India’s defence industry is benefiting from cooperation with France

India’s defence industry is benefiting from the country’s switch away from Russia and towards France for weapons acquisition.

India and France have cooperated on several key defence projects, such as Kalvari-class submarines, the Chetak and Cheetah helicopters and the Shakti helicopter engine. These projects involved technology transfer to India under licensed production from French companies.

Since the 1960s, Russia has been India’s primary defence partner and weapons supplier. However, India’s arms imports from Russia have fallen to a historic low. According to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute report, India’s defence imports from Russia fell from 76 percent during the 2009–13 period to 36 percent during the 2019–23 period. It marks the first time since the 1960s that less than half of India’s arms imports came from Russia.

The Russia–Ukraine war, ensuing Western sanctions on Russian entities and growing camaraderie between Russia and China have further prompted India to reduce its reliance on Russian defence exports. Additionally, India has faced significant delays in the delivery for several orders from Russia, such as the S-400 surface-to-air missile system and T-90S tanks. All of this has led to India placing no fresh orders with Russia since the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine war.

Instead, it has increased arms imports from Western countries, mainly France and the United States. France emerged as India’s second-largest defence supplier during the 2019–23 period, when 33 percent of Indian imported arms originated from France. (The US supplied 13 percent of India’s defence imports in the same period.)

Now that France has become a significant arms supplier, the Indian government is looking for possible opportunities for collaboration with it on advanced defence technologies.

French aerospace maker Safran and India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation are negotiating to manufacture an engine for India’s fifth-generation fighter jet, the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft Mk 2. Moreover, Safran is willing to engage in 100 percent technology transfer across various project phases, including design development, certification and production.

The project involves not only the transfer of technology to develop jet engines—usually the most technically challenging part of an aircraft—but also allows the firms to work together on advanced materials and metallurgy, which are important for making aircraft engines.

Such a partnership will give India access to technologies and industrial processes necessary for making the engines. The ability to domestically manufacture fighter engines may help the Indian Air Force to address its extreme shortage of combat squadrons.

Safran will also collaborate with India to develop helicopters that are likely to be the mainstay of the Indian Armed Forces rotorcraft fleet. The company is supporting the propulsion side of the Indian Multi-Role Helicopter program. The program aims to develop medium-lift helicopters to replace India’s Mi-17 helicopters. Safran has also agreed with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to transfer forging and casting technology for the Shakti engine, which powers the Indian state company’s Dhruv, Rudra, Light Utility and Prachand helicopters.

On the naval front, India’s Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers have signed a memorandum of understanding with France’s Naval Group to collaborate on surface ships. The collaboration will support a ship design based on the Naval Group’s Gowind class for the Indian market and friendly foreign countries.

Political reliability and longstanding defence ties make France a dependable defence partner for India. Its emergence as a significant weapons supplier is benefiting India’s defence industry by equipping it with the technology and expertise to manufacture defence products domestically.

Limited quarantine is China’s likely first move in subduing Taiwan

The West had better think carefully about how it would handle China imposing a nominally civil quarantine on Taiwan, because that’s the tactic that increasingly looks like an opening move for Beijing in taking control of the island.

A quarantine, imposing limited controls on access to the island, offered strong advantages for China even before Taiwan said in October that a blockade, surrounding it with forces to cut off all access, would be an act of war. Taiwan’s statement means China is even more likely to choose quarantine as a first step.

This use of the word ‘quarantine’ was coined in an important Center for Strategic and International Studies report last year. The authors foresaw that the Chinese government might ban only certain types of goods from entering Taiwan, or it could forbid ships from using a certain port. The measures would be enforced by nominally non-military forces, such as the China Coastguard.

Conceivably, China could see whether it could get away once with a quarantine action, then, noting success in asserting its authority, do it again and gradually tighten restrictions until they turned into a blockade—salami slicing, as it does in so many areas of international affairs.

First among the inherent advantages of quarantine for Beijing is that, unlike more warlike action, it brings no commitment to go all the way, to conquer or be defeated. It would raise no great expectation among the highly nationalist Chinese people of imminent conquest of Taiwan. So if the measure met stiff resistance, the Chinese Communist Party could back away from it, declaring that some civil administrative objective had been achieved.

Yet forcing it to back down would be difficult for Taiwan and its friends, which is another advantage of the quarantine tactic. They would have to escalate with warships and possibly armed force to stop a China Coast Guard ship from intercepting a freighter, for example. This would put Taiwan and the West in the unfortunate position of looking like the initiators of military conflict. On the other hand, if Taiwan and the West did nothing, and intimidated shipping companies mostly went along with the quarantine, China’s narrative that it had control over Taiwan would be strengthened.

Taiwanese Minister of National Defence Wellington Koo said in October that Taiwan would consider a blockade an act of war and would respond on a war footing after massive Chinese military drills were held near the island.

A quarantine would probably cause little or no disruption to China’s own trade, whereas the risk of military confrontation in a blockade could frighten ship owners into avoiding the Taiwan Strait and Chinese ports near it. This would severely affect China’s economy: most shipments that pass through the Taiwan Strait are Chinese imports and exports

A quarantine would probably involve no dramatic announcements from Beijing. Instead, China could claim it merely needed to expand customs procedures in the Taiwan Strait and surrounding waters where China believes it has jurisdiction. This might involve the Chinese coast guard carrying out inspections of ships and boarding non-Chinese vessels to inspect their paperwork. Vessels that refuse to comply could be forced to turn back or even be hit with water cannons. The coast guard could then restrict vital imports that enter Taiwan, such as energy products. This could cripple the Taiwanese economy and have the effect of shattering the Taiwanese people’s morale and willingness to resist Beijing.

Throughout 2024, China’s coast guard increased intrusive patrols in waters around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen archipelago, which is close to China.

In a possible early sign of a quarantine tactic, China’s coast guard in February 2024 intercepted a Taiwanese sight-seeing ferry that was sailing around Kinmen’s main island during a period when cross-strait tensions were running high. Chinese coast guard officers boarded the Taiwanese boat and asked to inspect the documentation of the crew, before disembarking a while later. Then, in mid-May, the Chinese state media outlet China Daily said, ‘In the future, this ‘Kinmen model’ of law enforcement inspections can also be applied to Matsu and Penghu islands, and even the entire Taiwan Strait.’

Among the difficult options for Taiwanese and Western response might be beefing up of Taiwan’s own coast guard, which is vastly smaller than China’s, and training it to respond to such tactics.

The US could also impose financial sanctions on China if it imposed a quarantine and persuade other democracies to join in. In doing so, the West would be hitting back at China using tactics that, like China’s quarantine, fall short of war. This might also meet the incoming Trump administration’s goal of weakening China, which it views as an economic competitor.

Whatever the response will be, plans are needed. Quarantine is so attractive a measure for China that Taiwan and its friends must be prepared.

Gradually, then suddenly: in geopolitics, decades can happen in weeks

Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises (1926) that bankruptcy occurs gradually and then suddenly. This should be treated as a rule of geopolitical affairs.

For centuries, political structures and hierarchies of power that once were thought to be unchanging often suddenly vanished. Demise was gradual but collapse was sudden.

The Russian Empire (abolished in September 1917) and the Soviet Russian empire (dissolved in December 1991) both exhibited permanence—until they did not. So did the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (abolished in October 1918) and the Ottoman Empire (abolished in November 1922).

Only last month we witnessed the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Rulers in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Havana and elsewhere nervously understand the Hemingway rule, even if they have never read him.

There is another way to express this rule. After decades when nothing happens, decades can suddenly happen in weeks (a saying that is attributed to Vladimir Lenin). While we expressed hope on New Year’s Eve for a more peaceful and less chaotic world, one senses that as 2025 unfolds we will see decades suddenly happen in a blaze of geopolitical twists, turns and transformations.

The scene is bewildering. What will happen in the Russo-Ukrainian war? Will a peace deal be reached? Will Vladimir Putin keep his grip on power? Will Israel go to war against Iran? Will Iran recover from recent setbacks or will the regime start to unravel? Will it make a dash for nuclear weapons?

Will a dramatic Middle East peace deal, and a Palestinian homeland, emerge as a result of a regional realignment involving the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other key players and a freezing out of Iran? Will Islamic State or al-Qaida (or both) manage to galvanise supporters into launching a new wave of terrorist attacks in the West, perhaps by mobilising Muslim anger over the plight of the Palestinians? Will the India-China border remain quiet? What is Kim Jong-un plotting? Does he sense opportunity in South Korea’s political crisis?

What will happen in the seas of the Western Pacific, especially around Japan, Taiwan and The Philippines? Or in the next phase of US-China strategic competition? What of China’s calculations about its objectives and timelines, especially given the return of Donald Trump to the White House? Will China’s economic and social fragility combine with internal political tensions to shake Xi Jinping’s hold on power? Will Trump’s second term dramatically transform the role of the US in the world?

In the grey space between peace and war, will we see an acceleration of cyber attacks, sabotage (including against undersea infrastructure), covert disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and other forms of intimidation by Russia and China against the democracies of the West, in a bid to throw them off balance, to fracture their social cohesion and undermine the national confidence of their populations? At the other end of the spectrum, will nuclear weapons be used for the first time since 1945?

On some of these issues, there will be still months and years to play out. Some, however, will play out within weeks.

As Henry Kissinger often said, in the face of a wide range of uncertainties and imponderables, often action has to be taken when the opportunities and threats are only incompletely glimpsed, and when the probabilities and consequences cannot be calculated precisely. If we wait for time to play out, we are likely to be surprised when things happen suddenly.

As Australia grapples with this bewildering range of contingencies, it will need to focus its efforts on that which matters most. For Australia, the gradual and then sudden establishment of Chinese hegemony and a US strategic withdrawal from our region (whether by choice or through military defeat) would be the most adverse geopolitical occurrence in our history.

Everything else listed above matters. This would matter most. A hegemonic China, technologically dominant and militarily unchecked, with the US looking on from its hemispheric citadel, would be for Australia a more demanding overlord than Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or Soviet Russia would have been had any one of them managed to achieve mastery in Eurasia. A dominant China would expect to get its way, and resisting would incur high costs.

Australian policy must be constantly directed to the challenge of working with others to prevent such an outcome.

In part, this will mean intensifying and accelerating our military, civil defence and national cyber defence preparations.

In the months and years ahead, there is a significant chance of a US-China military crisis in Asia, similar to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

If China continues to pursue a course of preparing for a blockade of Taiwan, the odds of this are likely to be at least 50 per cent. In the worst possible case, war might break out, gradually in the grey space between peace and war, and then suddenly with weapons being launched with little or no warning. The odds of this occurring between now and 2030 are likely to be about 10 to 20 per cent.

Aside from intensifying preparations for such eventualities, the other arm of policy that needs to be mobilised is our regional diplomacy. Australia last faced such dire prospects in the 1930s. In the face of the growing menace of Imperial Japan, it chose not to re-arm in time and as a result was defenceless in 1941, when John Curtin was forced to ‘look to America’. Neither did Australia act confidently and effectively enough in terms of its statecraft, even though it was more seized than was the British government of the growing threat posed by Imperial Japan.

We can learn the lessons of the ’30s. In the 90 years that have since passed, we have built a deep store of regional connections and we go to the region as a different Australia, independent and confident. We should engage with our neighbours on the need to stand together against Chinese coercion and aggression.

In doing so, we would not be seeking security from Asia but seeking it in Asia.

Our neighbours are highly attuned to geopolitical realities. Almost without exception, even if they do not say it, they are not keen to see China emerge as a hegemon. Equally, they would prefer to see the US remain engaged in the region, knowing that any regional power arrangement that had China at its head would be a vehicle for China to dominate.

However, most are not ready to tackle directly the question of China’s aggression and coercion. They see no need to do so—not perhaps until Chinese naval and coastguard vessels appear off their shores to assert Chinese sovereignty in disputed waters.

Short of them being directly threatened, attempts to enlist most of our neighbours into an anti-China coalition will not work. Here is where astute Australian foreign policy could have a significant impact. No one in the region believes that Australia is seriously trying to navigate US-China strategic competition. That it is trying not to choose a side.

Most believe Australia has already made its choice without being vocal about it. Australia’s presumed choice can be seen in our longstanding alliance with the US; the hosting of US strategic facilities in Australia; the basing arrangements that have been put in place for US military operations from Australia; Australia’s plan under AUKUS to acquire long-range nuclear-propelled attack submarines; and our participation in the growing US-led system of regional deterrence to counter China. While we have stabilised relations with China in recent years, our neighbours believe we are still working to thwart China’s rise as regional hegemon.

That certainty regarding Australian policy is credit in the strategic bank. We should leverage that credit. Instead of sliding and hedging, our message in the capitals of Asia and the Pacific should be a confident one of strategic solidarity. We should declare that we will stand with our neighbours in the face of Chinese aggression and coercion. This Australian pledge of solidarity should be extended to the following: Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Brunei in Southeast Asia; farther afield to Japan, South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, New Zealand and East Timor; the sovereign nations of the Pacific Islands Forum; and possibly others in the Indo-Pacific region. In a carefully couched and suitably adapted form that recognised current Australian policy on its status, the pledge even could be extended to Taiwan.

We would not ask any regional partner to take sides in US-China great power competition or in an anti-China coalition. Neither would the pledge involve or require the agreeing of a military alliance with Australia, although in some cases that might be considered as well and especially so in the case of Indonesia.

Specifically, Australia would pledge that were Chinese grey-zone aggression and coercion to occur in relation to the territorial integrity or national sovereignty of a neighbour, we would consult immediately with them on the best ways in which assistance might be provided by Australia in terms of diplomatic, economic, technical, intelligence and material support. Subject to there being in place a military alliance between our nations, this could involve defence assistance.

Australia would be pledging to deploy all elements of power to assist its neighbours.

In making this pledge, and by not taking the easy road of cowering in our sheltered land, relieved that the dragon was breathing fire on someone else, Australia would be undertaking its most significant independent strategic initiative in the region. The pledge would remove from the table the possibility that Australia might sit back and calculate the advantages for itself in silently acquiescing in, or even tacitly condoning, Chinese aggression and coercion against our neighbours.

The pledge would commit us to doing no more than a resolute and confident Australia would be likely to do in our own interests in the applicable circumstances. By making an explicit declaration now, before the eruption of a sudden crisis, Australia would be signalling that it was serious about contributing to collective security and resilience in the region, and that it was prepared to forgo hedging and ambiguity. With those neighbours that desired it, discreet planning could take place that would save time in a crisis.

Were others in the region to make similar and hopefully mutual pledges to their neighbours, Beijing’s calculations would become vastly more complicated. This would not be an act of altruism on Australia’s part. A more resilient region that was better able to withstand Chinese aggression and coercion, preferably through a web of mutual pledges of solidarity, would make for a more secure Australia.

Australia has long had a strong Asia consciousness. For instance, in 1934 the government of prime minister Joseph Lyons dispatched the first ministerial goodwill diplomatic tour of China, Japan, the Netherlands East Indies, French Indochina, Malaya, Hong Kong and The Philippines. It did not yield useful results, for reasons already mentioned, but it showed that we were at least willing to act on identifiably Australian interests in the region.

After World War II, a more distinctively Australian approach to the region began to be fashioned. By the ’90s, the Keating government was speaking of Australia finding security in Asia.

Building on this tradition of engagement, we should now make starkly clear that, amid all the flux, we are deeply committed to a free and open Indo-Pacific, where all nations are free to make their choices within rules that everyone has agreed. The Australian pledge as described here would give force to this commitment.

In today’s chaotic geopolitical world, the actions that we take now will echo for decades to come.

Hemingway wrote of bankruptcy. In our region we are strategically solvent after decades of engagement. Will we use our credit to help to build a more secure region, even as events unfold at a dizzying pace?

ASPI is and will remain independent

James Curran gets a number of things wrong in his Australian Financial Review column on the Varghese Review and the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Above all, ASPI did not ‘work hand in glove with the Morrison government on how to play China as an issue in Australian domestic politics’. This is a baseless accusation, for which Curran provides zero evidence. One can only assume the intention is to make ASPI a political target in the aftermath of the review’s release. ASPI is a non-partisan institute that shouldn’t be painted as working or aligning with any side of politics.

Curran further alleges that ASPI has ‘strayed’ from its founding charter, regarding itself as an ‘ideological font’ for ‘calling out and confronting an assertive China’. ASPI is, and will remain, a non-partisan, independent think tank as stipulated in its charter, laid out in 2001.

He then avers that ‘some of its analysts created an atmosphere in which to question government policy settings on China was deemed unpatriotic’. These allegations are also completely unsubstantiated. Who is he talking about, exactly?

The only person at ASPI that Curran mentions by name is the executive director, Justin Bassi. He accuses Bassi of making a ‘reprehensible’ and ‘juvenile’ comparison between the 14 recommendations in former diplomat Peter Varghese’s report and the 14 grievances against the Australian government, aired by the Chinese embassy in 2020.

Bassi simply noted that there was a ‘grim irony’ in the numerical coincidence, as one of the complaints was widely interpreted as a demand to defund ASPI because it has produced research and commentary critical of the Chinese Communist Party. How is this observation in any sense juvenile? Varghese did not recommend closing down ASPI, but he did recommend that direct government funding for ASPI’s office in Washington DC be discontinued, along with other moves designed to tighten government controls over the sector, including a role for ministers in setting research priorities and appointing government observers to ASPI’s board.

The fact that the government has agreed with most of Varghese’s recommendations is worrying in itself, but especially in light of the Chinese government’s long-running campaign to vilify ASPI. Regardless of the government’s or Varghese’s intentions, Beijing might be forgiven for leaping to the conclusion that ASPI has had its wings clipped in the diplomatic and economic cause of stabilisation—a policy that some ASPI analysts (myself included) have legitimately contested.

The fact that the government coincidentally celebrated the full resumption of the live lobster trade with China the same week it released the Varghese review and its official response can only have strengthened such associations, and perhaps even buoyed the belief in Beijing that its economic coercion of Australia was effective, after all. The timing of this statement, at a minimum, showed poor judgment.

ASPI continues to abide by the guidance in its charter that its main purpose is to provide ‘alternative sources of input to Government decision-making processes on major strategic and defence policy issues’. Also, that it should help to ‘nourish public debate and understanding’.

ASPI’s research output on China is an important part of what we do, though only one part. As an institution, ASPI is proud of the breadth of its China expertise and language skills, which is unsurpassed among think tanks in Australia. ASPI has also provided an outlet for prominent Australia-based academics to publish policy-relevant research on China. ASPI has contributed significantly to Australia’s stock of China expertise. Just this week, the US designated companies, including battery maker CATL, as Chinese military companies after years of research from institutions such as ASPI about links to the Chinese government and military, and about human rights abuses.

Ministers from around the world seek out ASPI analysts for briefings on our research. Datasets we have built over the past decade as a public good have been used by governments and organisations worldwide.

In his report, Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China. But universities, for their own reasons, have long since abandoned the field in the areas that matter most for Australia’s strategic policy—the external behaviours of China’s Communist Party, through its state security apparatus and the People’s Liberation Army. ASPI will continue to do what it can to nurture the talent required to fill that national blind spot and to publish ground-breaking research in these areas. ASPI’s researchers would collegially welcome a greater investment of resources by other think tanks, universities and the government in this regard.

Curran and others are free to criticise ASPI and other research institutes but should focus on evidence, not innuendo. I, for one, would much prefer to be writing about Australia’s regional security environment, defence capability and military strategy. A glance at the international headlines is sufficient to understand there is an urgent and growing appetite for expert analysis in these areas, to inform the general public, and provide alternative policy inputs for the Australian government.

The winners we must pick

In a modestly noted announcement in Western Australia in early December, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Resources Minister Madeleine King announced the addition of $475 million in government loans to mining company Iluka, taking the total to $1.25 billion.

This is for processing heavy rare earths to refined oxides. I understand this was a decision heavily debated within the government. There will be more such debates in the future. The most significant rare earths here are neodymium, praesodimium, dysprosium and terbium.

Tom O’Leary, the chief executive of Iluka, pointed out that the refined oxides ‘will then be used in magnets for electric vehicles, for defence applications … renewable energy, robotics—the list goes on.’

Minister King was anxious to point to a broad Commonwealth commitment to other rare-earths enterprises: Lynas in Kalgoorlie, Arafura in the Northern Territory and Australian Strategic Materials in Dubbo. The net was cast wider to a range of further critical materials being mined and processed in Australia: a proposed graphite refinery in Townsville, vanadium projects in Western Australia and Townsville and further rare earths in South Australia.

Indeed, recently, China has focused on Australia’s reserves of critical minerals as it strives to deprive the United States of gallium, germanium and antimony. These minerals are found in Australian deposits of bauxite, lead, zinc, gold and coal. Thirty out of 51 on the US’s list of critical minerals are present in Australia in substantial quantities. Fourteen more are present in more modest amounts.

Antimony, for example, is important in a range of armaments, notably bullets. Recent pricing has shown the consequences of Chinese bans on supplying the United States. Reuters reported that the price of antimony trioxide has increased by 228 percent this year in Rotterdam to US$39,000 per metric tonne.

What is happening at Iluka’s Eaneabba project is of immediate significance. The permanent magnets and hardening processes that depend on rare earths from the project are critical to the quality of missiles, their accuracy and speed. Light and heavy rare earths are in almost all US weapon systems.

To the argument that our actions might be market-distorting, Minister King points out, ‘The whole value chain of critical minerals and rare earth around the world is highly disrupted. It faces opaque international markets where pricing is almost impossible to establish in any normal fair market. So that is why government does have to participate in this particular emerging sector of our economy.’

She pointed out that we are not alone in this exercise. The US Export-Import Bank, South Korea and the credit agencies of Japan and Canada are engaged in projects. Britain, Germany and France, which direct financial resources for critical minerals, are also engaged.

The principal distorter of the market is China. The minister made that clear. The policy was about competing. ‘China … does dominate the rare earths refining processes of the world and Australia needs to compete.’

O’Leary has pointed out that if the refining process at Eaneabba is supported by the end of this decade, it could satisfy half the world’s need for permanent magnets.

In so far as Iluka is concerned, as The Financial Times has pointed out, the principal mechanism for China’s distortion of the market is tying pricing to the Asian Metals Market. Adhering to pricing arrangements dominated by China cripples the profitability of any producer other than China. China can take profit at any point along the complex processing chain of rare earths, and it can cripple a competitor focused on any other point. As Iluka points out, long-term prices determined by the Asian Metals Market for neodymium and praseodymium are at $58 per kg. If that market were abandoned, prices would average between US$82 and US$148 per kg, O’Leary believes.

This could be achieved by negotiating bilaterally with buyers. They would pay for reliability and diversity of sources. The government loan provides an opportunity to try such an approach.

The Commonwealth has placed a tough test on the loan. To access it requires the successful conclusion of off-take agreements over the next two years. We should hope deadlines will be viewed leniently. China is well positioned to fight hard, wielding a near complete monopoly with which to defend the processing of the heavy rare earths. Helpful to Iluka and Australia are the materials that we would provide, and, indeed, China provides relatively small, but critical, manufacturing inputs. Buying from us is unlikely to seriously impede a manufacturer’s ability to sell their completed system in any market.

The point about Australia is that we have substantial reserves, and exploration continues to surge.

Further, with the exception of the Colorado School of Mines undergraduate education, we have the five best mining-engineering schools outside China. We are superb miners, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation are helpfully knowledgeable about processing.

But putting the whole picture together requires a continual strategic commitment. Examining the recent Chinese bans, we can see that we can encourage a broad global effort. Given incoming president Donald Trump’s intentions, he will need to take a deep interest in what we are doing. It is worth a major effort to indicate to him that we have the capacity to relieve what might be a substantial point of blackmail that cripples his strategic position. The Chinese have already demonstrated a willingness to move in this general area and have indicated a preparedness to take those bans further into the goods now covered by Iluka’s production.

Faster, please: the ADF needs to catch up on uncrewed-aircraft technologies

The rapidly deteriorating strategic environment necessitates a shift in defence strategies and capabilities. The Australian Defence Force (ADF), like many military forces globally, must acknowledge that uncrewed systems will play an important role in future conflicts. It must accelerate its processes for developing their capability.

Russia’s war against Ukraine and fighting in the Red Sea have demonstrated a rapid proliferation of high volume, low-cost technologies that are now indispensable on the battlefield. In light of this, the ADF should further develop and implement strategies for uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) and counter-uncrewed aerial systems (C-UASs).

These strategies should provide clear guidelines on accelerating ADF access to UASs across air, land and sea; investments in and collaboration with the UAS industry; defining roles of civil and military authorities; and ways to counter drone threats.

The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and associated spending plan, the Integrated Investment Program, recognise the importance of enhancing Australia’s drone and counter-drone capabilities. The Defence Department does include UASs in ‘robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence’, one of its sovereign industrial capability priorities, but this covers only limited aspects of UASs, not the technology’s full breadth of capability and the need for large-scale manufacturing. Moreover, there is no evidence of recently developed or released strategies specifically addressing UASs and C-UASs.

By contrast, Australia’s allies, including the United States, Britain, France and South Korea, have already developed or revised their strategies. These are based in part on observations of the use of drones in Ukraine and understanding the need to protect against them. For example, the US released a C-UAS strategy in early December. Britain launched a new UAS strategy in February 2024 highlighting clear directions for enhancing UAS capabilities and for spending for the next decade. The ADF can similarly provide clear directions to accelerate access to UASs and C-UAS across air, land and sea by developing its own strategies.

The NDS calls for integrating existing and emerging technologies and for boosting military-industrial capacity with secure supply chains. The war in Ukraine has shown that a country needs to develop its own supply chain, manufacturing capabilities and stocks. The Australian industry is highly skilled and capable of doing this, but it needs direction through clear policy guidelines.

The ADF must recognise the need to balance between investing in complex, highly capable systems and high-volume, low-cost technologies that can provide quick and simple solutions for a range of security challenges.

The Integrated Investment Program includes spending on a range of uncrewed and autonomous systems. The ADF plans to spend more than $10 billion on drones, with at least $4.3 billion on uncrewed aerial systems and $690 million on uncrewed tactical systems for the army.

So far, Australia’s spending on UASs has focused on complex aircraft, such as the Boeing MQ-28A Ghost Bat, designed to operate alongside crewed aircraft or to independently increase aircraft numbers in combat. The air force has begun receiving MQ-4C Tritons, an unarmed, high-altitude and long-endurance uncrewed aircraft.

The ADF will spend more than $100 million on 110 drones from the Australian manufacturers SYPAQ and Quantum-Systems. While it considers the delivery of the limited number of systems in 2025 to express ‘an intent to enhance at speed’, other nations spend far more on ensuring that warfighters have such systems and, most importantly, are protected against them.

It must also acknowledge that UASs with high-end capabilities are highly vulnerable and must be protected. The conflict in Ukraine demonstrates that large UAS have become targets that are easy to detect and destroy. For example, TB2 Bayraktars, celebrated in 2022 for their performance, are no longer frequently used. Similarly, the Russian fleet has had to relocate from parts of the Black Sea due to drone threats, such as the one in November when Ukrainian drone boats motored over 1000km and blasted three Russian warships in one blow.

Furthermore, the government must better understand the relationship between civil and military authorities and their roles and responsibilities in counteracting UAS threats.

In peacetime, civil law enforcement agencies are responsible for defence against UAS, but responsibilities may overlap in relation to military installations and critical infrastructure. Moreover, civil agencies may require military support since only the armed forces have the equipment to detect, identify and engage UAS. The government must encourage close cooperation between civil and military organisations in order to maintain an effective level of interoperability.

Regardless of how the ADF develops its own UAS, it must prepare to defend against them. Every soldier must be aware of UAS threats, learn how to use a UAS, how to counter them for self-defence and to protect others and costly equipment. As UAS technologies evolve, so do C-UAS capabilities.

As evident from Russia’s war against Ukraine, the UAS are already threats, and they are here to stay. Australia must keep up with the rapid pace of innovation in this field. It needs to demonstrate commitment to stay ahead in the development of drone technology and ensure that its armed forces are prepared in the fast-changing security landscape.

The West’s crisis of confidence

The US president warned of a crisis of confidence, with ‘a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions.’ He cautioned that ‘the erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America’ and was ‘a fundamental threat to American democracy’ that had ‘come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.’

The warning was given to the United States not in 2025 by Joe Biden but in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, who died last month, aged 100.

Known as the ‘malaise speech’, it blamed the country as a whole, including its leadership. Now a failure of leadership is driving a failure of confidence that’s at the heart of the current era of crisis of the democracies, including in Australia.

It’s a crisis of confidence in who we were, are and will be as liberal democracies. It’s a loss of confidence that we can always have a better future if we are willing to stand up for it. The Western world came out of 1945 never doubting that 1955 and 1965 would be much better, though it well understood that sacrifices might have to be made to achieve that.

Now we seem to be so embarrassed by some of our history—for example, wrongs committed in colonialism—that we lack interest in our achievements. In watching the wrongs of other states, we fall into lazy and false moral equivalency, as though all countries were as bad as each other.

Meanwhile our adversaries (mainly China but also Russia) have no such doubts. They gain strength by ambitiously seeking a future that relives their past.

It will take leadership to bring us out of the malaise and lead us back onto a secure path fortified by our democratic principles.

Similarities between now and 1979 should be clear, and the response that followed it—peace through strength by the administration of Ronald Reagan—should be studied and repeated.

In 1979, as now, people were angry about inflation. Internationally, extremism in the Middle East was rising, fired up mainly by Iran. Great power competition was rising: in 1979, the era of US–Soviet detente ended with the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, the dire state of the liberal democratic world looks like the US’s malaise 45 years ago. Rivals have sensed the chance to overtake the US as the global superpower.

The Biden administration implemented a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, a sign of weakness that must have encouraged Putin to think he could get away with invading Ukraine. And when he did, Western support for Ukraine came too hesitantly.

Now many fear Trump will turn the US inward. Yet American and global security requires him to return it to its leadership ambition in which it is proud of its history and striving for a better future.

The crisis of confidence we face today is worse than that of 1979. Back then, an adversary as powerful as China did not exist and the West was not taught to despise itself—by education curriculums, much of the media and, sadly, even national leaders.

Carter said, ‘as a people we know our past and we are proud of it.’ Now, too many Western leaders resign themselves to what former Australian prime minister John Howard described as a ‘black armband view of our past’.

Australian diplomats are now reluctant to use the term ‘the West’ or even to advocate democracy. The formerly named Strengthening Democracy taskforce in the Department of Home Affairs has been subsumed into another area, effectively neutering its intent with lost focus and leadership.

Some loathers of the West within the West disdain the very concept of the West. Others say we must not upset authoritarian regimes or people who proudly proclaim to be of the Global South.

Meanwhile, Russia has been ravaging Ukraine for three years, and, though we have helped Ukraine survive, we have neither put it in a position to win nor deterred Putin from his hybrid warfare of foreign interference, sabotage and propaganda.

Australia and others have returned to a failed engagement strategy with Beijing, tolerating its gross human rights violations, breaches of international rules, and enablement of Russia’s war. We’ve done that in return for the economic benefit of trade with China. And we hope China will inflict pain on others more than us until the problem is one for future governments.

The Australian government’s standard line on the relationship with China has been that we will ‘cooperate where we can and disagree where we must.’ It’s become an excuse for concessions. They include succumbing to Beijing’s claim that Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is not wrongfully detained. Yang has been in a Chinese jail for six years.

Confident leadership demands ministers standing front and centre in telling the public about our difficulties with China. Instead, they minimise annoyance to China by delegating the task to officials—as when intelligence agencies call out China’s relentless cyber attacks on us.

The Australian government and too many others don’t have the confidence that democracies can stand up to China. Instead, they are resigned to such fatalistic attitudes as one that Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has expressed: ‘China will do what great powers do.’ That implies some moral equivalence between the US and China. In an earlier, more confident age, leaders would express the situation more simply: China is a national security threat.

The government has instead found an easier target, one that is more agreeable to those who disdain the West. It is forsaking Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, one that, to our great benefit, is almost single handedly fighting Iran and its terror organisations. Terrorism is on the rise globally, including in Australia, where the threat level is back up to ‘probable’.

Islamist ideology is the source of the greatest terror threat, yet the government lacks confidence that it can say so without dividing society. In fact, people would appreciate hearing the truth, even if they can already pretty well see it themselves.

In the malaise speech, Carter said, ‘The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers.’ In blaming the US’s leadership as well as the public, he took some responsibility, but he had few answers for regaining national confidence. The Iran hostage crisis was the nail in the coffin of his presidency. But out of Carter’s demise America rose.

We now need leaders who are up front in a new era of conflict and who bring the public with them in ensuring we do not succumb to the authoritarian regimes who want to change our way of life. And it needs to be genuine confidence borne of pride in one’s own nation, history and future.

Reagan said in his 1980 campaign against Carter:

I find no national malaise; I find nothing wrong with the American people. Oh, they are frustrated, even angry at what has been done to this blessed land. But more than anything they are sturdy and robust as they have always been. Any nation that sees softness in our prosperity or disunity in our sometimes noisy arguments with each other, let such nations not make the mistakes others have made; let them understand that we will put aside in a moment the fruits of our prosperity and the luxury of our disagreements if the cause is a safe and peaceful future for our children.

Reagan was correct: the malaise was within leadership, as it is now across so much of the liberal democratic political class, including Australia’s. Where are the leaders who would forgo the fruits of prosperity to secure our future? Our national future, in the Indo-Pacific and within the Alliance, AUKUS, the Five Eyes and with our NATO partners and beyond, depends on them.

Unlocking the full potential of the ADF’s northern ranges and training areas

The Northern Territory (NT) is one of the world’s most exceptional military training environments, offering vast and rugged landscapes ideally suited for large-scale exercises, live-fire drills and complex operations. Defence-owned areas such as Bradshaw Field Training Area and Mount Bundey Training Area have earned global recognition for their ability to support high-intensity training.

Yet the Australian Defence Force is not fully exploiting the potential of these assets. It is underutilising critical resources that could enhance the ADF’s operational capabilities and Australia’s broader defence posture.

The NT’s training areas have been integral to the ADF’s operational readiness, providing an ideal environment for training in conventional and irregular warfare. They have long supported complex exercises, testing of diverse military equipment and joint training with allied forces.

However, in recent years, there has been a noticeable reduction in the scale and frequency of ADF exercises in the NT. This decline, compounded by the army’s shrinking presence in the NT and competing demands on Defence, has limited the ADF’s ability to fully exploit these ranges for high-intensity, combined-arms training, leaving a significant gap in defence readiness.

The underutilisation of the NT’s training grounds is particularly clear when compared with the heavy involvement of the US military. Under the US Force Posture Initiatives, the United States has made significant spending in these areas and regularly conducted exercises on them. This engagement reinforces the strategic importance of the NT’s ranges, highlighting the gap in the ADF’s use of them. Other international partners, particularly Japan, also recognise the value of the ranges. As regional tensions rise, training alongside allies in a location as strategically situated as the NT enhances interoperability and military readiness.

Despite the NT’s exceptional training environment and the US forces’ frequent use of this advantage, the ADF’s commitment to high-intensity exercises in the region has waned. As the Indo-Pacific becomes more geopolitically significant, the NT’s ranges should be central to Australia’s defence strategy, not secondary assets used infrequently or for limited purposes.

The Australian government and the ADF must act to maximise the utility of the NT’s training areas. The ADF must significantly ramp up its commitment to large-scale, complex training exercises in the NT.

To optimise use of the ranges, Australia must increase large-scale exercises in the NT that integrate multiple military services and allies. These exercises should reflect Australia’s strategic challenges, such as maritime security, territorial defence and regional stability. A focus on rapid deployment and modern warfare scenarios will ensure that the ADF is prepared to address a broad spectrum of threats, from conventional military conflicts to humanitarian crises and natural disasters.

Equally important is fostering closer collaboration between the Australian government, the ADF and the NT government. As the ADF ramps up its training activities in the region, the NT government must actively support the expansion. The NT’s vast, sparsely populated landscape provides a unique opportunity for the ADF to collaborate with local communities and businesses, creating mutually beneficial partnerships.

Expanding military exercises can generate jobs, boost local economies and improve infrastructure, all of which will help sustain the NT’s growing role in Australia’s defence strategy. It can also stress-test the region’s transport and logistics infrastructure and industry base, while providing economic opportunities for local businesses and communities. The increased ADF activity will also enhance the region’s security and emergency response capabilities, providing direct benefits to the local population.

Australia can unlock the full potential of these invaluable resources by revitalising its commitment to these ranges, increasing international cooperation and fostering stronger partnerships with the NT government and local communities. A comprehensive policy approach, focused on increased training activity and stronger collaboration with both domestic and international partners, will ensure that the NT remains central to Australia’s defence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. This will enhance the ADF’s operational readiness, strengthen relationships with key allies, and solidify Australia’s role as an important player in regional security.

Pacific security in 2025

2025 will be a big year for Pacific security as Pacific island nations grapple with upcoming elections, disaster recovery, watching the situation in New Caledonia and navigating geopolitical tensions. The Australian government will be kept busy as it seeks to remain the region’s primary security partner.

In 2024, tensions escalated into unrest in New Caledonia, many Pacific countries faced political instability, natural disasters caused devastation across the region, and Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong declared that Australia and China are in a ‘permanent state of contest’.

Many of the same security challenges will feature in 2025, but new regional security initiatives and new governments could change how they are addressed.

In 2025, we can expect national elections in Australia, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The Tongan and Vanuatu elections will follow political instability of late last year.

Tonga’s new prime minister, Aisake Eke, was voted in by parliament on Christmas Eve, following Siaosi Sovaleni’s resignation in the face of a looming motion of no confidence earlier in December. Eke will have less than a year to deliver before Tonga returns to the polls.

Vanuatu will hold snap national elections on 16 January after the president dissolved parliament in mid-November as a result of ongoing instability. Like most elections, people primarily will vote based on domestic issues, particularly as the country faces a lengthy rebuild of Port Vila following the December earthquake. But the election could have greater implications for regional security than usual.

Over the past few years, Australia has pursued a security agreement with Vanuatu. However, the proposed agreement has contributed to political instability and leadership change. While new leadership may present an opportunity to progress the agreement, continuing political instability may obstruct security development.

Even if the agreement remains stalled, the Australian government will have its hands full delivering on the promises it’s made across the region.

Just before Christmas, Australia made a flurry of announcements with Pacific partners—including Nauru, PNG and Solomon Islands—demonstrating its commitment to security in the region. Those agreements are in addition to commitments through Pacific owned and led regional security initiatives financed by Australia, such as the Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) and Pacific Response Group.

The ‘permanent contest’ with China has shifted Australia’s approach to Pacific policy. In making agreements, Canberra has started adding conditions that support government’s aim of being the region’s primary security partner.

Agreements with Nauru and PNG, as well as the Tuvalu–Australia Falepili Union, have shown that Australia wants to ensure that its efforts, investments and infrastructure are adequately secured. In 2025 and beyond, Australia should ensure these agreements are transparent—for example, by detailing the strings attached to the deal to create a PNG team for Australia’s National Rugby League. This would set Australia apart from others, such as China, which still hasn’t made public any details of its 2022 security agreement with Solomon Islands.

Unfortunately, natural disasters and environmental challenges are almost certain in 2025. Humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations will be necessary as we approach the peak of the 2024–25 high-risk weather season.

The Pacific Response Group should provide a platform for regional military coordination on disaster response, but there’s still plenty of work to be done to show how it will interact with civilian or regional relief mechanisms, such as the PPI.

Competition with China is likely to continue to creep into this space, and those wary of China’s influence will be watching the use of aid in the battle for hearts and minds.

New Caledonia will also remain on the radar of many, with little progress being made on political negotiations. Political instability in Noumea and Paris is affecting efforts to recover from the 2024 riots. Pacific nations are ready to support New Caledonia and, if progress isn’t made before the Pacific Islands Forum this year, additional missions to the French overseas territory could occur.

Many eyes will be on the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, to be hosted by Solomon Islands in September. Positive security outcomes of last year’s meeting, including endorsement of the PPI, were overshadowed by a controversial change in recognition of Taiwan in an official statement. China is likely to further push Pacific nations to cut ties with Taiwan and undermine its legitimacy in regional forums, and Honiara might be more lenient towards Chinese pressure.

Pacific countries will have to ensure their voices are heard when navigating these tensions. To this end, Fiji and Vanuatu released their first foreign policy white papers last year, and in April PNG will table its first since 1981.

In September, PNG will celebrate its 50th anniversary of independence, so the month will be busy for Pacific leaders. Development partners will seek to capitalise on the occasion, making large announcements in partnership with PNG.

Very few of the events in 2024 could have been accurately predicted, including leadership changes, unrest and disasters. This year will be no exception, and the region and its partners must be ready, as always, to adapt.

The 16th Madeleine Award: truths and totems in tumultuous times

Amid tumultuous times, it’s the annual moment to lift the curtain, up the lights and open the envelopes for the 16th Madeleine Award for symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.

The Madeleine is a silly-season special, served at year’s start with a soupcon of seriousness, seeking sense in sayings, signs and symbols.

The award is inspired by the late Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations (1993 to 1997) and US secretary of state (1997 to 2001), who sent diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches. Now displayed at America’s diplomacy museum, those lapel pins expressed ‘hopes, determination, impatience, warnings or warm feelings’.

For Albright, it wasn’t ‘read my lips’ but ‘read my pins’. Her favourite mistake was taunting Vladimir Putin over Russia’s military brutality by wearing three monkey brooches, representing Putin’s stance of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. Putin went ape. Sometimes the message is just too sharp, Albright reflected, judging ‘I’d gone too far’.

With no monkeying about, we turn to the minor Madeleines. The first is the OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder. This slip-up star is almost always won by a politician. The prize’s nickname is ‘The Boris’, in honour of Boris Johnson who provides the OOPS! axiom: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

The Boris winner is South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, for imposing martial law. Yoon’s power grab—the first use of martial law in 44 years—was a gamble that crashed in six hours. The president declared emergency rule at 10:30 pm on 3 December, only to lift it at 4:30 am on 4 December after the members of the National Assembly rushed to vote to overturn the decree. By 14 December, the assembly had impeached the president, and he faces the possibility of a separate charge of treason. For conjuring up a disaster that destroyed his leadership, Yoon becomes a worthy member of the Order of the OOPS!

Next is the ‘Diana prize’, marking ‘the utility and force of photographs’. The trophy is named for Diana, princess of Wales, a noblewoman who understood that you’re nix without pix: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts,’ former British prime minister Tony Blair wrote.

The Diana goes to the photo of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being welcomed to Papua New Guinea with headdress and garb. The picture by the ABC’s Melissa Clarke is a winner, not least, because it overturns the don’t-look-silly-rule of the political minder class: never let your boss wear a strange hat or unusual costume. Context beats the minder rule. Albanese was on his way to walk the Kokoda Track with PNG’s prime minister. The image shows a cheerful leader paying homage to PNG as well as to the military legend of Kokoda.

While giving the Diana to Albo in PNG headdress, the judges point to one of the greatest ever news pix, the July photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump with his raised fist and an American flag in the background, after he’d been wounded in an assassination attempt. The photo by Associated Press photojournalist Evan Vucci is in the same class as that of the US Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II. Journalists use the word ‘iconic’ too often, but Vucci’s image reaches that rare grade. The only defences for not gonging Vucci’s magnificent work is that the Diana tends toward light, not shade, and Trump was last year’s Diana winner, for his scowling police mugshot after being indicted on racketeering charges.

Now to the George Orwell prize for double think. In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith labours in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past so history meets the shifting needs of the Party. In that spirit, the Orwell goes to Russia for creating a modern Ministry in RuWiki, to counter Wikipedia. In the RuWiki rendering of Vladimir Putin’s truth, Russian atrocities in Ukraine are merely ‘Western disinformation’.

As Foreign Policy commented: ‘RuWiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened.’ RuWiki lives the slogans Orwell describes carved into the concrete facade of the Ministry of Truth: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’

We stay in Russia for the Madeleine Award itself. Finding hope in Putin’s Russia is the mark of an award that arcs towards optimism, channelling a great Albright line: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’

In that spirit, the 16th Madeleine goes to an inspiring Russian politician, Alexei Navalny, killed in jail by the regime on 16 February 2024, at the age of 47. A fine obituary judgement of the opposition leader is that Navalny didn’t just defy Putin, he showed up his depravity, exposing the fear and greed at the heart of Russia’s regime.

Putin’s first attempt to murder Navalny was in 2020, when the lawyer was poisoned by nerve agent. Navalny survived and recovered in Germany. Then, he bravely returned to Russia, knowing exactly what he would face—a rigged trial and exile to the modern gulags. At the close of his trial, Navalny blasted the court with a favourite movie line: ‘Tell me, where does power lie? I believe that power lies in the truth.’

Alexei Navalny was a proud Russian nationalist who used his own life to symbolise what Russia should be. More than gesture, this was sacrifice expressed as greatness.