Strategist Article Archives - Page 1174 of 1186

Pine Gap – technically speaking, Australia has a choice

24 October 2012

Cam Hawker’s recent Strategist post, ‘Stuck in the middle with you’, suffers from five major fallacies. First, it assumes that Australia–US joint facilities predetermine the strategic relationship between Canberra and Washington. Second, it assumes that the facilities’ predetermination of policy is automatic—meaning, as Cam puts it, that ‘there is no choice and has not been for decades.’ Third, it argues that the pre-eminence of the joint facilities ‘hardwires’ Australian decisions about the use of force to US decisions—that once the US goes to war, Australia must follow. Fourth, it insists that in the typical rush to war, Australia would in any case have no time to think through possible constraints on the use of the joint facilities in a conflict to which Australia was not a party. And fifth, it suggests that recent signs of innovation within ANZUS, like the stationing of the US marines in Darwin, are largely irrelevant because our strategic policy is already a prisoner of Washington’s.

These are big, meaty assertions. Cam’s piece is one of the strongest examples I’ve seen in recent times of what’s called ‘the dependency thesis’—that Australian strategic and defence policy is dependent upon that of its great and powerful ally. But on all five points the article is fundamentally wrong-headed. The Australia–US strategic relationship is a broad one, and its character and content is not predetermined by the existence of the joint facilities. True, the facilities began their life as actual US bases, but evolved into joint facilities during the 1980s. As joint facilities, they serve both US and Australian defence forces, and US and Australian national interests. Changing US submarine deployment patterns have, over the years, made the Northwest Cape communication facility less relevant to the US and more relevant to us. And technological innovation meant the functions of the Nurrungar defence satellite support facility could essentially be fulfilled from the Pine Gap site. Pine Gap remains an important facility, but thinking that the arcane SIGINT relationship runs the broader strategic one is simply mistaken. Read more

The third US presidential debate: a consensus on Asian Pacific security

23 October 2012

I’m currently attending the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Honolulu, the fifth such meeting to be held in Hawaii as part of the now 20 year-old venerable Australian American Leadership Dialogue process. It’s an interesting setting to watch the third Presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

This debate focused on foreign and security policy, although Governor Romney was certainly keen to bring discussion back to the state of the American economy at every opportunity. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney performed strongly in the debate. On that basis I would score the debate narrowly in favour of Romney for two reasons. First, foreign policy should be a natural area of advantage for an incumbent President, because Obama has after all been directing the policy for the last four years. Second, Romney came across as looking largely on top of the issues, and cut a credible image as someone who could become the Commander-in-Chief. That’s no small achievement for a candidate who has had very little foreign policy experience in his political career to date. Read more

Stuck in the middle with you: Pine Gap and Australia’s strategic choices

23 October 2012

Australia has less room to maneuver in balancing between Washington and Beijing than many analysts suppose.

Much of the commentary on Australia’s management of its relationships with the United States and China is framed around the idea that having to choose between our traditional ally and our largest trading partner would be against our interests. Books such as Hugh White’s China Choice are premised on the idea that Canberra can act as an ‘honest broker’ between the two powers, lest their relationship deteriorate to the point that we are someday forced to choose between them. Back in 2004 the then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer indicated that Australia would not necessarily choose to join the US against China in a war over Taiwan should the dispute ever escalate that far.

More recently, the decision to rotate a small force of Marines through Darwin, prompted business leader Kerry Stokes to accuse Canberra of ‘taking sides’, while the respected analyst Michael Wesley queried the decision on the grounds that it may limit our strategic choices.

In fact there is no choice and has not been for decades. Read more

ASPI recommends: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

22 October 2012

For your (virtual) bookshelf: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Centre for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999.

In the 1990s, the CIA commissioned a study on the nature of intelligence analysis to try to understand why they had an unenviable track record of missing (more accurately, underestimating) some major developments in areas they had been watching closely, such as the decline of the Soviet Union. Or, as Jack Davis, himself a former CIA analyst memorably put it, the CIA analysts had mind sets that helped ‘get the production out on time and keep things going effectively between those watershed events that become chapter headings in the history books’.

Heuer’s monograph, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, is something of a classic in the field, and it sheds much light on the frailties of the human mind regarding the difficulties of making objective assessments of complex situations when only incomplete information is available. This is a very readable book in that it is not a theory-based approach, and it is full of examples of how we can fool ourselves into being surer than we have any right to be. Read more

ASPI suggests

21 October 2012

Welcome back for our weekly round-up of articles, reports and events in the strategy, defence and security world.

Articles and news

What is the biggest security problem in today’s world? This Foreign Policy article discusses five of the world’s potential ‘flash points’.

Next, Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security has a timeline for the East and South China Seas that documents the various disputes and confrontations from 1955 to the present.

China’s defence aviation industry—much like Japan’s many years ago—has been criticised as being imitative of the west. But the sector is driving innovation and has started to produce results that are causing a rethink. This latest RSIS Commentary (PDF) by Michael Raska is a short and sweet summary of China’s aviation industry now that its ‘next generation’ fighters have been unveiled.

Sticking with the China theme, here’s the podcast and audio for the latest IQ2 Debate ‘We’ve nothing to fear from a powerful China’ featuring Rizal Sukma, Joanne Wood, Michael Wesley and John Lee.

Events

For Twitter users, the Army is coming! On Tuesday 30 October, this year’s Chief of Army Exercise will live tweet the first of two expert panels via the Land Warfare Studies Centre account (@lwscaustralia) from 1pm AEDST. What’s more, Twitter users are invited to submit questions to the panel based on this topic:

It is widely accepted that many contemporary security issues are unable to be addressed by use of the military alone. What are realistic aspirations for, and limitations of, combined, multi-agency coordination in order to address security concerns and build constructive relationships within the Indo-Pacific region?

For Canberra-based readers, the UN Association of Australia is hosting a United Nations Day event at which the Deputy Chief of Army, Major General Angus Campbell, will speak about Australia’s contribution to peacekeeping operations; Wednesday 24 October at 6pm, ACT Legislative Assembly. To RSVP, email the UN Association of Australia.

If you’re in Melbourne this week, AIIA Victoria will be hosting a two-way discussion with occasional Strategist contributor Paul Monk on Australia’s strategic challenges on Thursday 25 October from 6.15pm.

Next week, we’ll be presenting a special US Presidential election edition of ASPI suggests. The intended level of defence spending has been one point of differentiation between the two candidates, so stay tuned.

Reader response: Australia and norms in cyberspace

19 October 2012

It was hard not to crack a wry smile when reading Tobias Feakin’s post on the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace. Let’s just say that the position of the blocs settling behind a more ‘rules-based’ approach, on one hand, and a ‘norms-based’ approach sit very uneasily with track records, both documented and rumoured.

The incongruities of diplomacy aside, the debate about a more voluntary and organic ‘norms-based’ or an enforceable ‘rules-based’ approach to cybersecurity is an important one to have.

There has already been some movement towards a rule-based approach with regards to some aspects of cybersecurity, with Australia becoming the most recent nation to sign and pass enabling legislation for the convention on cybercrime, a treaty acceded to by most European states, Japan, and the United States, and which covers issues such as computer-based fraud, unauthorised access to systems, child pornography production and distribution, and copyright infringement. Read more

Air combat – where to from here?

18 October 2012

The recent Australian National Audit Office reports on the current and future air combat capability highlighted the risk and potential cost of keeping the 1980s vintage Hornets flying until they are replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It isn’t the ANAO’s job to look at the policy options for dealing with the risks they identified, but their findings clearly beg the question of what to do.

There are three broad options: stick with the current plan of managing the ageing Hornets until the F-35 is mature and established in service elsewhere; bite the bullet and move to the F-35 sooner to reduce the risk that the Hornets won’t go the distance; or make a further purchase of Super Hornets to add to the existing fleet of 24 Super Hornets acquired in 2006 to de-risk the then planned transition from F-111 to F-35 between 2010 and 2014. For reasons explained below, the logic of the situation is increasingly pointing to a further Super-hornet buy.

Sticking with the current plan has the advantage of not requiring extra resources in the next few years—a real attraction from the point of view of a government with a finely balanced budget. The downside is that the Hornets will become increasingly expensive to maintain towards the end of the decade, while offering a progressively lower return in capability terms. Read more

Look behind you, Mr Richardson

18 October 2012

Dennis Richardson is preparing to leave the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to join Defence as its new Secretary, and he’ll be the twelfth person to hold that job since Sir Arthur Tange created the modern Department of Defence in the mid-1970s. Richardson and Tange have a lot in common: both notorious for being tough and no-nonsense, they share the distinction of having been Secretaries of both Foreign Affairs and of Defence—a remarkable double in any career. Both started as Defence Secretary at a time when Australia was deeply involved in tough overseas wars—Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. Tange dealt with a declining Defence budget post-Vietnam and Richardson faces a similar challenge as the government takes savings from Defence even before an Afghanistan drawdown. Tange was a structural reformer, Richardson more a problem solver. That’s just as well, as he’ll have more than a few problems to solve at Defence.

What does the record tells us about the performance of a dozen Defence Secretaries over the last 42 years? Constructed from disparate sources of information, the table below requires close attention. Our twelve Secretaries have all been male. Unlike New Zealand and the UK, Defence in Australia has yet to see a female civilian head. The average age of the Secretaries on taking office was 57 years, Allan Hawke being the youngest at 51 and Richardson the oldest at 65. Eight of the twelve had previous experience as Secretaries of other departments. Four did not: William Pritchett, Ric Smith, Nick Warner and Duncan Lewis, although the latter was National Security Advisor previously. Read more

Toward an Asian Century?

17 October 2012

Back in 1970, Time magazine ran an article entitled ‘Toward the Japanese Century’. More recently, in 2005 Mark Leonard was writing about the ‘European Century’. Today you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d envisage a ‘Japanese Century’ or, Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, a European one.

But both these ideas got me thinking about the term ‘Asian Century’ which is currently all the rage in Canberra. What do we mean by it and will we still be talking about it in forty years from now or even five years from now?

The term is of course best known in connection to the government’s upcoming Asian Century White Paper which has been preceded by ‘Asian Century’ essay competitions, community events and blogs. The term now litters newspaper columns and even university courses. It has become an overnight cliché, but has received little scrutiny.

When exactly did the ‘Asian Century’ begin and when will it end? Indeed, what do we mean by Asia? These points may appear glib, but they important; after all our language frames our enquiry. Read more

UN Security Council bid: thinking the unthinkable

17 October 2012

We will know around Friday afternoon whether Australia has been successful in winning its bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Having just returned from a trip to New York, the vibe I picked up there was cautious, perhaps even a little worried, about our chances. Our rivals for the seat, Finland and Luxembourg, have run effective campaigns and are not be underestimated: the outcome could be nail-bitingly close. Anthony Bergin and I wrote last week about why it’s very much in Australia’s interest to hold a seat on the Security Council. We are a middle power with global interests and being able to steer the UN—imperfect as it is—along tracks important to us is no small benefit. But good strategists also consider the down side risks: what happens if we lose the bid?

First up, recrimination will be the order of the day. A loss will mean that this weekend’s media will be full of astonished pundits expressing wonder about how it is that two of Europe’s minnows beat us to the seat: ‘Luxembourg, are you serious?’ It will be like losing the World Cup bid to Qatar. No attention will be paid to the fact that our competitors were campaigning for years before Australia started its bid. As the world is seen from New York, no one owes Australia a free lunch no matter how consequential we think we are. Although the Opposition has endorsed the bid in a low key way, a loss will lead to predictable charges of mismanagement. Some might wonder why the Prime Minister was bought so strongly and publicly into the last weeks of the campaign. Read more