Strategist Article Archives - Page 1165 of 1186

The unintended consequences of Fiji’s UN peacekeeping operations

17 December 2012

Great socio-economic promise was envisaged for newly-independent Fiji in the 1970s but due to a series of military coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006, this promise has remained unfulfilled. While many scholars explain the coups with reference to ethnic politics, I’d argue that the politicisation of the Fijian military is partly due to the fact that it has developed a self-image as a mediator of political tensions and executor of coups d’état. Unlike the Indonesian military, the Fijian military’s raison d’être wasn’t determined by internal security threats; in fact, it was historically apolitical. And the development of this self-image appears to be an unintended consequence of the Fijian military’s involvement in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations.

Much of this development has its roots in the Fijian military’s first deployment on a UN peacekeeping operation as part of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in 1978. Participation in UN peacekeeping operations had obvious benefits to the fledgling Fijian nation, including being seen as a good international citizen, the generation of foreign exchange and improved youth employment.

However, rather than staying in Lebanon for a year or so as originally intended, the soldiers served for more than two decades, withdrawing only in 2002. Moreover, the confidence the Fijian military gained from serving with larger nations’ militaries in UN peacekeeping missions has given it an inflated corporate self-image. Participation in UN peacekeeping missions also necessitated that the military increase in size beyond what would be required to defend Fiji. By making peacekeeping the centerpiece of foreign policy, Fijian governments have unwittingly enhanced the military’s capability to intervene in domestic politics. Read more

The 2011 Libya campaign: lessons for Australia

17 December 2012

Despite the aphorism that generals always prepare for the last war, the 2011 Libyan campaign to oust the Gadhafi regime presents some useful pointers regarding the exercise of deadly force by Australia. This is especially so when compared with the lengthy, costly and perhaps inconclusive military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. From a Western perspective, the Libyan campaign was short, cheap, and successful.

Nineteen nations, employing the most potent military coalition in the world (NATO) attacked a small country, of 6.6 million people, for seven months to eventually force a change of regime. No NATO personnel were lost in combat, there were few civilian casualties caused by NATO and the mission was clearly achieved. The cost was about one billion dollars, one ninth of what it costs for a month in Afghanistan.

The campaign has been widely hailed by air power advocates, but it was more than just a sophisticated air campaign. Forces from aerospace, land and maritime and cyber domains were all needed to ensure success. In the opening attack on the night of 19 March 2011, 45 precision munitions from three B-2 bombers aircraft and 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched against air-defence and other targets. The British also launched Tomahawks and delivered Storm Shadow cruise missiles from strike aircraft flying from Britain. This initial engagement, mainly by the US with some UK and French support, was crucial to the eventual outcome as it enabled subsequent operations to occur unencumbered by an air threat, and it began the attrition of Libyan military assets. Once air superiority had been established, the Europeans were then able to conduct about 90 per cent of all strike sorties.

The employment of precision guided missiles was central to maintaining domestic public opinion, ensuring fewer civilian casualties as well as removing the air threat. This part of the campaign is a model for the future and Australia is working to be able to implement a similar strategy. The elements required included Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance capabilities, aerial tanker support and a supply of precision-guided weapons. Australia is currently purchasing the Growler electronic warfare aircraft, which potentially offers an offensive cyber capability. Australian forces, with the JSOW-C long range strike weapon on Super Hornets have similarly capable missiles and modern combat aircraft with which to deliver air superiority. Read more

Reader response: Japan and Asia’s future order

16 December 2012

Peter Jennings gave a spirited response in the Oz last week to my thoughts about the trend of Australia–Japan strategic relations. I’m sure Peter is right that ‘there is no intent at this stage to sign a defence alliance between Japan and Australia’. But of course we shouldn’t wait until the decision has been made before asking whether it’s a good idea to head in that direction. Peter’s argument that it’s a good idea raises lots of important issues. Let me just focus on a couple—one about China and one about Japan.

China is clearly a key factor in this question, but I’m not quite sure where Peter stands on it. At one point he says Australia’s defence relationship with Japan has never been developed at the expense of our relationship with China. But later he says that China would clearly prefer that it not develop any further, and urges us not to allow this to dissuade us from building stronger strategic links with Japan anyway.

Whether we would be right to ignore China’s concerns depends on much wider questions about how best to keep Asia peaceful over the next few decades. Peter seems to agree with the predominant US and Japanese view that the best approach is to build a solid front of like-minded countries to ‘persuade’ China to accept the status quo with minor modifications. If this strategy—let’s call it containment—is workable, then an alliance with Japan would make some sense. But if, as I have argued elsewhere, the policy of containing China is mistaken, then so would an Australia-Japan alliance, because it would weaken rather than strengthen regional security. Read more

All ashore: the utility of amphibious operations

16 December 2012

The end of amphibious operations has been prophesised at various times during the past century. After the Gallipoli experience in 1915, many military thinkers in Britain and elsewhere believed that airpower, modern artillery, machines guns, mines and torpedoes and so on made it impossible to force a landing against a well organised defence. After World War II, which saw the greatest amphibious operations in history undertaken, Chief of Staff of the US Army General Omar Bradley stated that nuclear weapons precluded further large scale amphibious operations. In the contemporary environment much of the discussion is centred on the proliferation of Anti-Access / Area Denial (A2AD) technologies and ways of defeating them.

Meanwhile, in Australia the decision to buy two new large amphibious ships has been criticised as lacking a utility to the ‘Defence of Australia’ and turning the ADF into a ‘one shot defence force’ that will be used ‘like the US marines… to storm from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli‘ (paywalled).

Yet, despite the extremely difficult nature of these operations, time and again the utility of possessing an amphibious capability has been realised. In 1950, only one year after Omar Bradley had announced its death knell, the US military launched an operationally-decisive amphibious landing by a two division assault force at Inchon, South Korea. In 1956 the British had to pull their amphibious capability out of mothballs to conduct an amphibious landing during the Suez Crisis. This same capability proved exceptionally useful a few years later in Kuwait in 1961. Read more

ASPI suggests

15 December 2012

Here’s our usual weekly round-up of the latest articles and reports in strategy, defence and security.

Capability

China is making great progress in the development of new aircraft. This Diplomat article wonders, now that they’ve got their own jet fighters, how they are going with jet engines?

Next, the Australian government announced this week it’s keeping open the option of buying more Super Hornets (pictured below) as part of its ‘plan B’ approach to the purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

It’s interesting to see the parallels in Canada, where their F-35 purchase is also under review. The F-35 might have made headlines here, but discrepancies between the public figures and in-house costings have caused enormous political grief for Canada’s Conservative government.

Security and strategy

CSIS Jakarta’s Iis Gindarsah has a new article on the logistical issues holding back the Indonesian military’s modernisation plans.

Last week, I included a piece on the legalities of China’s new South China Sea passport. Here’s a follow-up: a new IISS Strategic Comment on how it’s stoking the territorial dispute.

Moving onto the Asian Century, the Asialink Commission’s new report ‘Our place in the Asian Century’ (PDF) argues that closer ties with ASEAN is the best way to navigate the rise of China and enhance our influence in Asia and beyond.

And speaking of engaging Asia Pacific partners, Hugh White argued earlier in the week, Australia should be wary of closer ties with Japan while Peter Jennings says full steam ahead. Meanwhile, Tessa Morris-Sukuzi looks at what the nationalist troika in Japan’s upcoming election means for regional security.

SDSC’s Stephan Frühling and Benjamin Schreer argue we need to get serious about ballistic missile defence and the Australian government should reinforce political support for international missile defence cooperation.

Next, this Foreign Affairs article by Brandon Valeriano and Ryan Maness on why we shouldn’t fear the fog of cyberwar (thanks Peter Layton). In short, actual cyberattacks aren’t as severe as people think. And if you’re in a reading mood, here’s a Foreign Affairs list on what to read on cybersecurity.

Keeping with a cyber theme, Land Warfare Studies Centre’s Chloe Diggins and Clint Arizmendi have a Wired post on the next domain of warfare: your brain. With new brain-computer interface technologies, could soldiers’ brains be hacked and manipulated in warfare?

Last but not least, here’s SIPRI’s 2012 map of multilateral peace operation deployments (PDF). It’s a useful snapshot of which groups of countries are involved in which peacekeeping ops globally. And for more detailed information, check out their database.

Image courtesy of Department of Defence.

Reader response: getting carried away with Britain’s new carriers

14 December 2012

Harry White’s contribution on the UK carrier program highlights a number of the flaws in the UK’s current approach to its defence capabilities. But he seeks to ask the wrong first question in suggesting that it should be ‘are carriers the best way to achieve our strategic objectives for the money’?

Rather, the UK needs to go much deeper than this and seek to work out much more precisely just what its strategic objectives are. If, as proposed in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, they are to include a capacity to intervene overseas, only then does the question of whether carriers are the appropriate basing solution for air power arise.

If (and only if) there is determined to be a requirement for an intervention capability, it’s worth looking at the very mixed experience with maintaining basing access and passage through other nations’ airspace that the UK and its partners had during operational contingencies in the 1990s, and the part that this played in the original decision to build the carriers. The need to achieve and maintain access certainly drove much of the thinking behind the 1998 SDR and was the reason for the unanimity of Defence advice (including the RAF) at the time. If the UK is to continue in the intervention game, then that issue of access very much remains on the table. And, even if access can be assured, there remains the question of the cost benefit difference between proximate, sea delivered air power (plus seaborne lift—and an island state like the UK will always need to use the sea when conducting expeditionary operations) and long distance air-to-air refuelled capability. This is a very complicated question. Read more

North Korean missile launch: the good and the bad for Australia

14 December 2012

In a typical destabilising move, North Korea launched a missile last Wednesday (despite having previously advised that the launch would be in late December). An unpredictable and defiant North Korea is nothing new—it’s something that we came to expect from Kim Jong-Il, and his successor appears to be no different. North Korean missile and nuclear provocations have direct security implications for neighbouring states and the United States (as a primary target of North Korean aggression). What’s less obvious is that they also indirectly impact Australia’s strategic interests.

Managing North Korea and strategies for bringing it into line has been an important election issue for political candidates in both Japan and South Korea—so this latest missile launch stands to influence the outcome of upcoming elections (16 December for Japan and 19 December for South Korea). North Korea’s latest provocation will only serve to further consolidate votes for conservative candidates; Ms Park in South Korea, and Mr Abe in Japan.

More hard-line conservative governments in Tokyo and Seoul might actually bode well for Australia’s strategic interests. Both countries are strategic partners for Australia as part of the ‘hub and spokes’ alliance arrangements with the United States. While a hostile North Korea continues to develop long-range missile capability, Tokyo and Seoul will have even greater incentive to reach out to like-minded countries like Australia to address common security threats. A stronger drive in Seoul to reinforce military ties with allies in the region stands to improve Australia–South Korea defence cooperation and maximise both country’s middle power status. Similarly, if this latest missile launch precipitates a shift in Japan’s defence policy to allow it the right to collective self-defence and to come to the aid of an ally, this shift would be a welcome development for Australia–Japanese defence cooperation. Read more

Reader response: managing submarines and managing uncertainty

13 December 2012

Andrew Davies’ post yesterday on the second Coles report is absolutely right: the fundamental issues don’t lie with the Collins design itself but with the poor management of the complex system that determines the maintenance and manning of the submarines. Andrew is also right that if those issues can be resolved, there could be very significant efficiencies involved in extending the Collins’ life of type.

However, as Andrew also notes, there is no certainty that those issues are being resolved or will be in future. As a result, there is a risk that the extension option will simply be throwing good money after bad. The question then becomes how different possible approaches going forward compare in terms of their consequences if those problems are not fully or satisfactorily addressed.

In other words, what needs to be analysed are the risks under alternative approaches for taxpayers (both financially and in terms of our defence capability) and how those risks vary with the extent to which we can or cannot address the systemic problems Andrew (and Coles) notes. Read more

Graph of the week: Collins (un)availability

13 December 2012

Yesterday’s release of the Coles review report into the availability of Collins Class submarines was very illuminating. As well as telling us that the Collins has some life in it yet, it shed a bit more light on past performance than had been previously unavailable in public.

In particular, after the 2008/09 reporting year, Defence stopped reporting availability data for the Collins fleet, instead rolling it into a single number for ‘major combatants’—ie submarines plus frigates. But figure 3 from the latest Coles report (PDF) and data from past Defence Annual Reports allows us to produce the following chart.

This graph updates the figure that Mark Thomson and I produced for our previous work on submarines. Historical data is in blue, estimated data in red. Perhaps it’s not too surprising that the 09/10 figures were deemed unfit for public viewing.

Sources: Defence Annual Reports (blue), estimates based on Coles data (red and black)

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

Are social media users now legitimate targets?

13 December 2012

There are lots of interesting dimensions in Israel and Hamas’ recent social media war. But one of the more pertinent ethical questions arising from this case is whether engaging with or contributing to a militarised social media space constitutes an act of war. If that’s the case, this might mean that those using social media in support of military operations are now legitimate targets.

According to the Geneva Convention, legitimate military targets

… are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.