Australia’s great expectations in the Indo-Pacific

The term ‘Indo-Pacific’ has recently slipped into the lexicon of Australian policymakers, in quiet supplement to ‘Asian Century’ and ‘Asia–Pacific Century’, with little questioning as to what this semantic shift actually means and achieves in strategic terms.

There’s nothing wrong with placing Australia in the spotlight and geographic centre of these two oceans and vast surrounding region; it cements Australia’s identity and role as a potential key actor in this emerging epoch, yet I would suggest that there is limited utility in defining Australian interests so broadly.

If you accept the broad concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’—and there would be many that would stumble at this first hurdle—it would be hard to refute the importance of what happens both on land and within the maritime domain encapsulated by its vast boundaries (from the shores of East Africa to the western seaboard of the United States). What is of primary importance when defining our own region and area of strategic interest is our ability to influence and shape what happens within that region, and create favourable outcomes.

Key to this is presence, and presence credibility. Two core tools that enable states to project successfully are reflected in both the strength of their diplomatic representation (and overseas presence), and military strength and capabilities (including actual and perceived ability to have and sustain overseas presence). Geographically characterising and increasing Australia’s strategic region as the ‘Indo-Pacific’ would require quantum shifts, on both these fronts, in both will and capacity; two things that prima facie under the current environment look unlikely to happen. Read more

Growler: a big decision with big consequences

Today the government announced that the RAAF will have 12 of its recently acquired fleet of 24 F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter aircraft equipped with the ‘Growler’ electronic warfare jammer package at a cost of $1.5 billion. If all goes to plan, the aircraft will enter service in 2018.

The resulting EA-18G Growler configured aircraft will provide the RAAF with an electronic jamming capability against adversary air defences. Used in either a stand-off or escort jamming role, it will enable the penetration of hostile territory for strike and ground-support missions. Having only entered service with the US Navy in 2009, the Growler is a state-of-the-art system that will benefit from ongoing upgrades in the years ahead.

From an operational perspective, the Growlers will enable the RAAF to independently conduct operations against relatively more advanced adversaries than would otherwise be the case. Strategically, this significantly increases the range of circumstances where Australia can launch operations without the support of the United States. As such, it’s a valuable boost to our freedom of action in circumstances where our ally has conflicted interests or is otherwise distracted. Read more

What are Defence’s core capabilities?

In the last budget, which saw Defence take a hammering in terms of cuts (the details of which ASPI has covered in numerous documents and posts), little has been said about the sanctity of the ‘core capabilities’ which are said to be safe from current and future razors.

Tracking down the explicit list of core capabilities has proven impossible, for the plain fact that one does not exist. After navigating Defence Media Operations and liaising with the Minister’s office (read: nagging for over a week at frustrated people who know about as much as I do), no such list exists.

Instead, we have to trawl through the 2009 White Paper and extrapolate one from vague statements like ‘the Government must make careful judgements about Australia’s long-term defence needs. Such judgements are even more important in times of fiscal or strategic uncertainty’. Read more

A third North Korean nuclear test could be a game changer

In a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Siegfried Hecker from Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation suggested North Korea could conduct a third nuclear weapon test within as little as two weeks if it chooses to do so. His warning is a timely one—not least because a successful nuclear test by Pyongyang might seriously disturb the strategic dynamic in Northeast Asia.

Public anxiety about a possible third test seemed more focused a few months ago. Indeed, the botched April launch of a satellite into space using a long-range missile gave rise to fears that the North would try to conduct another more successful nuclear weapon test. Given the level of development of the North Korean nuclear weapon program and the drivers of the regime, a third test is highly likely at some point in the future. With Kim Jong-un expected to rule for decades, he has few aces up his sleeve, including a nuclear one.

So far the two previous tests have not much ruffled strategic feathers in Northeast Asia. But they have both been small. If a third test provides a yield of, say, fifteen kilotons—about the size of the Hiroshima explosion—the effects could be quite different. A test on that scale would signal to North Korea’s neighbours that it had achieved significant nuclear progress. While a fully-weaponised North Korean nuclear arsenal might still be distant, a third test would increase feelings of insecurity in South Korea and Japan in particular and prompt both governments to reach out to the United States for further security assurances. Read more

White Papers: timing is everything

Timing is everything

It is often said that good fortune in politics comes down to timing—the same could be said of policy. Excellent policy work can be swept away by a change of government or ministerial reshuffle. Looking back on the last forty years, it’s interesting to examine both the timing of the launch of previous Defence White Papers and the impact that subsequent federal elections had on their success (see table below for dates).

Four of the last six Defence White Papers were produced a year or more in advance of a federal election, that is, in the middle of a government’s term. It’s a safe approach: it gives governments time to bed down difficult policy issues; reduces temptation for oppositions to campaign against proposals; and gives Defence time to start implementing policies. In only two of the six cases—1972 and 1987—was the release of a white paper closer than eleven months to an election.

In his memoir, Defence Policy-Making: A Close-Up View, 1950–1980 (PDF), Sir Arthur Tange recounts that the McMahon Government directed that a defence white paper be prepared in 1972. Defence shaped the review around a closer focus on what today we would call Australia’s inner arc and away from Southeast Asia. According to Tange:

…the Prime Minister threw the status of the document into confusion by deciding against presenting it as a White Paper expressing government policy, and instead declaring it to be a ‘Departmental Review’. … In effect the Department was lumbered with responsibility for a hybrid—a document that included views we knew the Government would want to include which we did not share, and an analysis of the desirable strategic posture that failed to receive government endorsement. … McMahon’s caution might well have been for fear of devil in the detail. Read more

The core force and credible contigencies

My previous posts have observed that the core force should have two principal attributes: it should be the base from which expansion should occur in the event of major strategic deterioration, and it should be able to meet the demands of contingencies that might arise in the shorter term. This new post addresses the latter: in this new Age of Asia, what should the government require of the ADF for contingencies that might arise at little notice.

When these ideas were first articulated, there were limits on the military contingencies that could credibly arise in the shorter term, set by two considerations: the levels of capability that could be brought directly to bear against Australia were in general quite low, and Australian governments took the view that Australia’s broader interests should have only a modest influence on the structure and capabilities of the ADF. This latter point was reinforced by observing that the nature of the ADF we required for our own defence would give the government of the day a broad set of options for contributing to operations further afield, and that Australia’s potential contributions to such operations would be valued more as statements of political support than for their decisiveness on the battlefield.

There is an argument that such potential short-warning contingencies have now become more demanding. For example, there is the prospect of military confrontation in the South China Sea, with its unresolved disputes over maritime boundaries and reefs. There is the wider question of Australia’s more general contribution to regional security, especially in the event of serious tension between at least some of the ASEAN states and China. And there is the perennial issue of ensuring that Australia has sufficient military options to keep our relationship with the United States in good shape. Further, the fertile imagination can always bring forward additional kinds of contingency that might affect Australia’s interests: attempts to close international straits, interdiction of sea lines of communication, tension between the United States and China, for example.
Read more

Is Australia still threatened by weak South Pacific states?

RAMSI Community outreach officer Chris Tarohimae

A continuous theme of successive White Papers has been that our strategic challenges in the South Pacific come not from powerful states, but from weak ones. The idea that weak South Pacific states pose a strategic threat to Australia received considerable attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This perception initially manifested in Australia’s intervention in Timor-Leste, and later in our intervention in the Solomon Islands, stabilisation assistance to Tonga, and security cooperation with Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state weakness and failure were elevated to security issues, with claims that terrorists or transnational criminal groups could establish bases in weak South Pacific states from which they could pose a threat to Australia. While transnational criminal groups have gained a foothold in some South Pacific states, the idea that terrorists could establish a significant presence was always farfetched. With the decline in global terrorism, and improved Australian and regional responses to transnational crime, both threats now appear less relevant.

A more relevant threat, however, is that a hostile power might establish bases in the South Pacific and threaten the air and sea approaches to Australia, or even launch an attack on us. To an extent this threat is nascent in China’s, and to a lesser extent, Russia’s, attempts to project power in the region. However, it has been countered by the United States increasing its presence in the South Pacific (most notably in Fiji), and by pressuring Australia to follow. Read more

What do we want the ADF to do?

With characteristic precision, Mark Thomson has put his finger on the primary question for Australian defence policy today: not how much should we spend on the ADF, but what do we want it to do? His argument for modest defence spending is properly premised on the view that Australia’s strategic objectives—by which I mean specifically the things we want to be able to achieve with armed force—should be modest. His argument has two elements, one concerning our strategic objectives as an ally of the United States, and the other about our objectives for independent military action. In both cases he argues we can set our strategic objectives pretty low. Is he right?

Let’s start with the alliance side of the story. What do we need to be able to do militarily as an ally of America, given that the huge disparity in power means that we will make no decisive operational difference to any conflict in which we fight at America’s side? There are three ways in which we might weigh this. First there is what one might call a moral imperative to pull our weight rather than free ride, and I must say I share Mark’s sense that free riding is fine as long as you can get away with it. Second there is the question about how low can you go and still ride for free? At what point does our ally stop protecting us because we won’t do our bit? That, of course, depends on why he is protecting us in the first place. On the very credible assumption that he is in the alliance more to serve his interests than ours, the threshold for this is pretty low.

Third, there is the question of whether we are doing enough to influence US policy in ways which are critical to our interest. Here I’m not so sure. We should at least ask ourselves how much we might want to influence US polices in Asia, and how much we’d need to do militarily to have a chance to exercise such influence. I’m torn two ways here. On one hand, Australia’s interests in shaping American policy are clearly very strong. On the other, Britain’s experience in the Middle East over the last few decades, where it has made big contributions and gained very little influence, suggests that the scale of effort needed to have any say in US policy is very great. Further work is needed here before I’d be sure that this is not a good reason to expand our strategic objectives as an ally. Read more

Get the message? Why communicating Australian policy changes to asylum seekers is no easy task

Yesterday it was revealed that a film crew will accompany Australian police, military and government officials as they head to Nauru and Manus Island to prepare for the arrival of an expected influx of asylum seekers. They’ll create a video series designed to dissuade further potential ‘irregular maritime arrivals’ from attempting to come to Australia. The title of the series—‘Australia by boat, no advantage’—is derived from one of the key messages arising from the report compiled by Angus Houston and his fellow panellists.

Communicating with asylum seekers is important to Australia’s deterrence regime. A key reason why policies fail to deter is because, as international and Australian studies show, most asylum seekers know very little about Western countries or their asylum policies. For example, research conducted in Afghanistan in 2010 (PDF) on behalf of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) found that few Afghan Hazaras know about Australia’s deterrence mechanisms, including the mandatory detention policy. That’s consistent with another study which found that some Afghan refugees didn’t know of the existence of a country called ‘Australia’ before arriving on its shores via smuggling boat.

Afghan asylum seekers in particular, who have made up the bulk of Australia’s boat arrivals for the past decade, have poor access to mass media; only around 30% of Afghan households have access to electricity. Those who live along the Afghan border in Pakistan also tend to have limited access to mass media other than radio. It remains incredibly difficult for the Australian Government to reach such audiences and convey complex policy information to them. So it’s unlikely that the latest information campaign, which will be delivered through new media channels, will reach a large segment of the Afghan target audience. Read more

Ken Henry’s Asian Century

On current planning, the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper will be released within a few weeks. Former Treasury Secretary Dr Ken Henry and his team are finalising the report and Cabinet will consider it soon.

In an ASPI Policy Analysis published today, and in an opinion piece in The Australian, I argue that the success of Australia in the Asian Century will depend on how well it deals with some threshold strategic issues. As the Prime Minister said on launching the review ‘There will be plenty of hard questions—not all of them will have easy answers’. Four hard questions should be asked: will the white paper focus on the right region in the right way; how will it address strategic risk; how will it treat defence and security; and what place will it accord to other parts of the world?

In this blog I won’t go over that material again, except to note a concern that we must avoid the risk of delivering the perfect regional strategy for Australia at the same time as the region looks to a more globalised engagement. For Australia, a global rather than regional approach helps to diversify our economic and strategic links and matches the increasingly global strategies of the major Asian countries. Dr Henry and his writing team understand the need to balance our global and regional interests, but it will be a hard act to capture that in the White Paper, especially given its Asian remit. Read more