What can the US strategy for homeland defence teach us?

Based on previous Defence white papers, this year’s white paper will, among other things, address the question of how the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) should support Australian civil authorities in peacetime.

Areas where the ADO’s responsibilities and those of other government agencies overlap include border security, protection for major events, counterterrorism, emergency response to natural disasters, and marine search and rescue. This year’s white paper writers would benefit from reading the US Department of Defense’s Strategy for Homeland Defense and Defense Support of Civil Authorities (PDF). Read more

Defence: the most fundamental task of government?

GURESHK, Afghanistan--Danish soldiers patrol outside the Mayai Village of the Gureshk District in Helmand Province on Jan. 26, 2009.

When Prime Minister Gillard announced the National Security Strategy in January this year, she said: ‘national security is the most fundamental task of government’. Indeed Section 51 of the Constitution provides the Commonwealth with powers that leaders of both major political parties over the years have (in their own words) referred to as ‘the first and most important task of Government’—the defence of the nation.

Given bipartisan support for the importance of this task, how has it come to pass that respected analysts and commentators are now saying that Defence ‘is an incoherent mess, to mix the metaphors, an approaching train wreck of colossal proportions’ and that ‘plans set out in 2009 are in disarray; investment is badly stalled, and the defence budget is an unsustainable mess’. Read more

Ross Terrill’s long road to China

Ross Terrill’s life course and professional experience mirror much of what has happened in Australian geopolitics and economic life since WWII. The country lad growing up in Gippsland started with the ‘umbilical cord’ view of Australia’s link to Britain. But the Australianness of Ross Terrill found its expression in spheres well beyond the Victorian bush or the joys of Melbourne University. Terrill went on to become a citizen of both the United States and Australia, as he immersed himself in the study of China.

The Professor’s working life has been in the US and China but he offers a distinctly Australian view of these two giants. The Terrill who went on the journey to China with Gough Whitlam in 1971 (in several senses a trail Ross Terrill had mapped) can write of the similarities between the Labor Prime Minister of the 1970s and today’s US President: Read more

Two thoughts on the DPRK question

Tanya Ogilvie-White’s recent article is a thoughtful and sensible piece that sparked two thoughts. First, the proposition that Chinese and US interests in respect of the DPRK are beginning to align means, I believe, that China is showing signs of placing the nuclear proliferation dimension of the DPRK issue at the top of its list of interests. There’s evidence of this, but this was also the case immediately after the other two nuclear tests conducted by the DPRK (in 2006 and 2009). In the earlier cases, China seemed to drift back to assigning top priority to being protective of Pyongyang, so I’d regard the jury as still being out on alignment, although it’s something to hope for. The 6-Party Talks went through a number of twists and turns but one scenario not tested was all five of Pyongyang’s partners making clear that they regarded a particular package of proposals as generous and fully responsive to the DPRK’s interests—that is, a package that Pyongyang needed to regard as an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Second, I’d be inclined to be somewhat more forgiving of the stark signals Washington elected to send to reinforce its deterrent message. The cost of a deterrent posture, even one as onerous as the US has sustained on the Korean peninsula for decades, is typically dwarfed by the shortest imaginable war. When you are the ‘deterrer of last resort’, when the number on everyone’s speed-dial is yours and responsibility to prosecute any conflict is inescapable, and when you are dealing with a newish and still unfamiliar power configuration in Pyongyang, erring on the side of making certain the other side appreciates what might be in store is not only understandable, but might in fact have been decisive in keeping the crisis away from the brink.

Ron Huisken is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, ANU.

North Korea: still sliding towards the abyss?

Pyongyang Subway Museum MuralSpurred on by Tanya Ogilvie-White’s post on Friday, I want to add some thoughts to the mix on the current situation on the Korean peninsula.

What do we know about what’s really driving decision-making in Pyongyang? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not very much’. So we have to work by theories instead. A first theory says that Kim Jong Un might well be using this crisis to consolidate his position internally. That’s plausible—in communist dictatorships it’s not uncommon for a leadership transition to take about four years. If that’s true in North Korea’s case, we’re still only about one third of the way through that period. Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011 pushed North Korea into a political contest for which the family was only half prepared. Remember how long they took to announce the death?

In the years before Kim Jong Il’s death, some Chinese interlocutors at ASPI exchanges were speculating that the family probably couldn’t get the third generation up and into place. Sometimes that thought has popped back into my mind while watching current events play out. Kim Jong Un is still young—if he can entrench his rule, he’ll likely be there for thirty years or more. So his opponents have an incentive to topple him early. If the current crisis is all about regime consolidation, then we have to conclude that the harder Kim Jong Un pushes the buttons for tensions on the peninsula, the less secure he feels in his position. Judging by recent events, then, he feels far less secure than many suppose. If that’s true, one of the scenarios we should be thinking about is a post-Kim Jong Un North Korea, even though it’s far from obvious how such a transition might proceed. Read more

Good deeds and good strategy: humanitarian and disaster relief operations

President Barack Obama waves to people in the gallery after addressing the Australian Parliament in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Nov.17, 2011.This is a shortened version of a longer paper presented to the Alliance 21 meeting in Washington. Abridgment by Kristy Bryden.

The arrival of US Marines in Australia has started a national, regional and international debate that will run for some time. The debate centres on the obvious advantages of an enhanced regional humanitarian and disaster response (HADR) capability and the disadvantage of an increased US military presence in Australia, seen by China part of a wider effort to circumscribe their emergence as a regional, and potentially global, power.

How the increased US presence is understood within the region will do a lot to shape the nature of the alliance between Australia and the United States into the 21st century. It’s hard however, to counter the perception that the increased US military presence in Australia is a response to the growing power of China. The reality of the deployments and the potential for more extensive deployments, especially air and naval forces with strategic reach, places Australia firmly in the American camp. Read more

Wars of necessity: naive militarism

Jim Molan’s polemical article in Quadrant (March 2013) (and his précis on The Strategist last week) presents a target-rich environment. Putting aside what I’ll describe as Jim’s robust style of argument, he addresses the two key perennial policy questions for Defence: how much to invest and what to do with the investment.

His main proposition seems to be that good strategy leads Australia being capable of engaging in ‘high-end warfighting’ in so-called Wars of Necessity. ‘That is why we build the ADF’, he says. So what’s his justification for this level of capability?

At one level, Jim seems believe we should invest just so that the ADF ‘can conduct a level of sophisticated joint warfighting operations appropriate to a nation such as Australia’—whatever ‘appropriate’ means in this context! To be fair, however, the appeal to national pride and institutional vanity is not the only or the primary argument offered in the article. Read more

Indonesia: priorities, politics, perceptions and Papua

Senator the Hon Bob Carr, HE Dr Marty Natalegawa (Indonesian Foreign Minister), HE Dr Purnomo Yusgiantoro (Indonesian Defence Minister) and Defence Minister Stephen Smith at the inaugural Australia-Indonesia 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue in Canberra on 15 March 2012.

There is reason to be pleased with the defence outcomes of the 2 plus 2 meeting just concluded in Jakarta. For once delivered without hype, the meeting’s communiqué points to solid progress in building a closer relationship between two unlikely friends, Australia and Indonesia. Although the unemotional Stephen Smith and the flamboyant Purnomo Yusgiantoro must qualify as the Odd Couple of regional defence diplomacy, it seems that the two ministers have established a good rapport. The Australian decision to brief Indonesia closely on the development of the 2013 Defence White Paper has been rewarded with an offer from Purnomo to do the same for a planned Indonesian defence statement next year. That’s a good basis for building a closer dialogue.

Australia’s offer to provide the Indonesian military with an additional five C-130H Hercules aircraft at ‘mates rates’ after the gifting of an initial four is a useful development for both countries. This will boost Indonesia’s air-lift capacity, shortfalls in which hamper our cooperation in responding to natural disasters. Commitments to increasing exercises and the perennial promise of considering joint maritime patrolling are all steps on the right track. Earlier on The Strategist I proposed a number of practical steps that could be taken to build further defence-to-defence links, so there’s scope for the relationship to grow further. Read more

De-escalating the North Korean nuclear crisis

This morning, I read the first piece of sensible analysis that I have seen on the current escalating North Korean nuclear crisis. It’s an article titled ‘Rattling the American Cage: North Korean Nuclear Threats and Escalation Potential’ (PDF), co-authored by Peter Hayes and Roger Cavazos—two authors from the Nautilus Institute, both of whom have a deep understanding of proliferation dynamics and have been studying North Korean behaviour for many years. I hope everyone with an interest in defusing what has become a very tense standoff will read it, as a weighty and well-informed alternative to the otherwise shallow, hysterical and mostly counter-productive commentary that has appeared in the media in recent days.

Their argument goes like this: based on past patterns of behaviour, it’s most likely that the latest round of North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship is calculated to consolidate Kim Jong Un’s charismatic leadership and demonstrate the country’s independence, in defiance of international condemnation, UN Security Council sanctions and the Obama administration’s (failed) policy of strategic patience. Accordingly, Pyongyang’s intention is not to attack South Korea, pre-emptively or otherwise, but to signal to the international community—and the US in particular—that the costs of what Pyongyang regards as a hostile and unjust US-led policy of isolation and intimidation are growing. Kim Jong Un’s ultimate goal is thus extortion rather than pure deterrence—to bring about a change in US policy that will bolster and legitimise his regime. Read more

ANZUS and the alliance security dilemma

Future challenges to the US–Australia alliance will revolve around tensions inherent in what Glenn Snyder identifies as ‘the alliance security dilemma’. Modern alliances are characterised by the dual fears of abandonment and entrapment—the client state simultaneously seeks to avoid abandonment by its major power protector and entrapment when it’s pressured into making commitments it would rather avoid. Three challenges will accentuate the alliance dilemma for Australia over the coming decade.

Alliance burden sharing

America’s military spending is projected to be slashed by at least half a trillion dollars in the next ten years. The consequences for US allies could be profound. No state today has the potential to seriously rival the US as a military power, and that’s unlikely to alter for some time. But China will continue to make rapid inroads into US military ascendancy in Asia, despite President Obama’s intriguing reassurance that ‘reductions in US defence spending will not come at the expense of the Asia Pacific’. China’s ability to impose serious costs on the US in littoral zone conflicts is exemplified by Beijing’s major investment in asymmetric warfare technologies designed to deter US intervention in specific scenarios. Of concern to America’s Asian allies must be the fact that China’s area denial and anti-access capabilities have improved during a period when US defence expenditure was not declining. Read more