Grand strategy is a big idea back in fashion as a useful way to think about and address important issues. But many grand strategic schemes advocated are complicated, incomplete, inappropriate and use arcane terms that perplex policymakers and non-experts alike.

Over the next few posts we’ll build a simple, minimalist framework for thinking more clearly and concisely about grand strategy. We’ll then apply the framework to thinking about two challenges Australia faces; withdrawing from Afghanistan and managing China’s emergence.

Why bother devising a grand strategy though? What does it do that something else doesn’t? Grand strategy is a way to try to get somewhere that you want to go. That may seem simple but can be better understood when compared against two well-known alternatives: opportunism and risk management. These are approaches that await events; they respond to other’s actions. They’re reactive but they can be useful.

Australia is good at opportunism, with notable examples (PDF) in both the Vietnam and Iraq Wars of jumping on board the American grand strategy and exploiting it for our own benefit. We’re also adroit at risk management; our last two Defence White Papers took a risk management approach of building up an armed force just in case a carefully chosen, particular risk eventuated. An insurance policy against a house fire if you will—and hope there’s not a flood, as it might not pay out! Both approaches depend on others and react to their activities. With opportunism you go where others take you, and Australia becomes a player in another country’s project. In risk management you sit down to await the hope-this-doesn’t-happen event. As the old saying goes, ‘hope is not a strategy’, and neither are opportunism and risk management. Read more

There’s one consistent thread to Australian Defence White Papers that didn’t really come out in Peter Jennings’ article—the notion of self-reliance. Of course, we didn’t come to that notion by accident—it was pretty much forced onto us through the British policy of no commitments east of the Suez and the 1969 United States ‘Guam Doctrine’, leaving us little option but to be prepared to act alone.  But it’s been a consistent message in Australian strategic policy since 1972:

1972 – self-reliance in situations of less than global or major international concern,

1976 – face a range of other situations that we should expect to handle more independently,

1987 – defend ourselves with our own resources,

1994 – defend our country without depending on help from other countries combat forces,

2000 – defend Australia without relying on the combat forces of other countries, and

2009 – manage strategic risk.

One of the things that comes with a well-developed sense of self-reliance is the notion of being a ‘middle power’. In the context of the US alliance, then PM Rudd was at pains to tell the Brookings Institute in 2008 that we have the world’s 15^th largest economy with the 11^th largest military budget. But there’s more to it than those bare numbers and the notion of middle power is elusive; the common theme associated with traditional major powers has been their nuclear status and/or power projection capability. By relying on the United States deterrence umbrella rather than pursuing any nuclear ambitions and lacking a strong expeditionary capability, the notion of Australia as a middle power seems somewhat presumptuous—which begs the question as to what the White Paper discussions of self-reliance actually mean.

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Tatnell is a serving member of the Australian Defence Force.

When the subject of defence spending surfaces in public debate, there are inevitable and regrettable exchanges about whether Australia faces a ‘threat’ that justifies the expenditure. This is understandable, given the psychology of warfare, but unfortunate from the point of view of clear thinking about defence spending and the purposes for which sophisticated and expensive platforms are usually purchased. Public debate would be raised to a more responsible and constructive level if, instead of focusing on ‘threats’, we thought in terms of insurance cover and premiums.

Discussion of ‘threats’ (of coercion or intrusion) easily becomes distracted by hyperbole at one extreme and lazy scepticism at the other. We’re currently having, for example, a debate about whether China represents a ‘threat’. The 2009 White Paper suggested that its authors believed China to be a looming threat and that we should beef up our armed forces accordingly. The new White Paper would do better to cast national security thinking in terms of insurance policies. This might encourage analytical thinking about what kinds of insurance the country would be wise to take out and what level of premium it would need to invest in order to have good insurance cover. The question of whether or how health insurance should be funded is a huge one across the Western world in our time and not a bad analogy for thinking about national security, since both are becoming increasingly unaffordable given long standing assumptions. Read more

Defence white papers are usually hailed as definitive statements of policy, and we can expect the 2013 one to be no exception. The phrase has an air of the laboratory about it—of boffins toiling to frame the unimpeachable results of evidence-based policymaking.

The idea of white papers as policy icons was never more on display than in the 2009 version. Nostalgia buffs can review the 83 media statements released on 2 May that year, where we were told the document was ‘the most comprehensive statement on defence ever produced’.

The reality is a bit different. White papers are political documents, produced for and owned (at least temporarily) by governments and designed for purposes beyond detailing high-minded policy. The impetus to produce them has often been the unwelcome arrival of a strategic shock, and they’re most commonly abandoned after a change of Prime Minister.

The 1976 white paper modestly started a journey to that elusive goal of ‘defence self-reliance’. It was a reaction to the Vietnam rout a year earlier and the knowledge that we’d need to do more to look after our own security. The paper’s spending projections were overturned in 1980 when a spooked Fraser government promised to boost spending after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—a promise that never materialised. Read more