Too slow and too picky: Defence recruiting isn’t fit for purpose

Australian Defence Force recruiting systems need to be overhauled if the ADF is to sustain and increase its size in the coming years. The ADF also needs to make changes to entry standards so it can take maximum advantage of the pool of applicants.

In early 2024, the ADF was around 4300 people below its authorised strength of 62,700 permanent members. This makes the 2040 target of 80,000 permanent personnel look increasingly difficult to achieve.

While the challenges of recruiting are usually framed in the context of competition with other industries—with the low unemployment rate cited as evidence of labour market tightness—other factors are at play. It is commonly argued that pay and conditions for ADF members need to rise to attract and retain personnel. However, they are already relatively generous: Australia’s median full-time pay is about $88,500 a year. The starting pay of a sergeant or fully qualified officer is higher. A private reaching pay grade 5 will also earn more than the national median. Further increases to pay grades are likely to have diminishing returns.

In 2024, 64,000 people applied to join the ADF. The average time it took to complete a recruitment process was 300 days. These are both surprising figures, in different ways. On one hand, taking just a fraction more of those applicants in a year would bring the ADF up to its authorised strength. On the other hand, the recruitment period shows just how cumbersome and inefficient the recruitment process currently is.

While spending 300 days to decide whether to recruit someone might not have mattered as much in the relatively peaceful era straight after the Cold War, it is unacceptable when geopolitical tensions are increasing and we need expand the ADF quickly. Also, according to both human resources theory and plentiful anecdotal evidence, many of the ADF’s best applicants probably have other job opportunities. The longer the ADF takes to finish the recruitment process, the more likely a high-performing candidate will be frustrated by the bureaucratic delays and go elsewhere.

For those keeping score, some of those 64,000 applicants were successfully recruited and some withdrew their applications partway through. The rest would have been deemed unsuitable and had their application rejected. But could none of those applicants have been able to safely and competently do any of the 4,300 positions that remain unfilled in the ADF? Almost certainly not.

This is where the ADF needs to change its attitude towards recruitment standards: it needs to become less choosy. It is perhaps an uncomfortable truth that many Australian servicepeople who fought and died in World War I and World War II would have been rejected by today’s ADF. At the height of World War II, around one in eight Australians was deemed suitable to serve.

Defence needs to take a less risk-averse attitude towards health issues. There are many stories of potential ADF recruits being rejected for minor or historical physical and mental health reasons. ADF attitudes towards mental health are particularly outdated. Mental health issues are now better recognised and understood by health professionals and the public, increasing diagnosis rates. Despite improvements in the treatment and management of mental conditions, the ADF’s overly conservative attitude towards mental illness is excluding an increasingly large demographic from the recruiting pool. Recruiting from that pool will require improved mental health support both during service and after discharge.

The ADF will have to make changes to improve its recruitment process, starting with greater resource allocation to increase recruiting capacity. Identifying and prioritising high-performing applicants early would further optimise the recruitment process and increase Defence’s chances of securing these candidates. The ADF should also streamline bureaucracy where possible, particularly around document provision and follow-up medical examinations. Managing the contract with Defence’s recruiting service provider, Adecco, will further improve performance.

Defence would benefit from updated recruiting standards around minor or historical health issues. It should adopt a less risk-averse approach centred on an applicant’s ability to do their job at the time of recruitment. In the longer term, Defence should conduct a review into its recruitment processes with the aim of designing a recruiting system that can deliver the personnel needed for the ADF’s future.

Despite perceptions, there is a large pool of applicants who want to join the ADF. With appropriate changes to recruiting systems and standards, that pool should be able to fill the ADF’s expanding requirements. This will help the ADF meet its target of 80,000 permanent personnel by 2040.

Norway should cede its war windfall to Ukraine

Norway’s government has effectively become a war profiteer, we argued in a commentary in December. It is an opinion shared by a number of European politicians and by European and Norwegian media. But rather than paying attention, Norway’s government is getting defensive.

The basic facts are not up for debate. After the outbreak of the Ukraine war caused natural gas prices to rise sharply in Europe, Norway reaped windfall profits totalling some €108 billion, according to Norway’s Ministry of Finance. That is more than the value of all military and civilian support Ukraine has received from the United States and Germany combined from when the war started through October 2024. It is roughly one-third of the value of the Russian central-bank assets that are currently frozen in the West (and which Western governments have extensively debated channelling to Ukraine for defence and reconstruction).

But Norway has kept its windfall for itself, providing a measly three billion euros in aid to Ukraine in its 2025 budget, only slightly up from the previous year. This approach is simply wrong: Norway must transfer its recent super-profits, excess profits above the normal level, in full, directly to Ukraine. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store and Finance Minister Trygve Slagsvold Vedum seem more interested in justifying their decision not to do so than in helping Ukraine, Europe or even future Norwegians.

Store and Vedum contend that the windfall gains were a normal result of the myriad market forces that determine gas prices. But this argument is disingenuous. While it is true that many factors shape energy prices, Norway’s excess profits overwhelmingly reflect one: in 2022–23, it had in Europe a captive market for its natural-gas exports. This was a direct result of the Ukraine war: Russia had cut its natural-gas supplies to Europe, but European gas importers had not yet managed to build liquefied natural gas terminals to offset the loss.

Store and Vedum do not stop at dismissing Norway’s war profits as good fortune; they claim that their government, and the oil companies operating in Norway, did our European neighbours a favour by stepping up gas supplies when Russian deliveries ceased. Europe should be thanking us, Vedum says. This ‘good Samaritan’ narrative smacks of hypocrisy, especially as Norway, while pocketing its lucky gains from the spike in gas prices, sends a pittance to the Ukrainians fighting and dying for their country’s survival and Europe’s security.

In fact, from the perspective of European gas consumers, the elevated gas prices were equivalent to a Norwegian war tax on them. The increased energy costs strained the budgets of households and companies, thereby reducing European governments’ room to raise taxes for supporting Ukraine’s war effort. And yet, many of these countries have still managed to provide far more support to Ukraine, as a share of GDP, than Norway has.

Store and Vedum say that, rather than use its windfall as a political instrument, the excess profits should go directly into the Government Pension Fund Global, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, where they will be preserved for future generations of Norwegians. This position aligns with Norway’s longstanding commitment to safeguarding its long-term fiscal sustainability, exemplified by a rule that no more than three percent of the fund’s value can be transferred to the government budget each year.

But Store and Vedum’s position is short-sighted in the current context. After all, what could harm future generations of Norwegians more than the failure to preserve democracy, freedom, and the rule of law in Europe?

In any case, the fiscal rule was created to prevent domestic macroeconomic problems (such as exchange-rate appreciation and excessive inflation), which would not arise if the funds were transferred directly to Ukraine. The leaders responsible for establishing it—including former Norwegian prime minister and former NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg—could not possibly have imagined that Norway’s government would one day use it to justify holding on to wartime rents.

Norway did provide critical energy supplies to Europe in a desperate moment. But in a purely fiscal sense, one can argue that the country did more to support Russia, as its captive market for gas (which it did nothing to create) limited its neighbours’ ability to raise wartime taxes, while Norway refrained from sending much aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Norway has enriched itself immensely, through the returns on the government’s direct investments in oil and gas fields, dividends from its ownership share in its parastatal oil company Equinor, and tax revenues from oil companies, which are subject to a 78 percent marginal rate on their profits.

Refusing to use this war windfall to support Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction reflects a myopic perspective that Norway’s government would do well to abandon. Despite our reluctance to join the European Union, we Norwegians are part of—and dependent on—the European community. Rather than focussing exclusively on narrow domestic interests, Norway’s government must start considering the well-being of all of Europe. Growing threats to liberal democracy—coming not only from our big neighbour to the East, but also from our big ally across the Atlantic—makes this shift all the more urgent.

Silence from Canberra on threat to national security

They say silence breeds contempt but the reticence of the Australian government about national security threats is more akin to the quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer when resisting Nazi Germany: that ‘silence in the face of evil is itself evil’.

The government is not responsible for individual violent incidents across our cities, but it is responsible for informing, reassuring and protecting the public. Yet the current malaise of leadership is feeding anxiety and infecting the social cohesion that has stood Australia apart from much of the world despite decades of global terrorism and conflict.

Australia remained united in the face of terrorist plots from al-Qaeda, attacks by ISIS, wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the malicious rise of China, and Russia’s war in Europe. But we are cracking; rising anti-Semitism and national fear shows domestic division is even more insidious than international incidents.

The government’s systemic abdication of responsibility, cloaked in silence and evasive justifications, is not a one-off relating to the caravan plot against Australia’s Jewish community but a troubling trend, exemplified by the tactic of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and ministers only commenting if asked by media and, even then, answering with non-statements.

Australians are not naive. We understand the need for operational secrecy in matters of national security and that classified intelligence should not be divulged lightly. But ‘operational details’ cannot be a catch-all excuse to deflect legitimate scrutiny or hide truth.

Uncertainty breeds fear so governments must be on the front foot. Almost within the hour of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, US president Franklin Roosevelt was instructing his press secretary to immediately inform the media. While not comparable events, the principle is key: keep the public informed and confident that its government is in control even in the most challenging times—even more important in the digital age.

Albanese’s refusal to address questions about the explosives-laden caravan, due to ‘ongoing investigations’, added to confusion, anxiety and speculation. A stonewalled public is not a secure one. Similarly, his reluctance to clarify whether he discussed China’s sonar pulse attack on Australian navy personnel in a meeting with Xi Jinping just days after the incident in November 2023, citing the confidentiality of diplomatic talks, simply resulted in doubt and more questions.

While discretion in diplomacy is essential, selective silence is inconsistent given the broad topics of leaders’ meetings, if not the exact words, are usually published, and suggested he just didn’t want to admit he had inexcusably failed to raise the matter.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s handling of the case of Yang Hengjun, the Australian arbitrarily detained in China, is equally disconcerting—failing to even acknowledge on 19 January Yang’s sixth year of detention, and previously insisting on being ‘constrained for privacy reasons’, despite Yang’s own desire for public advocacy. Hiding behind the veil of privacy appears less about protecting Yang’s interests and more about protecting the government’s.

This week marks one year since Beijing sentenced Yang to death so a comprehensive condemnation and demand for release is required. Similarly, Wong omitted to mention China in her readout of January’s discussions with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in contrast to Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya’s honesty that China was a central part of his meeting with Rubio.

Meanwhile, when asked about the United States and European countries reviewing the security risk of Chinese-made smart cars, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said no such review would happen here as the priority was consumer choice. On that basis, we’d welcome Russian gas or perhaps Iranian nuclear know-how, not to mention that prioritising price now will mean consumers in the future will have few choices but Chinese-made smart cars.

The pattern of evading, ignoring or downplaying security threats is itself a security threat. It erodes public trust—and cynicism can quickly turn to conspiracy. It creates an information vacuum to be filled by conspiracy theories and speculation, leading not just to an uninformed but a misinformed public. And it has the potential to weaken Australia’s strategic position by reducing the confidence of our allies and increasing that of our rivals.

We’ve seen it before. The flood of illegal boats from 2008 and refusal to acknowledge pull factors created not only a backlash against illegal immigration but reduced confidence in legal immigration and emboldened criminal organisations. It was only by being upfront about the illegal immigration problem that confidence was restored in Australia’s strength as a migration nation.

Importantly, division is distinct from difference. Different opinions, including on world leaders or policies, are to be promoted as the basis of freedom of speech. But support for terrorist groups and acts of intimidation and violence are not free speech.

Only a transparent government can be accountable to the people it serves. A silent government shows no confidence in itself or the people.

In 1962 president John F. Kennedy said: ‘We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts … For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.’

Our longstanding national resilience means the cracks can’t be papered over but can be resealed quickly by a government willing to lead, including with some good old-fashioned naked truth.

Drifting into danger: will we ever see the independent intelligence review?

The road to hell is apparently paved with good intentions. But often, it’s tarmac laid with thoughtlessness and passivity.

Two years ago the Albanese government described Australia’s immigration policy as broken, owing to unplanned, temporary migration flows since 2005. It claimed this ‘happened without any real policy debate or discussion. It happened not through thoughtful planning and strategy, but by negligence and continental drift.’

Today, a similar drift threatens to break a model of intelligence review, strategic direction and public engagement that has served Australia well for more than two decades.

It’s been more than 210 days since the 2024 independent intelligence review report was given to the prime minister. As noted in The Strategist back on the first anniversary of the review’s commencement (and two and a half months after the review was completed):

The Albanese government did well by instituting this latest review … but the job isn’t finished until the report and recommendations are made public. Then the hard work of implementation and accountability begins.

Back in August 2024 the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet confirmed the report’s receipt before its 30 June 2024 deadline. There’s no public indication of anything abnormal or deficient about the report or its findings—hardly surprising given the eminence of the authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude. There’s also no hint of a great clash of competing visions or principles to guide our National Intelligence Community (NIC), or of a fundamental intelligence failure requiring remedying, not least given the transformative investments in and fundamental restructuring of the NIC following the last review in 2017.

This only exacerbates frustration with the government’s failure to respond to the review and release a public version of the report. There are two possible explanations. Either it’s timidity or they’re unable to exercise sufficient direction to end this damaging delay.

It bears repeating that the world has not stood still since June 2024—and certainly not since the last inputs into the review, which date to late 2023. Since September 2024 alone we’ve seen civil and military unrest across the globe, including the most audacious intelligence operation in recent history—Mossad’s supply chain attack on Hezbollah—as well as the eruption of antisemitic violence in Australia and the change of administration in Washington.

One interpretation is that for seven months the NIC has been beavering away implementing the classified report. But even this ignores the importance of the public report, including to the NIC itself.

The benefits of public intelligence review reports were outlined in a Strategist article last year.

In short, they enable intelligence reform and transformation, given the NIC’s reliance on the public for workforce recruitment, technology and industry partnerships and social licence. Public reports also help hold government accountable for the implementation of recommendations.

Also, an unclassified version of an otherwise very sensitive and restricted top-secret document is the best way of engaging not just the public but all the NIC’s staff, and officials across the broader bureaucracy.

While Australian voters will make their call at the ballot box later this year, we suspect few votes will turn on this issue alone.  But there is now a much, much bigger problem, which doesn’t just affect the value and future utility of this particular review.

The implication that the Smith-Maude review may never see the light of day places us all on the precipice of a government, albeit without malice aforethought, breaking the system of public intelligence review that has existed in Australia for over 20 years.

Before the 2004 inquiry by diplomat Philip Flood, Australian governments’ understandable but unsustainable historical refusal to engage publicly on intelligence resulted in a series of crisis-response, judicially led inquiries: two Royal Commissions, led by Justice Robert Hope in 1974–77 and 1983–84, and the Samuels-Codd Commission of Inquiry in 1994–95.

Other reviews were also carried out entirely behind closed doors, such as the post-Cold War Richardson and Hollway reviews (both 1992), and the Cook 1994 counter-intelligence inquiry.

It was Flood who gave Australia the significant benefits of intelligence review through scheduled check-ups focussed on the future, and an effective balance between secrecy and openness. Since then, we have had the 2010–11 Cornell-Black review, the 2016–17 L’Estrange-Merchant review and now the Smith-Maude review, as well as the Richardson review of the NIC’s legal framework.

This is an invaluable, internationally unique, bipartisan system that would be sorely missed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, complete nonsense filled an intelligence community-shaped information hole in Australian public life—and that was in a more regimented media ecosystem.

Without the substantive public engagement built into the independent intelligence review system, what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s misinformation hellscape?

DeepSeek may be cheap AI, but Australian companies should beware

Amid the shocked reactions this week to the release of the Chinese artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek, the risk we should be most concerned about is the potential for the model to be misused to disrupt critical infrastructure and services.

I wrote in 2023 about the many forms of Chinese AI-enabled technology we use that pump data back to China, where it is sorted by Chinese algorithms before it is sent back here.

These include things such as digital railway networks, electric vehicles, solar inverters, giant cranes for unloading containers, border screening equipment, and industrial control technology in power stations, water and sewerage works. Like DeepSeek, the vendors of these products are subject to direction from China’s security services.

This clear risk has been buried by the avalanche of commentary about the other implications—not least the panicked stock market reaction in which Nvidia’s share price plunged 17 percent and the Nasdaq fell 3 percent. With so much money chasing AI, investors are as twitchy as meerkats.

Don’t cry for Nvidia—cheaper AI models promise to broaden the market for its chips, and this is reflected in its recovering share price. Besides, Nvidia helped create its temporary setback by selling powerful H800 chips to Chinese companies—including DeepSeek—for a year before the Biden administration tightened up its chip export controls.

There may even be some upside when a company produces comparable results to leading US models—purportedly for a fraction of the price and using dumber chips. US big tech will be spurred to figure out how to do generative AI more cheaply. That’s good for business and good for the planet.

From a national security perspective, how worried should we be about an AI model with a chatbot algorithm that provides such lame answers on issues sensitive to the Chinese government?

Of course it’s undesirable for yet another wildly popular Chinese app to be shaping how we think. It’s also a worry that the company will make all our data available to Chinese security services on request. DeepSeek’s own privacy policy says as much: ‘We may access, preserve, and share the information described in “What Information We Collect” with law enforcement agencies (and) public authorities … if we have good faith belief that it is necessary to comply with applicable law, legal process or government requests.’

The policy also explains that the company stores ‘the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China’.

But the bigger question is what would happen if DeepSeek’s model lowered the costs and increased the competitiveness of Chinese AI-enabled products and services embedded in our critical infrastructure? If these offerings were even cheaper and better, they might become even more pervasive in our digital ecosystem, and therefore even more risky.

Here’s another case. What if DeepSeek became the default choice for Australian and other non-Chinese companies seeking to improve their products and services with customised, low-cost, leading-edge AI? As the Wall Street Journal notes: ‘DeepSeek’s model is open-source, meaning that other developers can inspect and fiddle with its code and build their own applications with it. This could help give more small businesses access to AI tools at a fraction of the cost of closed-source models like OpenAI and Anthropic.’

Useful applications might include customised chatbots and product recommendations, streamlined inventory management or predictive analytics and fraud detection.

Could DeepSeek embedded in tech made by non-Chinese companies be a vector for espionage and sabotage—an arm of China’s DeepState, as it were? Could DeepSeek be directed to alter embedded code or simply turn off access to its open-source model to disable these products and services?

Perhaps we can take some comfort here. One of the advantages of so-called ‘open source’ models is that users can host them in their own controlled environments to better protect their customers’ data. That would mitigate the espionage risk. Using isolated environments would also mitigate the sabotage risk to some degree as well. However, if DeepSeek AI were embedded in products and services that are used in sensitive and critical products—for example, essential components of an electricity station or grid—we might want additional mitigations, given the much higher stakes.

The key point is governments need take a close look at the potential risks of DeepSeek employed in sensitive areas in two contexts: by Chinese companies—given their legal obligations to co-operate with China’s security agencies—and by non-Chinese companies that might use applications derived from the DeepSeek model. In Australia, that sounds like a job for the security review process recently established under our framework to ‘consider foreign ownership, control or influence risks associated with technology vendors’.

It’s early days. US big tech is not going to rest on its oars. DeepSeek may not be as cheap as it claims, nor as original. Indeed, OpenAI is investigating whether DeepSeek leaned on the company’s tools to train its own model. But when it comes to protecting our digital ecosystems from emerging technologies with the game-changing potential of DeepSeek, it’s never too early to start planning.

Northern Australia strengthens its role in economy and energy security

Each day, more than 160 airline flights carrying 13,000 passengers take off and land at Perth Airport to and from destinations across northern Australia. They ferry skilled workers to and from minerals and energy operations. Darwin and Brisbane airports also host air services to and from northern Australian resources hubs.

This provides a real-time indicator of the health of the Australian resources sector, which is overwhelmingly concentrated north of the 26th parallel.

In 2023-24, aircraft and passenger movements between Perth and Western Australian destinations exceeded interstate traffic for the first time, pushing the airport to new throughput records.

Despite price weakness for some minerals, the resources sector remains healthy. Northern Australia’s minerals maintain outsized importance in the national economy and for state and federal government revenues.

The Department of Industry, Science and Resources’ latest Resources and Energy Quarterly, released in December 2024, highlights the fact that the minerals and energy sector generates two thirds of national exports and 11.4 percent of GDP.

Northern Australia’s minerals and energy dominance makes it central to the national resources sector and thus much of the Australian economy. In 2023–24, the combined value of the top four exports from northern Australia—iron ore, liquified natural gas (LNG), metallurgical coal and thermal coal—was $261 billion, or 63 percent of total resource exports.

Northern Australia contributes almost all the nation’s iron ore exports, expected to total more than 900 million tonnes in 2024, or some 56 percent of global seaborne trade in the commodity.  Export value is about $140 billion. While iron ore prices are expected to soften in 2025, volumes are forecast to rise. The Pilbara remains by far the largest iron ore production centre in the world.

Metallurgical coal is northern Australia’s next largest export by tonnage, with the north contributing 46 percent of global supply. All 81 million tonnes of the nation’s LNG exports in 2023-24, worth $69 billion, came from northern Australia. This supply is vital to the energy security of economies such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

Exploration spending is the long-term bellwether for the minerals industry. According to S&P Global data, northern Australia hosts 803 of more than 2000 exploration properties in the country. Australia-headquartered companies operate 632 of them. Identified reserves and resources in exploration properties are valued at $14 trillion.

While data is unavailable on mineral and petroleum exploration spending for northern Australia as a region, there is an indicator in the trend in the Northern Territory, where mineral exploration budgets were up 86 percent in the five years to 2023-24. The search for deposits of critical and strategic minerals such as lithium, copper and uranium drove the rise.

S&P Global records 163 mines in northern Australia, including those under construction. Outputs include copper, lithium, zinc, phosphate, vanadium, manganese, rare earths, gold, and metallurgical and thermal coal. The 11 secondary processing plants in northern Australia produce refined products such as alumina and metals including aluminium, copper and zinc.

Northern Australia, with abundant land and sunshine, is already a major source of renewable energy, with high potential for very large-scale production. From the Pilbara to the central Queensland resources hub, mines and mineral processing plants are increasingly sourcing energy from solar generators, backed by coal or gas. Whether exports of electricity and products such as green hydrogen are viable and will find markets remains to be seen.

While northern Australia’s minerals and energy future and its national economic contribution remain very positive, the region faces challenges in sustaining and growing production. As a December ASPI report highlighted, the region is vulnerable to natural disasters, particularly as some of its infrastructure is inadequate in the face of severe weather events. The government needs to spend more to maintain vital transport links as well as energy and telecommunications services.

Federal and state project assessment and approval processes have improved during the past decade and must continue to do so while maintaining scientific rigor. Efficient coordination between levels of government and between agencies is vital.

New lower-cost LNG supply from the United States and Qatar puts pressure on Australian LNG projects and their host governments to control costs of both construction and operations.

Several critical minerals projects in northern Australia have been held back by depressed and volatile prices, largely due to market manipulation by the current dominant producer, China. Australia and like-minded governments are working together to underwrite the commercial viability of such projects so they can attract global financing and move to construction and operational phases.

The thousands of workers who commute by air to, from and within northern Australia are testament to the strength of the resources sector, but also highlight the region’s chronic shortage of resident skilled workers. More locally and regionally based workers will help northern Australia capture greater value from its industries. The liveability of the north’s cities and towns is key to attracting and retaining more people.

The daily stream of jets from major population centres to northern Australia, however, will remain the main source of skilled people that contribute so much to the national economy and its energy security.

Democracies should learn the TikTok lesson and restrict risky apps from day one

With its recent halt on implementing a legally mandated ban on TikTok, the United States is learning the hard way that when it comes to Chinese technology, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The US and like-minded democracies should no longer permit any social media platforms with direct ties to authoritarian governments with political censorship regimes to operate without restriction.

For years, technology and national security analysts have sketched out scenarios of what might happen if a democratic population were to become dependent on a Chinese-owned technology. Once such a technology becomes embedded in people’s daily lives and livelihoods, removing it stirs up a host of domestic political controversies, making it politically untenable to mitigate the national security risks.

That is exactly what has happened with TikTok. Around 170 million Americans—about half the country’s population and an even higher percentage of those using social media—use the short video app, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. Millions of Americans have become dependent on their TikTok followings, built up over years, for their income or to promote their businesses. Tens of millions more use TikTok as a key source of information, community, and entertainment.

In classic American fashion, those users have refused to go gentle into that good night. As a law banning TikTok was set to go into effect on 19 January, many users downloaded the Chinese social media app RedNote, which isn’t just Chinese-owned—it is Chinese itself, based in Shanghai and subject to all Chinese national security and intelligence laws. Self-styled ‘TikTok refugees’ said they moved to RedNote to express their disregard for US government concern about the risks presented by Chinese companies. Overnight, RedNote, which presents even clearer security risks than TikTok, became the top download on the Apple app store in the US.

TikTok called on US President Donald Trump to offer a reprieve, and he did. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order authorising a 75-day extension on the law taking effect.

But it’s unclear what will happen next. We will need to see how a Trump administration navigates this issue. The law mandates either a forced divestiture or a ban. A previous US effort to force the sale of TikTok failed when the Chinese government issued new rules requiring Chinese companies to obtain a license for such a sale. Beijing did not grant ByteDance a license, effectively blocking the sale. Discussions are now reportedly underway for the sale of a 50 percent stake in TikTok to a US company, but that would not fulfill the law’s requirements.

This situation demonstrates the need to act early to inhibit the widespread adoption of social media platforms tied to authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China, that implement sweeping surveillance, censorship and manipulation of public opinion.

Western governments had all the information they needed about the risks of social media apps operating under authoritarian systems when TikTok took off in 2018—the year it became one of the world’s most downloaded apps. That was the time to act—the same time action was being taken to prevent Huawei from dominating the 5G telecommunications sector. The question now is whether we learn from our failures. While it’s too late to prevent TikTok from becoming a beloved American online space, it’s not too late to prevent the widespread adoption of similarly problematic apps. RedNote, for example, remains untouched, as do a host of other Chinese platforms.

The main argument against a sweeping ban on problematic foreign-owned apps is that this would infringe on free speech. But the opposite is true—as the US Court of Appeals essentially found. A social media platform under the sway of a foreign government obsessed with censorship and surveillance is an impediment to free speech. Democratic governments should act to preserve free speech by preventing these platforms from dominating online spaces.

Trade experts and economists understand that free markets don’t just happen naturally; creating and preserving a free market requires a strong government hand. There must be laws against unfair market behavior, mechanisms to bring cases against potential violators, means to investigate those claims, and strong enforcement. Sometimes the biggest violators are governments themselves.

In the same way, a free speech environment doesn’t happen naturally. There must be laws and practices in place to protect it. Put another way, it sometimes takes a strong government hand to create and preserve a free market for speech. As with free markets, sometimes the biggest violators of free speech are governments. And just as the public in a democracy has the ultimate power to vote out its own government for violating freedoms, protecting the public from foreign regimes and their intelligence services is the job of democratic governments.

The Chinese government has no right to censor or manipulate information on US soil. The Trump administration should act as soon as possible to ensure that no other social media companies linked to authoritarian governments can again play host to America’s virtual public square.

To deal with Russia, first understand what Putin wants

President Donald Trump has said he wants to end the fighting in Ukraine quickly. But it’s far from clear whether this is achievable, not least because the war in Ukraine has become a proxy for Putin’s wider confrontation with the West.

Trump’s campaign pledge that he would end the fighting within 24 hours has already been modified, with the new president and his advisers more recently discussing a period of three to six months. Trump has signalled plans for an early meeting with Vladimir Putin, while the United States’s special adviser to Ukraine is expected to visit Kyiv soon.

Putin will likely welcome a meeting with his US counterpart, not least because it will put him where he always wanted to be: talking directly to Washington, one great power to another, disposing of world affairs. This appeals to the Russian president’s concern for his, and Russia’s, appropriate standing in global affairs.

Moreover, Putin will likely fancy that he can play the incoming president, much as reports claim he did at their Helsinki summit in 2018. He will also consider himself to be in a strong position to drive a hard bargain on Ukraine.

He thinks he’s winning and that time is on his side. To some extent, he has a point.

Russia has the upper hand in what has become a brutal war of attrition. Russian forces have been making slow, costly yet inexorable progress, pushing the outmanned and outgunned Ukrainian defenders onto the backfoot. Meanwhile, relentless missile and drone attacks have taken a high toll on Ukrainian energy and civilian infrastructure.

Western countries are facing domestic political and economic pressures and distractions. Putin calculates that this, coupled with uncertainty over Trump’s approach to the US’s European allies, will lead the West to tire of supporting Kyiv and to welcome a deal.

To date, Putin has shown no real interest in a negotiated settlement—except on his own terms. These terms would effectively amount to capitulation by Kyiv and are by no means in the West’s interests.

Putin has not resiled from his core objective to bring Ukraine to heel, install a more pliable government in Kyiv, and draw Ukraine back firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence.

He won’t therefore be satisfied with just a ceasefire. Rather, he’ll want recognition of Russia’s annexed territories and a pledge of permanent Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament.

This relates to Putin’s wider objectives. As the war has continued, he has increasingly described Ukraine as a proxy for what he portrays as a wider existential conflict between Russia and the West. Resisting purported Western hostility towards Russia is now crucial in legitimising Putin’s continued rule.

Putin also wants to revise the post-Cold War security settlement in Europe and restore Russia’s global standing and influence. This was the essence of treaties that Moscow proposed in December 2021 on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine.

How the Trump administration deals with Moscow will be crucial not only for Ukraine’s future, but also for wider European and global security.

A quick, partial deal now would eventually come back to bite the US and its European allies.

If Trump wants a quick deal, he will press Ukraine to accept a ceasefire along the current lines of fighting. Kyiv may indeed have to accept a loss of territory as part of a settlement. But unless this is accompanied by robust Western (above all, US) security guarantees, such an agreement is unlikely to last, giving Russia the opportunity to rebuild its forces. Once it senses that Western attention has shifted elsewhere, Moscow will be emboldened to resume its subjugation of Ukraine.

The smarter approach for Washington would instead be to try and even up the scales by intensifying pressure on Putin to nudge him into negotiations while strengthening Ukraine’s hand ahead of any talks.

For example, Putin is keen to secure a relaxation of Western economic and technology sanctions so the Russian economy can recover and Moscow can reduce its stark dependence on China. Western states should give no such relief. Sanctions should instead be stepped up to increase pressure on the already-weakened Russian economy.

Washington should also pledge to increase military and economic support for Kyiv, signalling to Putin that he’s unlikely to achieve his aims in eastern Ukraine.

These measures would push Moscow to agree to talks to end the fighting and would strengthen Kyiv’s hand (and that of its Western backers) ahead of any such negotiations.

Early signals from the new administration are encouraging. Trump has urged Putin to agree to end the fighting in Ukraine, threatening otherwise to increase pressure substantially on Moscow, including through expanded sanctions.

Even so, securing a long-term, durable settlement in Ukraine involves more than this. It will also require Washington and its European allies to face up squarely to Moscow’s more confrontational and expansive ambitions.

The question is whether the new US administration will do this.

Things I was wrong about

This is an article about things I was wrong about. It’s not exhaustive.

It’s also an unconventional way to take stock of some of the biggest ongoing issues in foreign affairs and security: Australia’s relationship with Papua New Guinea and the rest of the near region, big military acquisitions, and what to learn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I am a small fish in an admittedly shallow think tank pond, and I assume few have paid attention to my mistakes. But I’ve been doing this for long enough now that I ought to hold myself to account.

In May 2022 I wrote in The Strategist that the next National Rugby League team should come from PNG.

A rugby league deal has now been struck worth $600 million over 10 years across PNG and the wider Pacific—though not, of course, because of anything I wrote—and I find myself deeply ambivalent about it.

An esteemed colleague who must remain nameless is culpable for changing my mind. Among many questions: how would failure be dealt with, and what will the Australian government do if the league comes asking for more? And, as Stephen Howes and Oliver Nobetau have emphasised, is this the best use of Australian money in PNG?

A PNG team playing in Australia is not an inherently bad idea. It’s a significant diplomatic achievement and one that will have deep symbolic import for many people in both nations. It is also backed by elite politicians on either side of the strait. One cannot underestimate the near mythical role sport plays in the psyche of Australia. Sharing that with our closest neighbour is potentially soft power genius. Advocates also point out that sports might be used to drive engagement with other social programs. If unlimited money were available, a PNG team would make some sense.

But there is not unlimited money. The long-run strategic payoffs of addressing the basic human development challenges that drive PNG’s fragility seem likely to be greater. This isn’t a call for more development assistance; the case for expanded visa arrangements is strong, for instance. In the cold light of day, this deal looks like an extravagance in the face of average Papua New Guineans’ daily struggle to be safe, healthy and educated—though I hope I am wrong again.

Mistake number two. In September 2022, I parsed some developments in advanced military command-and-control systems in the United States. I wrote that ‘Truly integrated command-and-control systems are one priority that might be considered in the various [Australian] assessment processes’ then underway—for example, the Defence Strategic Review.

The pursuit of comprehensively integrated sensor and communications networks now seems to me a fool’s errand. In acquisition terms, we know how difficult big, complex projects are, and any all-seeing, all-talking network would be just that. There are many cases where there is no other choice (submarines, for example) but we should try to avoid it.

And operationally, I should have listened to my own advice, which followed closely at the heels of far more credible others, including now-Major General Chris Smith, that in warfare the best that can be hoped for is rough coordination, because of the ever-present friction that bedevils military operations. It’s a matter of satisficing, not perfecting. Ukraine’s resistance to Russia so far appears to validate both these dimensions, showing what hastily acquired, messily integrated arrays of kit can achieve in determined hands.

Thankfully, my third mistake was not on the record. Had I been making predictions about the outcome of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I would have been wrong. So many analysts were very wrong, and these analytic failings have attracted welcome reflection.

Like many, I thought—or assumed—that a concerted Russian attack would quickly overwhelm Ukraine. I failed to appreciate Ukraine’s development of its military capabilities since 2014, the realities of scale and distance in the theatre, the level of mobilisation therefore required, and the disfunction of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its armed forces.

I still think acute concern about escalation has been entirely legitimate. I also wonder whether small changes might have seen a successful coup de main on Kyiv, or what might have happened had President Volodymyr Zelensky been killed in the early hours or days.

My fourth mistake was underestimating the power of narratives to cloud specifics. I contributed to an Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue paper exploring the emerging ‘all tools of statecraft’ rhetoric. I also published related shortform work shortly afterwards.

My intent—aligned with that of many others, much more distinguished—was that our international affairs community rebalance the books, elevating the roles of conflict prevention alongside defence preparedness, and long-term resilience building alongside shorter-term tactical responses.

This rhetorical turn towards ‘all tools of statecraft’ has become mainstream. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the National Defence Strategy and the International Development Policy all reflect the advocacy of many for a more integrated ‘statecraft’ approach.

But I’ve found myself increasingly sceptical. For one thing, there is little sign that the budget levels between Australia’s different policy levers are shifting to any greater balance. It isn’t all about the money, but the money is important.

Until very recently, it seemed like we had hollowed the idea of its political significance and rendered it technocratic, a matter of important but mundane coordination between Canberra departments.

And yet, perhaps the wheel really is turning. We’re now seeing outcomes that reflect a more ambitious rendering of statecraft: leaders opening space for genuine policy innovation and changing international relationships in consequential ways.

The Falepili Union—a genuinely comprehensive partnership, with a clear dividend for Australia—was perhaps the first big signpost. An agreement announced with Nauru late last year is another huge step and, whatever its flaws, the PNG rugby league deal reflects a clear appetite to find different ways of engaging the region. The potential to build on these successes, particularly regarding labour mobility, appears real. Replicating such innovations in bigger, more crowded Southeast Asia will remain a challenge and something to watch.

Could’ve seen it coming: ASPI’s tech tracker had picked up China’s AI strength

It shouldn’t have come as a complete shock.

US tech stocks, especially chipmaker Nvidia, plunged on Monday after news that the small China-based company DeepSeek had achieved a dramatic and reportedly inexpensive advance in artificial intelligence. But the step forward for China’s AI industry was in fact foreseeable.

It was foreseeable from ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker, which was launched in early 2023 and which in its latest update monitors high-impact research (measured as the 10 percent most highly cited publications) over two decades across 64 technologies, including machine learning and natural language processing (NLP).

While high-impact research isn’t the full picture, it is a leading indicator of scientific innovation right at the beginning of the lifecycle of a technology. As we argued in our August 2024 update, scientific innovation needs to be nurtured through every step of the lifecycle, notably through commercialisation for economic gain.

The two-decade Critical Technology Tracker report showed that China’s consistent investments in science and technology were paying off, with steady gains in its global share of high-impact publications in machine learning over the previous two decades. In this ascent, China overtook the United States in their yearly global share of highly cited publications in 2017.

ASPI has shown that between 2019 and 2023, 36.5 percent of high impact research in this field was published by Chinese institutions, compared with 15.4 percent by the United States. In NLP, the race is tighter, with the US’s and China’s global share of publications neck-and-neck in the same five-year period, at 24.8 percent and 24.1 percent, respectively.

ASPI’s research has also shown that, of the world-leading institutions in machine-learning research, the top five were in China. Tsinghua University, the alma mater of several key researchers behind the latest DeepSeek model, ranked second. ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker also ranks Tsinghua University third in research in natural-language processing, behind only Google and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chinese technology firms have been increasingly tapping into the growing pool of indigenous talent. Last year, DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, emphasised that the core research team was ‘all local’ and included no one who had trained or done extensive work abroad—though some members did have work experience in foreign operations inside China, such as Microsoft Research Asia. The Financial Times reports that Liang formed his AI company by combining an excellent team of chips experts with the best talent from a hedge fund he had co-founded.

AI is just the latest technology in which we have seen Chinese companies challenge the established dominance held by US or European companies. Solar cells, electric vehicles and smartphones are all technologies in which Western companies held and lost early advantages. ASPI’s data shows that China has in fact surpassed the US in cutting-edge research for 57 out of 64 technology areas; 2016 was an inflection point.

The global AI industry is still weighted in favour of the US in share of pioneering tech companies. But as DeepSeek’s announcement emphasises, US and other Western countries should have no great confidence in keeping their leads. In fact, any confidence should be called out as complacency.

So, the Trump administration’s commitment to making America great again in technologies is certainly welcomed. The big example so far is the announcement on 21 January of the US AI infrastructure joint venture Stargate, into which US$500 billion ($800 billion) is to be invested.

DeepSeek’s release makes it clear that now is not the time for half-measures or wishful thinking. Bold decisions, strategic foresight and a willingness to lean in to the AI race is vital to maintaining a competitive edge, and not just by the US.

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker is clear in another regard: that we should be ready for similar advances by China in other technological domains. Let’s hope that DeepSeek really is the wakeup call needed and likeminded countries now take the action needed to avoid being shocked again—not just in AI, but in all critical technologies.