India threat?

Navy Week celebration at the gateway of IndiaIndia is presently investing in a sustained program of military modernisation. Some $40bn was earmarked for defence in the budget for 2012–13, with a significant proportion to be spent on new weapons. This year, according to SIPRI, India became the world’s biggest arms importer, and its long ‘wish list’—including fourth-generation fighters, heavy-lift aircraft, attack helicopters and main battle tanks—suggests that it will remain in that position for years to come.

These numbers, however, tell only part of the story. Some of this modernisation program involves upgrades to defensive capabilities, but not all. The mix also includes three new aircraft carriers (a refurbished Russian ship should eventually be delivered in early 2013, with two indigenous carriers soon to follow), nuclear submarines (a leased Russian Akula-II class boat plus a new Indian one) and air-to-air refuelling tankers (six soon to be ordered), as well as those multi-role combat aircraft, transports, helicopters and tanks. Many of these are systems designed more for power projection within and beyond India’s immediate region as well as for territorial defence.

In scale and spend, India is matching parts of China’s longer-running and more expensive modernisation program. In others areas—aircraft carriers and air-to-air refuelling, for example—India is arguably acquiring superior capabilities. Yet while China’s military modernisation is generally considered a cause for cause alarm, India’s program is not. Why? Read more

New Zealand: washed in the blood of the lamb?

I read with interest Robert Ayson’s take on the mending of relations between the United States and New Zealand. Rob believes that New Zealand is the prodigal son from the Good Book, welcomed home by the doting parent despite the other son’s (Australia’s) resentment. But there are three parables in Luke Chapter 15. And given the Land of the Long White Cloud’s heavy dependence upon four-legged beasts who are white and woolly, perhaps it might be appropriate to rehearse the parable of the lost sheep (Luke, 15: 4-7). The finding of the lost sheep is a metaphor for a sinner’s repentance; the lesson being that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

This message of a sinner’s repentance can also be found in the parable of the lost coin (Luke, 15: 8-10). And if Professor Ayson re-reads his own parable of the prodigal son I’m sure he will find a similar theme there too. The younger son tells his father than he has ‘sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son’ (Luke, 15: 18-19).

All three parables make the same point: that the sinner who repents may be washed in the blood of the lamb. None says anything about sinners who don’t repent. Since New Zealand shows no sign of abandoning its anti-nuclear policy, perhaps we have to look for its ‘repentance’ in other areas. A case could be made that New Zealand has attempted to help carry some of the weight in Afghanistan and more so in the South Pacific. And Washington certainly has no pressing need to bring nuclear-armed vessels into New Zealand’s ports. But the return of strategic cooperation seems likely to be on a case by case basis.

On a final point, I would say that Rob is wrong if he believes that Australia resents—and opposes—New Zealand’s return. It is in Canberra’s interest to have Wellington on board in relation to common strategic interests, and for New Zealand to bring what weight and influence it can to shared positions. The brutal truth though, is that it can’t bring much weight—so it’s very much in Canberra’s interest, as in Washington’s, to know when and where Wellington sees itself as indulging in ‘riotous living’ (Luke, 15:13) and when and where it sees itself as a strategic player.

Rod Lyon is a non-residential fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

More than words: Australia–Indonesia strategic relations

Two Australian No. 77 Squadron F/A-18 Hornet Aircraft welcome Indonesian Air Force (TNI AU) Sukhoi Su-30 & Su-27 Flanker aircraft into Darwin to participate in Exercise Pitch Black 2012.

Australia’s leaders from both sides of politics have been paying greater attention to Indonesia; there’s been more official engagement, as well as new diplomatic and defence initiatives in the past year. And we’ve been describing Indonesia, as our Defence Minister has during his Jakarta visit last week, in more important terms like ‘strategic partner’.

But it looks like that there’s some way to go before ‘strategic partner’ becomes more than just a term of endearment. If we look at the 2009 Defence White Paper (for the time being still the government’s defence strategic policy), we find a curious ambivalence towards Indonesia. According to the White Paper, we have a ‘fundamental interest in controlling the air and sea approaches to our continent’ (paragraph 5.5). But in reference to a secure immediate neighbourhood, it says we should prevent or mitigate ‘nearby states [from] develop[ing] the capacity to undertake sustained military operations within our approaches’ (paragraph 5.8). There’s a contradiction there; as Hugh White notes in his Security Challenges essay (PDF), it may very well be those same capabilities Indonesia requires to ensure its own security in its northern approaches that could be instrumental in both Indonesia and Australia securing their strategic interests.

In short, the language of the 2009 Defence White Paper simply doesn’t match our statements of Indonesia as a strategic partner. Read more

Mind the gap, Mr Abbott

Tony Abbott visits an ACPB

Tony Abbott’s speech today to the RSL National Conference sets out some important pointers on the shape of defence policy under a future Coalition government. On spending, it’s been clear for some time that the Opposition had no intention of immediately reversing the cuts announced in the last budget. Abbott said:

Any savings that the Coalition can find in the defence bureaucracy will be reinvested in greater military capacity. Our aspiration, as the Commonwealth’s budgetary position improves, would be to restore the three per cent real growth in defence spending that marked the final seven years of the Howard government.

An ‘aspiration’ to return to spending growth is better than no prospect of growth, but it holds out little hope for a return to growth soon, and one must presume that the 3% growth will start from the newly established lower spending base. (See post below ‘Table of the week’ for a calculation of the effect of 3% real growth on the Defence budget.) Read more

Table of the week: how much is 3%?

Just to put into perspective what a 3% real increase in the Defence budget amounts to over a decade, the table below shows how a baseline budget of $25 billion would evolve over ten years under that arrangement. All figures are in billions of this-year dollars.

  Yr 0 Yr 1 Yr 2 Yr 3 Yr 4 Yr 5 Yr 6 Yr 7 Yr 8 Yr 9 Yr 10 Total
Base 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 275
+ 3% 25.0 25.8 26.5 27.3 28.1 29 29.9 30.7 31.7 32.6 33.6 320.2
Extra 0.00 0.75 1.52 2.32 3.14 3.98 4.85 5.75 6.67 7.62 8.60 45.19

 

ASPI answers a letter from a reader

Dear ASPI,

I have a ‘friend’ who has an embarrassing problem with defence planning. It seems no matter what he tries, it ends up expensive and unsatisfactory. What can he do?

Worried of Parliament Hill

Dear Worried,

You should console your friend that he is not the only one having these sorts of difficulties—in fact, it’s almost de rigueur in defence (PDF) (or defense) circles. But I know how uncomfortable this can be when a big event like forming government after an election is looming.

Alas, there’s no magic formula for fixing it. But there are some things that might help. Here’s a dos and don’ts list for approaching defence acquisition (with some suggested ASPI reading).

Do

  • have a close look at ‘80-20 solutions’—those applications of (relatively) simple and (relatively) cheap technologies that give a fair proportion of the capability of more expensive systems at a fraction of the price. For example, surveillance is an area where a mix of long-range, very capable platforms could be supplemented by cheaper shorter-range ones.
  • take a whole of nation view of capability where appropriate. Defence isn’t the only stakeholder in aspects of national security such as border protection and in cyberspace.
  • be transparent in your defence policies and acquisitions. There will be times when you don’t like this—and the Defence Department certainly won’t—but it will be better for us all in the long run. Mark Thomson and Leigh Purnell’s 2010 report has some good pointers.
  • understand the nature of fixed and marginal costs in defence procurement—having a large number of small fleets means a lot of overheads and runs the risk of insufficient capacity in any given area.
  • wherever possible, stick with the now tried and true avenue of procurement of proven systems from a close ally under the American Foreign Military Sales process.

Don’t

  • be seduced by the lure of high-end technology for its own sake; keep the focus on what you want the forces to be able to achieve and remember that it isn’t done in a vacuum; the capability of credible adversaries is a consideration, as is the location of operations. Projecting power against Australia is a formidable task.
  • rush white papers—they have a tendency to come back and bite a few years down the track. In particular, take the time to get the funding as right as possible, because Mark Thomson will soon find out if you don’t.
  • conflate defence policy and industry policy. Whether we like it or not, the worldwide defence industry landscape is increasingly dominated by a handful of multi-nationals. Swimming against the tide will only run down our resources faster and is at odds with our national strategy over the past half century.
  • defer to advice from the Department when your instincts say differently. We’ve seen what happens when it’s left to its own devices.
  • attempt to hide a back step in defence planning/policy by pretending that it was all part of the grand plan—admit the change up front (as the press and others will identify it for you anyway) and explain the reason for it.

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

New Zealand after Panetta: Australia’s prodigal brother

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and NZ Minister of Defence Jonathan ColemanIf I understand Peter Jennings correctly, his response to Leon Panetta’s visit to New Zealand consists of three parts. First, there is a touch of bemusement about how far the United States has bent over to get New Zealand into the tent. Second, there is the stern message that being an ally today is much harder than New Zealand might remember it: what matters now is what you bring to the table as Australia knows from hard experience. Third, while the improvement in US–NZ relations is welcome in Canberra, the US–Australian relationship is too big and important to let the little New Zealanders rejoin the high table. As he concludes: ‘the Kiwis aren’t quite there yet.’

This logic reminds me of the parable of the prodigal son. The younger son, who had besmirched his family’s good name by years of wild living, is welcomed back by his father, who puts a ring on the lad’s finger and has a calf fattened for the celebratory feast. But the older son, stunned by this act of complete grace, complains that he himself has been slaving away loyally for years without receiving remotely similar treatment. According to the New International Version translation of the book of Luke, the father replies, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. Read more

Leon Panetta rubs noses in Auckland

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in New ZealandThose who doubt America’s commitment to ‘rebalancing’ its strategic priorities to the Asia-Pacific should consider the effort Washington is making to strengthen ties with New Zealand. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Auckland on 21 September culminates a two-year process to bring Wellington back to an alliance-like level of defence cooperation with the United States and, in Panetta’s words, ‘to make a new era’ in relations between the countries.

It’s been a generation since a US Defense Secretary was last in New Zealand—Caspar Weinberger visited in 1982. For the intervening thirty years New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policies and its ban on US naval ship visits (because they might carry nuclear weapons) put most defence cooperation into the deep freeze and ended trilateral cooperation with Australia under ANZUS. (Although, while the most public aspects of cooperation were curtailed, behind the scenes some intelligence cooperation continued—or indeed increased—as a result of New Zealand’s commitment to the Afghanistan operation.) Read more

Indian perceptions of the Indian Ocean

In his June 2012 visit to India, Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta gave a speech that described India as central to the United States’ Indian Ocean strategy. As he put it:

‘America is at a turning point. After a decade of war, we are developing a new defense strategy for the 21st century, a central feature of that strategy is rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, we will expand our military partnerships and our presence in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia. Defense cooperation, defense cooperation with India is a linchpin in this strategy’.

India, however, has a ways to go before it becomes anybody’s linchpin. That’s because Indian perceptions of operations in the Indian Ocean are driven by two factors: an adverse reaction to expeditionary actions; and a real belief in creating multilateral task forces to create order in the region. Read more

ASPI suggests

As usual, we’ve compiled a mix of new reports and articles for your weekend reading pleasure as well as events for the coming week.

First up is some defence industry news. The consolidation of global defence industry continues unabated with the announcement that the largest British company BAE and EADS (the parent company of Airbus) might merge. The trend of more business being in the hands of fewer companies has seen the emergence of a more globalised approach to buying and maintaining military equipment, something that continues to change the landscape here in Australia as well.

The Pentagon might be facing a 10% cut over the coming years, but Todd Harrison over at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis has a new backgrounder that suggests it might be manageable without cutting any major programs.

Moving onto regional issues, the Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre at the University of Adelaide has a new policy brief which examines different constructions of the Indo-Pacific region and the implications for regional security (PDF). The authors, Dennis Rumley, Timothy Doyle and Sanjay Chaturvedi, argue for an Indo-Pacific regional security construction that includes both China and the United States.

Turning to military operations, RAND has just released a rather timely monograph prepared for the Special Operations Joint Task Force – Afghanistan that examines eight cases of local security forces in counterinsurgency operations. Ranging from 1945 to the present day, the study investigates efforts to raise local defence units in Indochina, Algeria, South Vietnam, Oman, El Salvador, Southern Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the findings are a mix of prescriptions for managing the local forces but also stress the importance of relations with the host government and the role of aid agencies in building local defence units.

If you’re in Canberra next week, there’s a presentation at the ANU by Dr Zifirdaus Adnan, Indonesian Language and Studies Discipline, University of New England on how Indonesian terrorists ‘left’ terrorism. Dr Adnan will present findings from an international project on the life stories of Indonesian jihadis which traced how they became initially engaged in terrorism, how some have deradicalised and ‘left’, and what this means for the future. The seminar is at the HC Coombs building, ANU, Tuesday 25 September at 12pm.

Lastly, ASPI’s Andrew Davies will join a list of other speakers headed by the Hon. Jason Clare MP, Minister for Defence Materiel, at the ADM Defence Workforce Participation Summit 2012 at the Hyatt in Canberra next Thursday and Friday, 27 and 28 September.

And, if you’ve got any suggestions for reports or events, we’d like to hear from you. You can reach us by email here.