Strategist Article Archives - Page 1161 of 1184

Force Structure 102: getting the balance right?

14 January 2013

The next White Paper’s conclusions on the overall force balance will be closely studied. While whether current or future wars receive priority and the numbers of wars to be fought concurrently might be big strategic decisions, it’s the force structure decisions that will identify the big financial winners from the White Paper.

There is a wonderful myth in Australian defence planning that the correct force structure is some ideal ‘balanced’ force. It’s myth mainly because everybody has their own unique idea of the ‘right’ balance. Rather than being permanent, the balance sensibly changes overtime as people consider the emerging circumstances and decide what to focus on. Each White Paper in ways large or small rebalances the ADF. The last White Paper’s decision to build 12 submarines was one such rebalancing.

In simple terms, military forces can do many things, but there are really only three broad types of wars they can be organised for: civil wars (including counterinsurgency), conventional interstate wars and nuclear wars. The weighting of the force between the various types of war is one of the balancing criteria. Read more

Sea power, Mahan and the Western Pacific

14 January 2013

One of the things I like most about the summer break is the opportunity to catch up on some reading. This time around one of the items on my reading list was a revisit of a 1911 essay ‘The Panama canal and sea power in the Pacific‘ by the great sea American power theorist Rear Admiral A. T. Mahan.

The reason I wanted to read this particular piece again was because there’s a turn of phrase in there that has stuck with me and which seems pertinent to our deliberations about the future security structure of the Asia–Pacific region. Mahan, as was often the case, was ahead of the pack in thinking through the strategic implications of the opening of the Panama Canal—still three years away at the time of the publication of his essay.

For Mahan, there were two main implications. Firstly, that the western coast of North America would now be more readily accessible by American fleet elements based on the Atlantic coast and the Royal Navy would be thousands of miles closer to the westernmost provinces of Canada. The ability to provide greater security along that coast would mean that the population of the region could be greatly increased, and the products produced on that seaboard would be able to be reliably traded, with consequent economic gains: Read more

Reader response: Reserves, force structure and budget cuts

13 January 2013

In a recent post on force structure, Peter Layton dramatically highlighted the continuing tension between future capabilities and existing requirements. The problem is, of course, (as Andrew Davies likes to say) that there are a limited number of dollars, and each of them can only be spent once. This is a particular problem when it’s necessary to decide what equipment should be purchased. Similar considerations are also relevant when considering personnel.

It has been a long time (71 years) since Australia faced the prospect of being invaded, and this helps to go some way towards explaining the current structure of the forces.

It’s clear today that the prospect of Japanese invasion was more remote than was appreciated at the time—the Japanese discussed the possibility but the Army wasn’t at all keen on the idea. Nevertheless it was this ‘total war’ situation, together with the prospect of fighting island campaigns in the jungles of the Pacific, resulting in an enormous mobilisation. By 1943 the Army had swelled to more than a dozen divisions (11 infantry and 3 ‘armoured’); nearly 500,000 men, or more than ten times the size of today’s Army. As it turned out, there were far more people in uniform than the country could support. Additionally, manpower was needed for other vital tasks, such as growing food and supporting the general Allied war effort. That’s why, within a year, a decision was taken to significantly reduce the size of the armed forces in general and the Army in particular. Read more

ASPI suggests

13 January 2013

Happy 2013 to all our Strategist readers! Welcome back for another round of new articles and links in the security, strategy and defence world.

Mali

Mali is heating up with the deployment of French troops at the request of Mali’s interim government to help beat back Islamist rebels. If you need a quick primer, check out the timeline and factsheet put together by the American Security Project’s Ashley S. Boyle.

Non-proliferation

Michael Krepon at Arms Control Wonk blog shares his (bleak) prognosis for the year in nuclear arms reduction for Iran, Russia, India and North Korea. Earlier in the week, Tanya Ogilvie-White gave her take on dealing with North Korea’s nuclear intransigence.

Afghanistan

The tempo of drone strike operations in Afghanistan is illustrated by this Defense News item. Two a day in December was a decline on the previous rate. Meanwhile, Kate Clark at Afghanistan Analysts Network looks at different US troop configurations other than the ‘zero option’ for 2014.

Indo–Pacific

Meanwhile, Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis has a new paper that’s optimistic about the opportunities in the India–US strategic relations. It echoes observations by Amit Gupta on The Strategist last year who also saw room for growth in the relationship.

Whether it’s a ‘pivot’ or a ‘rebalance’, the increased American focus on the Asia-Pacific region seems to be good for business. It might be an appropriate time to have another look at US President Eisenhower’s farewell address on the military-industrial complex.

Interested in aircraft carriers of the Indo-Pacific’s Maritime Great Game? German blogger Felix Seidler has a round-up and analysis of the region’s big players over at CIMSEC blog.

Defence projects

The one-time head of DMO, Stephen Gumley, used to say that it wasn’t budget issues with defence projects that kept him awake—it was the schedules. The release just before Christmas of the Australian National Audit Office 2011–12 Major Projects Report bears out that observation:

Maintaining Major Projects on schedule, the second major dimension of project performance, remains the most significant challenge for the DMO and its industry contractors; in turn affecting when the capability is made available for operational release and deployment by the ADF.

But we shouldn’t feel too special—it seems that this is just another of the rich heritage of traditions we have inherited from the United Kingdom, whose own National Audit Office has just made essentially the same finding.

Prioritising North Korea in the UN Security Council

10 January 2013

Australia is right to use its seat on the UN Security Council to push for a tough response to North Korea’s most recent act of military provocation. Pyongyang’s successful launch of the Unha-3 rocket on 12 December 2012 has profound implications for peace and stability in our region, creating exactly the kind of high level threat that the Security Council was set up to address. Yet, in the month since the launch, the body’s only action has been to issue a statement condemning the launch and promising consultations on the issue. This came eight months after an earlier, failed rocket launch prompted the Security Council to declare that it ‘deplored’ North Korea’s behavior and was determined to ‘take action accordingly in the event of a further launch or nuclear test by that country’. It’s high time that these words were translated into action, and Australia is now well-placed to try to make that happen, starting with this week’s first substantive Security Council meetings of 2013.

Although it requires urgent action, North Korea’s missile program doesn’t pose an immediate or direct threat to Australian territory. A report in The Australian described the December launch as ‘chilling’ because, theoretically, it puts parts of Australia within reach of a North Korean nuclear-armed missile. This is misleading, to say the least, because Pyongyang hasn’t yet developed a re-entry capability or a nuclear warhead that would be small enough to fit on top of a missile, and is likely still years away from such a capability. The December launch was significant on a technological level because it demonstrated a successful separation of a three-stage rocket—an important technological step in the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but certainly not the final step, and arguably not the most significant one in terms of advancing North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. Read more

AUKMIN: awkward Anglos

9 January 2013

Later this month Perth will host the fifth meeting of AUKMIN, the annual gathering of Foreign and Defence ministers from Australia and the United Kingdom. It will be a curious gathering, overshadowed by a doubt that both sides won’t raise but which still dogs this oldest of Australia’s bilateral relations: neither country takes the other seriously as a potentially closer defence partner. Australia doubts that the UK’s new-found interest in Asia really goes beyond trade and investment to include deep engagement on security. The UK wonders how much interest Australia has left for Europe after the Asian Century White Paper tied us so firmly to the region’s economic success story.

The litmus test for substance in a bilateral defence relationship is what the two defence forces actually do together. Reading the last AUKMIN communiqué from January 2012, I’m forced to the reluctant conclusion that the answer is ‘not very much’. The communiqué shows that ministers ‘discussed’ all manner of strategic issues, from the Arab Spring to Fiji—going so far as to commit themselves to ‘sharing strategic insights and aligning… thinking’. The reader searches in vain for just one practical measure of planned and funded defence engagement. Both the 2012 and 2011 communiqués deploy the phrase that the two countries are ‘committed to working together in concrete and practical ways’ on security cooperation—effectively demonstrating the iron rule of communiqué writing: the less substance there is in the relationship, the more spruiking is needed.

The fact is that defence cooperation between the UK and Australia is limited and at risk of shrinking further. Because of cost saving measures, secondments between the forces are reducing, as is training and exercising. Intelligence exchanges and strategic dialogues are low cost and show that each country has a lot to gain from deeper engagement but they can’t wholly replace the practical value that comes from close service to service engagement. Of course there is a deep cultural affinity between the two Defence organisations, but wallowing in heritage and history is no substitute for an active and modern strategic relationship. Read more

China’s had a good run – now for the real threat

8 January 2013

For defence and security thinkers the dominant theme for the past several years has been the rise of China and the potential for this development to create tension across the Asia–Pacific. The US pivot, President Barack Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament, an increasing focus on the South China Sea and the release of Australia’s Asian Century White Paper all signal widespread concern that China’s growing influence will result in a redefining of the region’s strategic order.

The focus on China is understandable, but this singularity of attention has meant that another challenge has not received the consideration it warrants. The real danger lies in the intensification of the present shortage of resources, particularly food and water, and the likelihood that shortfalls will spur instability and conflict across the Asia–Pacific and the globe. Resource wars are coming, and yet comparatively little has been said about them by commentators or done to prepare for them by governments.

Of the many resources that humanity consumes, the most vital are food and water. In 2012 over one billion people suffered from chronic hunger, the majority of them living in the Asia–Pacific, while a further billion are ‘food insecure’. This is only the start of the hunger, and experts predict that the global food supply will diminish in coming years. In fact, the situation might already be irretrievable, because: Read more

Force Structure 101

7 January 2013

Behind every book, article and blog post about contemporary defence issues, there lurks the author’s view of what is the ADF’s ‘correct’ force structure. This is never more evident than when there’s a White Paper in the wings. White papers usually represent the outcomes of numerous clashes between competing force structure options. Accordingly, advocates of various alternatives are out in force, both in public and behind closed doors, to try to influence the final result in their favour, This is especially so today when money and resources are scarce.

At the Cabinet level, force structure represents how the Defence budget is allocated—the ‘balance of investment’ in budgeting terms. When funds are limited, the first decision is which gets priority: the current force or the future force? We’ve faced this dilemma before. In the 1990s governments decided to fund the future force at the expense of the current one. This philosophy underpinned both the Keating Government’s 1991 Force Structure Review and the Howard Government’s later 1997 Defence Reform Program. At the time it seemed reasonable enough—there was no war and none threatening so the budget was skewed towards the future, when there might be. Personnel and operating costs were cut to free up funding for new equipment.

Smaller operating budgets meant less flying hours, less steaming days and less track miles. Reduced personnel costs meant a smaller Defence workforce. There was also considerable outsourcing of the ‘tail’, cutting of logistic stocks and transfer of functions to the part-time Reserve. Not surprisingly, when an actual operation like Timor-Leste turned up, where the current force rather than a future abstraction actually had to show up, the Army had worries over both manning the deployment over the longer term as its personnel rotation base had been cut, and in the sustained support of the deployed forces. With Navy the impact was subtler; as the Rizzo Review found, outsourcing to gain efficiencies cut Navy’s and DMO’s professional skills, contributed to the poor preparedness of Navy ships a decade later. Read more

Policy talks the way money walks

6 January 2013

A Pentagon rubric promises, ‘Show me your budget and I’ll describe your strategy.’ It mirrors the dictum Arthur Tange made famous in Canberra, ‘Until you’re talking dollars, you’re not talking strategy’. US Vice President Joe Biden has a version used by his Dad: ‘Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.’ (A point made on The Strategist by Henry Ergas in an earlier post.) Or we can reduce it to basics, as taught by that famous philosopher Jerry Maguire: ‘Show me the money!’

Jerry, Tange, Biden and the Pentagon all agree on a hard truth: sometimes promises and policy are no more than gossamer of aspiration, ambition and posturing; to find the reality, see where the money is walking. The ‘dollar test’ is useful in measuring the distance between declared policy and real policy. Applying it to Canberra, what do the budgets say about the real strategy being followed in foreign affairs, national security and defence?

First, consider the long-term and debilitating budget decline of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. DFAT has been doing more with less for so long that bureaucratic starvation has become the default diet in the Casey Building. The Parliament’s Joint Foreign Affairs Committee has just identified what it calls ‘chronic underfunding of DFAT over the last three decades.’

DFAT’s chronic state was even more obvious over the 9/11 decade because of the big increase in the dollars being fed into the aid budget as well as the hyper-expansion of the national security agencies. DFAT is in the strange position of overseeing an AusAID which is now several multiples richer than the parent department. Read more

Happy holidays from The Strategist

21 December 2012

Since we started up in July, we’ve had a wonderful time working with our contributors and receiving feedback from our readers. We’re pleased that you have found The Strategist a worthwhile experience in an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas. Our aim continues to be to provide high-quality analysis in a format that suits busy readers.

Our last post for 2012 will be on Friday 21 December, and we’ll be taking a break from blogging until Monday 7 January. We’re looking forward to bringing you more considered analysis on the big defence, strategy and security issues facing Australia in 2013.

But while we won’t be publishing during this time, we don’t want to lose touch with our contributors or readers. Until our return, we’ll be happy to receive submissions of around 800 words for our Strategist Summer Series which kicks off 7 January. We’ll be checking our emails during that time and will still be around on social media so follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook for updates, links to articles and other news.

From the Strategist editorial team, we thank you for reading and contributing to our blog and wish you a wonderful holiday season!

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bob Doran.