Antarctica and the Defence White Paper: snow job?

Corporal Marc Neiberding in Antarctica with the Royal New Zealand Air Force in February this year.

The Antarctic has never prominently featured in Defence white papers; indeed it rated a mention in only two of the last four, those in 1987 and 2009. Written some 22 years apart, the difference in tone and content between these strategic assessments of the Antarctic is notable, and worth re-reading before considering what might be said in the 2013 policy statement.

The Defence of Australia: 1987 (PDF)

The Government strongly supports the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty, which prohibit military use of the territory. The national interest of Australia lies in ensuring that Antarctica remains demilitarised and free from political and strategic competition. So long as Antarctica remains demilitarised, no threat to the security of Australia itself is in prospect from or through that region. There is no requirement for defence activities to support our territorial or economic interests in Antarctica or for defence involvement beyond the present limited logistic support for Australia’s national effort there. Read more

Dennis Richardson and Arthur Tange: part II

My previous column compared the only Australian mandarins who have headed both Foreign Affairs and Defence, Dennis Richardson and Arthur Tange. To further pursue that comparison, step forward two other mandarins: Philip Flood, former Secretary of DFAT, and Max Moore-Wilton, former Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department.

In in his memoir, Flood describes Tange as ‘one of the truly great mandarins’ who held the rank of departmental Secretary for 25 years. Flood writes that Tange was driven by his ‘passion for Australia, his powerful work ethic and his strong belief in a distinctive, forceful and uniquely Australian foreign policy. Tange was a serious man with no time for fripperies’.

Flood told me recently that he would nominate Tange as one of Australia’s three greatest public servants of the 20th century, along with Robert Garrran and Roland Wilson. In the contemporary section of Flood’s Public Service Parthenon, Dennis Richardson is rated as one of the three top public servants of recent decades, alongside Max Moore-Wilton and Ken Henry. Read more

There’s no perfect measure for defence spending

In a recent post, Neil James made some interesting points about defence spending metrics and the political economy of defence in a democracy. With the federal budget due in three weeks’ time, I thought I might add some observations of my own on how to measure defence spending. A response to Neil’s provocative points on the politics of defence funding will have to wait for another day.

There are four measures of defence spending in common use: dollars, growth rate, percentage of GDP and percentage of government outlays, each of which gives useful and complementary information about the financial aspects of a country’s defence effort.

The most direct measure of a country’s defence spending is what it spends measured in its own currency. But it is also the measure most beset by complications. Comparisons of defence spending within a country over time are made difficult by inflation. Although it’s routine to talk about ‘real’ dollar figures adjusted for inflation, there’s actually no unique way of doing so. What’s more, the steady introduction of new products into the economy reduces the meaningfulness of comparing the ‘value of money’ over very long time periods, even within a consistently applied methodology. Read more

Is Antarctica demilitarised?

Guest editor Anthony Bergin

Flags from international research collaboration team on the CHINARE Arctic cruise.Article 1 of the Antarctic Treaty provides that Antarctica ‘shall be used for peaceful purposes only’. It prohibits ‘any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapons.’ However, it allows the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose. Thus, countries such as the US, New Zealand, and occasionally Australia, use military personnel in support roles in Antarctica, but in doing so, conform to Article VII of the Treaty that requires a party to the Treaty to inform other parties of the details of any military personnel or equipment introduced into Antarctica.

The demilitarisation of Antarctica was a major goal of the Antarctic Treaty. But the treaty was negotiated in a very different world, strategically, technologically and politically, to the one we have today. If we take a broad view of ‘measures of a military nature’, Antarctica is no longer demilitarised. Read more

Cutting our cloth – part I

Jim Molan wrote recently that the ADF is ‘…being pushed into a state where its capabilities are at, or will soon be at, a state from which they will not be able to be revived in any reasonable period of time—a situation of terminal decline’. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have no reluctance to argue with Jim, but in this case I think he’s not too wide of the mark. For the amount the government spends, I don’t think we get much of a return in terms of military options available.

It’s not too hard to find examples that support Jim’s contention. Navy has managed to keep a frigate on station in the Gulf for over a decade, but has conspicuously failed to maintain an acceptable level of capability in its amphibious and submarine fleets. Army and Air Force have both managed to do the jobs they’ve been called upon to do, but recapitalisation of the air combat fleet ($15 billion) and protected mobility for land forces (over $10 billion) at the same time as a new submarine fleet (potentially $30–40 billion) and replacement frigates (over $10 billion) is going to be a very big ask in the future fiscal environment we’re likely to see. Read more

Dennis Richardson and Arthur Tange: part I

With his appointment as the Secretary of the Defence Department last year, Dennis Richardson has joined Arthur Tange as the only public servant to have headed both the departments of Foreign Affairs and Defence. Given that Tange remade the Defence Department and had a major impact on the structure and style of Australian diplomacy, this puts Richardson in elite company.

Another former head of Foreign Affairs, Philip Flood, judges Tange as one of the three greatest Australian public servants of the 20th century, while he rates Richardson as one of the three top public servants of recent decades. (More on the rankings for history by Philip Flood and Max Moore-Wilton in the next column.) What’s of direct interest for those in the bureaucratic trenches today are the parallels to be drawn between the Tange experience of Defence and what Dennis Richardson faces. Read more

ASPI suggests

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates reviews the People's Liberation Army Honor Guard as part of an arrival ceremony honoring Gates' visit to the Bayi building in Beijing, China, on Jan. 10, 2011.China released a new Defence White Paper. Lots of commentary on that, including from the BBC, NYT, and The Australian. In particular it seems that China didn’t include a no-first-use statement about its nuclear arsenal.

Former Australian ambassador Garry Woodard has reconstructed (PDF) what he calls  ‘…the previously unknown, and remarkably casual process by which the Menzies government committed Australian troops to Vietnam.’ He then goes on to argue that the ‘processes by which Australian governments have taken the decision to go to war, from Korea in 1950 to Vietnam to Iraq in 2003, do not stand up to scrutiny.’

Ross Terrill, a doyen of China studies and visiting fellow at ASPI, is giving a lecture at the ANU China Institute at 5pm on Friday, 26 April on Mao, the CCP, and American China-policy: an overview from Yanan years till now.

The Boston bombings this week have generated more speculation than information. But here we have an example from the New Yorker of the results of fear-mongering, and similarly, this piece from the BBC.

There’s a lot out there on the Korean situation, but here is a sensible one on why, though not utterly improbable, war on the Korean Peninsula is highly unlikely. Also on The Diplomat, is this piece about the provocative move by Japan to grant fishing rights to Taiwan around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which are the subject of a dispute between Japan and China.

CSIS has a report (PDF) to provide a taster on the complexities of the geostrategic implications of unconventional oil and natural gas—a good thing in a week where Woodside Petroleum cancelled a USD$45 billion liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

TPP is politics by other means

U.S. Ambassador to Japan John V. Roos shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo, Japan, on April 5, 2013.Mark’s explanation of what is complex terrain is pithy. Asia has two free trade agreements, one championed by the US at the expense of China (TPP), and one via ASEAN which includes China but not the US (RCEP). He writes that whatever the sense of competition between them, neither will do structural harm to the economic interests of the other. So, we should be intolerant of any attempt at a veto of the respective agreements—no state should be allowed to inhibit the trade liberalisation of another.

But I think that while the intended consequence of the TPP is economic, its primary effect is political. Any ‘veto’ which would be exercised by China may have trade casualties, but it would have a political target. This is an area of politics which will directly affect China’s capacity to pursue core interests of all sorts—because the TPP looks very much like a containment mechanism, particularly now Japan is a part.

If the TPP is seen by China as a containment mechanism, then the partnership’s negative impact on stability in Asia will outweigh the economic benefits we could expect to see. After all, the TPP may help economically, but it is hardly a structural change. And Asia’s economic success is built mainly on several decades of stability—continued stability will be more important for growth than the liberalisation generated through the TPP. Read more

The $90 billion question: transnational organised crime in our region

Cocaine hidden in machineryThis week I was part of a group launching the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) threat assessment on Transnational Organized Crime in East Asia and the Pacific. Alongside writers of the report from the UNODC, and John Lawler of the Australian Crime Commission, I was asked to assist in providing an independent viewpoint of what’s a dynamic and complex phenomenon, and remains a threat to security and prosperity across the region.

It’s difficult to establish common agreement on the scope, size, nature and main geographic origin of the threat posed by transnational crime. Comprehensive data is hard to come by, is often opaque and requires extensive analysis in order to create a picture which policymakers and practitioners can use to make informed decisions and take action. This is where the UNODC’s report is so important, in that it’s one of the first attempts to create a common understanding of the threat in our region.

The contraband markets established by transnational crime networks are worth some US$90 billion in the East Asia Pacific region to those groups. This isn’t an insignificant sum, and is arrived at by examining 12 selected contraband markets and the financial flows they enable. The report examined four key areas: people (human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants); narcotic drugs (heroin and methamphetamine); environment (wildlife, wood-based products, e-waste and ozone-depleting substances); and goods (counterfeit goods and fraudulent medicines). Read more

Percent of GDP spent on Defence is a straw man

Surely the discussion (see yesterday’s posts from Andrew Davies and Graeme Dobell) about average percentage of GDP allocated to defence investment is a straw man floated by the Minister for Defence. Somewhat successfully it seems.

Defence spending as a percentage of GDP is OK for comparing expenditure between countries, especially over time. But it has always been much less useful for comparisons within the one country, not least because GDP depends on the size and strength of our economy at any one time. Defence investment in Australia is also quite inelastic in political and economic absorption terms no matter how healthy the economy has been. Moreover, such GDP comparisons ignore any differing strategic circumstances involved, and internal political factors.

A better trend-line comparison is the percentage of the federal budget allocated to defence over time, including trend-line comparisons with the other major sectors of government spending, such as social security, health and education. Read more