed seriously for decades and for two good reasons. There’s been no serious interest by industry for sensible economic reasons. We’ve also seen the introduction of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol), with a moratorium on mining that commenced in 1991.

The United States Bureau of Mines introduced a system some years ago of classification for mineral deposits employing both geological and economic criteria. The classification has three main categories – economic, marginally economic, and sub-economic. Antarctic mineral occurrences are taken properly as sub-economic and classed simply as ‘mineral occurrences’. Polar Prospects: A Minerals Treaty for Antarctica : UNT Digital Library

But there’s been some changes in the last couple of decades that may well alter the equations in the near future. The changes are mainly in technology, rendering identification and extraction potentially easier. Economics remains, as it’s always been, the greatest deterrent, unless there’s a specific non-economic reason to extract. Read more

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9 May 2013

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Graph of the week: up, up, but finally away?

8 May 2013

I’ve been plotting the gross measures of the progress of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program pretty much since the day I joined ASPI back in 2006. It hasn’t always been a pretty story. It became obvious fairly early that the F-35 wasn’t going to buck the trends of history in terms of delivering more capability for less dollars. The projected cost has increased steadily, and the delivery schedule has moved steadily to the right, meaning that Australia and other customers have had to think about a ‘Plan B‘—exactly what we saw implemented last week in the White Paper announcement of an additional buy of Super Hornets.

The annual budget papers from the Pentagon have demonstrated both of these trends. The delays in delivery of capability and higher than expected costs has seen the American services steadily defer acquisition, preferring to spend their money elsewhere rather than buying into a manifestly immature program. The graphs below show these trends.

The first chart shows the expected flyaway cost (the cost of the aircraft itself, including engines but not any of the ancillaries required to operate it) over the forecast period for each USAF budget request from Financial Year (FY) 2008 to FY 2014. Back in 2007, when the FY 2008 budget was tabled, the USAF expected to be paying $83 million (all figures in 2013 US dollars) per aircraft by now. This year’s budget has the figure of US$153 million, a full 84% higher. Even five years from now the price won’t have come down in real terms to the expected 2013 number—the USAF expects to be paying $88 million for each of its aircraft in 2018. That’s obviously not a great result, and it’s consistent with my previous observation that this program has been more troubled than most. Read more