Strategist Article Archives - Page 1153 of 1181

Reader response: more force structure options

14 February 2013

Peter Layton’s recent post raises some important questions about force structure but ultimately comes up with an overly simplified characterisation of the alternatives.

Peter describes the two ends of the force structure continuum in overly stark terms, and the reality is far more nuanced. The vast majority of Australia’s operational deployments have been multi-national activities, so describing one end of the continuum as conducting independent operations is simply not valid—especially in an increasingly networked world.

Aside from Australia’s operations in the South West Pacific during World War II, Australia’s operational deployments also tend be dominated by only one of the three services. A good example of this is the Timor-Leste INTERFET operation. As a consequence, Australia doesn’t have a tradition of deploying ‘balanced’ joint forces. To be sure, our tactical force contributions to US-led coalitions have tended to be employed under service component lines as Peter suggests. But this isn’t the other end of the force structure spectrum.

In fact, I’m not convinced that the continuum is a simple two-dimensional model and that we must once again chose a point on it to continue our force structure evolution. Given the financial constraints and competing pressures, the United States—as the pre-eminent global power—is entering a phase where it would prefer to provide support to regional coalitions rather than take the lead in every instance (Libya was an example of that). The emergence of regionally-based coalitions, in my view, presents an additional dimension to Australia’s force structure debate. Read more

ANZAC cooperation: just do it

13 February 2013

Rob Ayson’s dismay about the lacklustre summit of Australian and New Zealand Prime Minister’s last weekend is easily understandable. It produced so little of substance that one was left asking: why bother? What we got was an agreement to house a largish boat-load of asylum seekers and to fund a war memorial for Wellington, ‘… made of rugged Australian red sandstone’. On this side of the Tasman, your average daily Prime Ministerial media event often delivers more than that. It’s thin pickings for a relationship that’s allegedly so close—Prime Minister Gillard has used the word ‘family’ to describe it no less than 13 times in the last two years.

From the context of her comments, Gillard uses the term to imply a sense closeness and comfort in the relationship, but the family analogy is in fact the enemy of progress in trans-Tasman cooperation. Far from looking to build substance in a modern relationship, the leaders of both countries wallow in their comfort zones, with neither pressing nor being pressed to deliver more. That warm-slipper reality suits relationship managers in both countries; the status quo is undisturbed and expectations stay low.

That might well be an acceptable way to manage the relationship if it were the case that our strategic outlook was mostly positive. But there are sufficient challenges in prospect to curl the toes of even the snuggest Ugg-boot wearer—and challenges of a type that Australia and New Zealand should jointly think through. Read more

Hard times

13 February 2013

Earlier today, I took up an invitation to speak at the annual Australian Defence Magazine Congress. My task was to provide an update on the defence budget and make predictions about where it’s headed. The first part was easy, the second less so. Here’s an outline of what I said.

Where are we now?

In May 2009 the government released an ambition blueprint for the ADF of the future—Force 2030—accompanied by a 21-year funding commitment and a decade-long $2 billion Strategic Reform Program (SRP). The funding commitment lasted all of 10 days, before $8.8 billion of promised funding was ‘reprogrammed’ (i.e. deferred) to beyond 2016 in the 2009–10 Budget. (That budget is examined in grisly detail here.)

Over the next three Budgets, Defence went on a wild ride. When the dust settled in May last year, Defence had seen a further $1.8 billion of promised funding deferred, had handed back $1.6 billion in unspent funds, absorbed $2.5 billion in unfunded measures and copped a demand to find an extra $10 billion of new savings (i.e. reduced funding) above and beyond the SRP. All up, since the publication of the 2009 White Paper, $25 billion of scheduled White Paper funding has been lost one way or another. Read more

Reader response: submarines—what are they good for?

13 February 2013

Andrew Davies makes some points about maritime operations which need teasing out.

The first is in relation to maritime trade and the ability to protect it. It seems to me that in making the declaration that such protection is getting more difficult because of the reducing numbers of warships and the increasing numbers of merchant ships, there is an inherent assumption that such protection has to be achieved by mechanisms such as convoy. In other words, there has been a default to what is a particular operational/tactical method rather than an attempt to consider the issue as a whole. I find it interesting how often this happens when naval/maritime questions are raised in public, perhaps much more often than is the case on land or in the air.

There can be no doubt that the protection of shipping is a complex and constantly evolving problem. But that complexity needs to be borne in mind, because it works both for and against would-be protectors. There are many techniques for the protection and control of shipping, some time-honoured and some very new. Close protection of merchant ships by warships is a tool that may well be employed in particular circumstances, but it would be wholly impractical in others. Arguably, there have been a whole host of developments, such as the much improved maritime domain awareness systems now multiplying around the world, as well as remote and very long range sensors (such as passive and low frequency sonars) which provide much greater support to what needs to be at least a theatre (and potentially global) effort, and about which all too little has been said in public. What is also clear about the protection of maritime trade as a whole, as opposed to securing specific vital supplies to particular destinations, is that it would need to be on a coalition basis. As, arguably, it always has been. Read more

Force Structure 103a: joint or combined?

12 February 2013

For Australia, force structure decisions don’t solely revolve around national considerations. The alliance with America has a major influence. In thinking about force structures we have two choices at either end of a continuum: either develop an independent national joint force or instead field tactical units able to fit seamlessly into a larger American joint force. In practice we try to a bit of both, although this potentially builds two different and incompatible forces.

The heyday of the national joint force option was in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the Defence of Australia (DOA) rubric. A national command and control structure was established with the necessary communications systems that allowed independent operations. That proved handy in East Timor when Australia ended up providing the bulk of the forces and running the operation. Perhaps surprisingly, not all middle powers have such a command and control system. Many NATO nations, for example, don’t have a large national command structure that allows them to undertake distant independent operations. Instead, they are part of the NATO command and control system. Read more

Reader response: China and Japan – let’s take a step back from the brink

12 February 2013

Ben Schreer takes a hard-nosed approach to his analysis of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute in his recent post, but I don’t think I can agree with him.

First and foremost, despite his criticism of China I think Ben’s assessment actually gives too much credit to Beijing. He portrays a China that’s methodically ‘probing’ its way towards ruling the waves of the Western Pacific. He sees China implementing a coherent and sophisticated strategy involving the coordinated use of maritime surveillance, coast guard vessels and more conventional naval assets.

Ben might well be right. But for an alternative perspective, readers might also be interested in an excellent new report just released by Linda Jakobsen at the Lowy Institute. A seasoned China watcher, Linda characterises the new Xi Jinping leadership as one plagued by domestic pressures and internally focused as a consequence. This interpretation stands in marked contrast to Ben’s assessment, which—while acknowledging in passing the possibility of internal fissures—sees China as an externally focused, largely unitary actor that is pursuing a coherent grand strategic vision.

Linda’s analysis resonates with an oft-cited International Crisis Group report, published in 2012, that exposes conflicting mandates and a lack of coordination amongst Chinese government agencies—the so-called ‘nine dragons’—involved in the South China Sea. Yet Ben anticipates that the current, coherent pattern of Chinese maritime behaviour in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute will play out similarly in the South China Sea. What’s interesting, however, is just how different China’s approach to these two friction points has been. Where in the East China Sea exchanges between Beijing and Tokyo have quickly escalated to involve the use of military ships and aircraft, Chinese tactics in the South China Sea have by and large remained confined to the use of maritime patrol vessels. Read more

ASPI suggests

12 February 2013

Welcome back for our pick of the defence and security world’s articles over the past week and listing of interesting events.

Navy and fleet sizes

The US Navy has reduced its fleet requirement from 313 to 306 ships. If you’ve been following Andrew Davies’ graphs of the week on the US Navy and fleet size, you won’t be surprised.

Nuclear security

With President Obama set to deliver his State of the Union address later today, the team over at Arms Control Wonk have distilled the best quotes about nuclear weapons and disarmament from all past SOTU addresses, going back to President Harry Truman.

There’s a little inter-blog discussion going on about nuclear superiority, sparked off by Erik Voeten’s post on The Monkey Cage which questions conventional wisdom on the subject, followed by a response by Daniel Nexon over at Duck of Minerva.

Japan and China

The Diplomat’s Trefor Moss argues that, despite a hawkish PM, it’s unlikely Japan will go to war with China and gives seven reasons to back that up.

Over at CIMSEC’s blog, Felix Seidler has a piece that asks, will China’s Navy be operating soon in the Atlantic? Read more

Australia and New Zealand: the pitfalls of unnecessary summitry

11 February 2013

Imagine a parallel universe where the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers conclude their annual meeting by announcing that they’d get together the next time there was a large enough issue to require their mutual high level attention. That might hardly rate a mention in the Australian press. But in New Zealand, where the trans-Tasman relationship is sometimes approached with excessively high public expectations, the Prime Minister of the day might be accused of sacrificing the most important international meeting of the year!

After the weekend meeting between Julia Gillard and John Key in Queenstown, I think that controversy could be worth risking. First of all, we don’t currently have a serious regional crisis erupting where the two countries have to make concerted decisions about the possibility of intervening together. Indeed as the Timor Leste and Solomon Islands missions wind down, the reverse is occurring: New Zealand and Australia are both getting personnel out. When a new crisis in our rather large neighbourhood erupts, the two leaders should meet as a matter of urgency. But this would be a summit of mutual necessity not of ritual obligation. Read more

Submarines—what are they good for?

11 February 2013

In his recent post, Justin Jones did a commendable job of providing the justification for including submarines in a force structure. Jim Molan was right when he said that too much of the discussion of the ADF’s force structure is in terms of inputs—i.e. we rush to talk about the numbers of submarines or Joint Strike Fighters versus Super Hornets before we’ve refined our thinking on exactly why we want those things in the first place. So it’s good to see a discussion that starts with the ‘why’ of submarines.

I agree with a lot of Justin’s points, but I still wasn’t convinced that we got to the real crux of the issue as far as Australia’s future submarine force is concerned. The case he made on this blog for submarines has a number of strategic elements (the ‘ends’ to which subs could be put): maintaining our maritime sovereignty, keeping the international trading system free and open, and the use of naval power as part of the broader use of force in support of national objectives. To help achieve those, it’s argued, submarines provide us with certain ‘means’ (or what Jim calls the ‘operational plans’ part of the process): sea denial, sea control, ISR and strike.

My first objection is that there’s no obvious link between the ends and the means. As I argued recently, the ability of navies to secure world trade is diminishing, as naval fleets dwindle and commercial fleets multiply. And submarines are more a tool of interdiction than protection. I have no doubt that our submarines, and those of any reasonably capable subsurface fleet, could do great harm to world trade, but I don’t think they can protect it—at least not directly. They could, however, be part of a strategy of sea denial, either as a deterrent or acting to keep would-be interdictors away from vital naval or commercial shipping. But we’d better hope it’s not too big an area, and we’d better hope that any adversary will confine its attention to those parts of the maritime world where a small number of relatively slow diesel-electric boats can operate effectively. Read more

Bring out your Generals

11 February 2013

Old soldiers never die, General Douglas MacArthur said, they just fade away. In Australia however, it seems they vanish completely. So few retired generals contribute meaningfully to public debate on Australia’s defence and strategic policy, it often feels like Jim Molan is carrying water for all of them.

By my count there are just four retired generals (including admirals and air marshals) regularly contributing to the current public debate on defence. There have been others who have made occasional contributions, but the voice of so many of our ex-generals is missing entirely.

There are several reasons why ex-generals might not feature regularly in public debate. Perhaps they feel a duty not to run commentary on their successors. Perhaps they are wary of the influence wielded by US peers and instead maintain a dignified silence as loyal professionals. Some might believe they can be more influential through private lobbying. Or perhaps they have conflicts of interest through employment in government, defence industry, or as defence consultants.

Anyone of the above reasons might explain why our ex-generals are reticent to sally forth onto the airwaves, talk to journalists, or storm the op-ed pages. But they don’t explain why our ex-generals are missing from scholarly discussion, journals, and academic debate on defence and strategic issues. Read more