John Curtin’s legacy

On this day 27 December in 1941, John Curtin famously declared that in the war with Imperial Japan, Australia would look to the United States, ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. In our national mythology, this is seen as Australia acting independently, instead of following Britain’s lead. However, Curtin had little choice but to appeal desperately for US military assistance, as Australia could not defend itself, and could not rely upon Britain, which was fighting for its life against Nazi Germany.

Curtin’s plea to the US was also calculated. He knew that Australia would be a crucial base for future US operations against Imperial Japan. He wanted Australia to have a say in the conduct of these operations.  First, however, Australia would have to be defended. Curtin played on the fact that it was in the interests of the US to defend Australia as its vital southern base in the war.

In 1944, after the danger had passed, Curtin tried to resuscitate the idea of ‘imperial defence’, whereby Britain, Australia, and the other self-governing dominions would better co–ordinate their defence strategies. As such, Curtin’s ‘look to America’ was not the foundation stone of the Australia-US alliance, as the mythmakers would have us believe. Those foundations were not laid until 1951, with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty.

There is another myth: namely, that the US came to Australia’s aid out of feelings of kinship. This is not true. The US had a thoroughly unsentimental view of Australia’s strategic utility. MacArthur said as much on 1 June 1942, in confidential remarks that were recorded for posterity. He said that the US had a vital interest in securing Australia as a base, and not defending it on the basis of who inhabited the continent. As an aside, had ‘Australia’ instead been three separate European nations, say of British, French, and Dutch origin, and not a friendly and unified continental-sized British dominion, MacArthur’s calculations would have been very different, especially if French Australia had been aligned with Vichy France. Who inhabited the continent, which was the strategic consequence of the British settlement of Australia, did matter after all.

There are uncomfortable truths about this period of Australia’s history. In the 1930s, Australia should have better prepared itself. As Leader of the Opposition between 1935-41, Curtin had come closest to articulating what needed to be done. However, he lost the federal elections of 1937 and 1940, and could not therefore give effect to Labor’s policy of greater defence self-reliance. Had Australia been ruthlessly clear-eyed and more self-confident in the 1930s, the national panic of 1941-42 could have been avoided. Had Australia rearmed in time, it could have deployed a powerful force in its sea-air approaches, which could have disrupted Imperial Japan’s attempts to project force through present-day East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Indonesia (in the latter case, in co–operation with Free Dutch forces). Had Australia ‘looked to America’ sooner, combined US-Australian planning for the defence of Australia could have been undertaken before the war.

Just as Australia was found wanting strategically, it was also unprepared at home. In December 1941, Australia was not yet on a full war footing, despite having been at war for over two years. Curtin argued that as Australia was now inside ‘the firing lines’, its way of life had to be revolutionised, through an ‘all-in’ effort. Production of war material would have to be increased dramatically. Drastic austerity would have to be enforced. He would often say ‘it’s fight and work…or perish’.

Curtin was critical of the ‘lackadaisical Australian mind’. By this, he did not call into question the patriotism of Australians, or their sense of duty. He called these ‘ever present qualities’. What concerned him were the particulars of the task—the specifics that would be involved in mobilising ‘dormant talents’ and ‘untapped resources’, something that would require leadership and direction from the government, and service and sacrifice from the people.

The Curtin of 1941 was a hard patriot. He was stern, puritanical, and critical of half-hearted effort. In his youth, he had been a radical socialist, convinced that capitalism would inevitably collapse on the road to socialism, when there would be no nations, no militarism, and no war. In the 1920s, he began to better appreciate that the parliamentary path—and not socialist revolution—was the best hope for social improvement. While he was the editor of the Westralian Worker (1917-28), Curtin became a vocal Australian patriot, as he wrote about the ‘dignity of Australian nationhood’, and his pride in Australia’s history and its accomplishments.

He did not see any contradiction in Australia acting more independently, while still retaining its dominion status, and its ties with the ‘mother country’. Curtin would have been puzzled by the tendency today on the part of some to engage in self-denunciation of our settler-colonial origins and history. While he thought that Australia should ratify the 1931 Statute of Westminster so as to achieve legal independence from the UK parliament (this was done in October 1942, with retroactive effect as at 3 September 1939), it would not have crossed his mind to cut ties with Britain, the Empire, or the Crown.

Curtin had a largeness of mind and a strength of character that allowed him to grasp and act on the uncomfortable reality of circumstances that did not suit his preferred political agenda of social reform. From the mid-1930s, he recognised that the times would require him to champion a different cause, which was one that did not come naturally, either to him or his party—namely how best to defend Australia in a war in the Pacific, at a time when the prevailing orthodoxy was to rely on Britain, operating from its base in Singapore.

Curtin’s legacy puts the lie to today’s conventional wisdom that the Left should avoid engaging on matters of war because, so the argument goes, this plays to the strengths of the Right. Curtin would have seen this as an appalling abrogation of responsibility. He spoke of patriotism and of war, using the language of duty, service, and sacrifice. Were he alive today, the modern Left would criticise him for ‘beating the drums of war’. However, Curtin was of an older Left. Like Clement Attlee, he saw no contradiction between socialism and the patriotic love of country. George Orwell was also in this tradition, and in 1941 wrote the great essay that squared patriotism and socialism, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’.

Those who would seek to appropriate Curtin’s legacy in a performative display to demonstrate their credibility on defence issues cannot limit their appreciation to admiring only what he did as wartime leader, once the existential danger to Australia and its political independence was apparent. To do so would be to ignore the inconvenient truth of his legacy. To honour Curtin, we have widen the lens and examine the totality of his thought and policies, and then ask ourselves what a modern-day Curtin would make of our precarious strategic environment (said to be the worst in 80 years), and what he would do about it.

Here is an attempt to properly honour Curtin in this way. A modern-day Curtin would be vocal about the threat posed by China. He would argue for greater defence self-reliance, and for at least 3 per cent of GDP to be spent on defence. He would be concerned about the threat of long-range missile and air attack, offensive cyber strikes, raids in remote areas, attacks on undersea infrastructure and so on. He would insist on the development of effective military solutions to these and other, similar problems. While a champion of defence self-reliance, he would recognise that a new ‘look to America’ would be necessary. He would argue for ANZUS to be put on to an operational footing, with a standing headquarters (this time headed by an Australian), to command a combined Australia-US force. He would be a supporter of AUKUS, but would be focused on realising rapid benefits, arguing that any capability pay-offs in the 2030s and beyond would not matter much if we lose a war in the meantime. He would give priority to home defence, mobilisation planning, and boosting local defence production. He would support universal national service for the defence of Australia.

On Curtin’s gravestone is carved the following:

‘His country was his pride/His brother man his cause’.

This epitaph captures his patriotism and his socialism. Curtin recognised that being prepared to fight a war is the price that has to be paid for preserving freedom, democracy, and sovereignty, and protecting the nation, which is the best vehicle that exists for social improvement. We do not need the Curtin myths. The hard truths of his legacy serve us better.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Submarine agency chief: Australia’s SSNs will be bigger, better, faster’

Originally published on 28 May 2024.

The nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines to be built under the AUKUS agreement are on track to be the world’s most advanced fighting machines, says Australian Submarine Agency Director-General Jonathan Mead.

‘They’ll have greater firepower, a more powerful reactor, more capability and they’ll be able to do more bespoke operations, including intelligence gathering, surveillance, strike warfare, special forces missions and dispatching uncrewed vessels, than our current in-service submarines,’ Vice Admiral Mead says in an interview.

With a displacement of more than 10,000 tonnes, the SSN-AUKUS class will be larger than current US Virginia-class attack submarine of just over 7000 tonnes. Australia’s six conventionally powered Collins-class submarines are each about 3300 tonnes.

The SSN-AUKUS submarines to be built for Australia and Britain, with help from the United States, will be a ‘bigger, better, faster and bolder’ evolution of Britain’s Astute-class submarines, Mead says. The design will have the advantage of more US technology and greater commonality with US boats.

Australian steel will be used to build Australia’s SSN-AUKUS submarines, subject to a comprehensive qualification process expected to be completed in the first half of 2025.

The steel is also being qualified to both the British and US standards. Having Australian industry involved will deepen and bring resilience to the three nations’ supply chains, with greater mass, confidence and scale, Mead says.

In April, major US warship builder Newport News Shipbuilding lodged an initial purchase order for processed Australian steel from Bisalloy Steel’s Port Kembla plant for testing and training.

The government has committed to having eight nuclear submarines, Mead says, ‘and we’re on track’.

‘We’re planning on three Virginias and five SSN-AUKUS. That takes the program through to 2054.’

The SSN-AUKUS submarines built by Australia and Britain will be identical, incorporating technology from all three nations, including cutting-edge US technologies.

Those for the Royal Australian Navy will all be built at Osborne in South Australia. ‘Osborne will be the fourth nuclear-powered submarine shipyard among the three countries and one of the world’s most advanced technology hubs,’ Mead says.

The SSNs will all have an advanced version of the AN/BYG-1 combat system, used in the Collins class and in US submarines, and the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo, an advanced version of which has been developed by the United States and Australia.

Mead says each Virginia has a crew of about 133 and the likely size of the SSN-AUKUS crew is being calculated as design work progresses.

The massive scale of the program and the nuclear element has understandably attracted strong attention, including criticism and questions about how skilled workforces will be found to build and crew the boats. Commentary has included suggestions that AUKUS is ‘dead in the water’.

Mead has no doubt that the project can be completed as planned. ‘Every day we ask ourselves the same question: ”Are we on track?” The answer is “yes.”’

For the program to succeed, it must be a national endeavour involving the Commonwealth, states and territories, industry, academia and the Australian people, Mead says. ‘To develop that social licence, we must provide confidence that we are going to deliver this capability safely and securely and not harm the environment.’

To build a nuclear mindset there must be an unwavering commitment to upholding the highest standards of safety, security, stewardship and safeguards, with all decisions underpinned by strong technical evidence. ‘It’s essential that everything we do is underpinned by strong technical and engineering evidence,’ he says. The reactor will be delivered as a sealed and welded unit that won’t be opened for the life of the submarine.

Mead acknowledges that recruiting is the big challenge.

He says comprehensive training of crews has begun, with Australian officers and enlisted sailors already passing nuclear training courses. ‘Australian officers have also topped courses in both the US and UK, showing that our people are up for the task that lies ahead.’

It’s intended that about 100 Australian officers and sailors will be in US training programs this year and they’ll go on to serve on US submarines as part of their crews. Other Australians will train in Britain and serve in Royal Navy boats.

Mead’s agency now has 597 staff, including engineers, project managers, lawyers, international relations specialists and policy makers. That is likely to rise to about 1000.

Given that Australia is the first non-nuclear nation acquiring nuclear-powered warships, the agency is working flat out to ensure rigorous regulations and safeguards are in place, along with the international agreements to back them.

Mead says Australia’s Optimal Pathway for acquisition of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) was designed to ensure that Australia would meet the exhaustive requirements to own and operate such vessels as soon as possible.

According to the Optimal Pathway, the first stage will see the first of several US and British submarines operating from the base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia as Submarine Rotational Force–West (SRF-West) from 2027.

In 2032, Australia will receive the first of three Virginia-class submarines from the US. One of the Australian officers now in US submarines is likely to be its commanding officer after extensive service on a US boat. The first two of those boats will be Block 4 Virginias, each with about 10 years’ US service, and they’ll be delivered after two years of deep maintenance and with 23 years of operational life left in them, Mead says, adding that the third US boat will be a brand new Block 6 Virginia. The US Navy has not yet put the Block 6 design into production.

The plan is to have the first SSN-AUKUS completed in Australia by early 2040s. Australia has an option to ask for two more Virginias if the SSN-AUKUS effort is delayed.

Mead says that how long the Collins are kept operational will be a decision for the government of the day as the SSNs arrive. The current plan is to begin big overhauls, called life-of-type extensions, for the Collins class in 2026.

He acknowledges that having the Virginias, SSN-AUKUS and Collin classes all operational could bring supply chain and training issues, but he believes those challenges can be handled. Having combat systems and torpedoes that are common to all these submarines will help.

Australians are on the design and design review teams for SSN-AUKUS. ‘We are embedding more technical and engineering people into the British program.’

Large numbers of Australian workers will soon be embedded in the British submarine construction site run by BAE Systems at Barrow, UK. ‘Many will come from the Australian Submarine Corporation, where they’ve been working on Collins. They’ll deepen their expertise, very specifically on how to build a nuclear-powered submarine,’ Mead says.

BAE will bring the intellectual property to the partnership with ASC to develop Osborne into a shipyard for nuclear-powered submarines.

It’s often suggested in Australia that, because the US has fewer submarines than it believes it needs, it will refuse to hand any over to Australia if its own situation worsens.

Senior American officials have expressed strong alternative views on why the project’s success is very important to the US and why it is in their own interests to make it work.

The US publication Defense News quoted the commander of US submarine forces, Vice-Admiral Rob Gaucher, telling a conference in April that co-operation with Australia would help the US submarine fleet in important ways. These included increasing the number of allied boats working together on operations. Having Australian personnel gaining experience on US boats would help ease a recruiting shortfall in the US Navy that flowed from the Covid-19 epidemic, and having access to the Australian base at HMAS Stirling in WA would extend the US Navy’s reach and maintenance options.

Gaucher said that, because the Australian SSNs would operate in co-ordination with American boats, ‘we get more submarines far forward. We get a port that gives us access’ to the Indo-Pacific region.

He said that by the end of this year the US Navy would graduate about 50 Australians as nuclear-trained operators and another 50 submarine combat operators. They would train on US submarines for the rest of this decade, increasing the number of people qualified to stand watch on American boats.

‘We get the opportunity to leverage an ally who can help us with manning and operating. We get surge capacity because now I have another area [where] I can do maintenance,’ Gaucher said.

Dan Packer, a former navy captain who is now the US director of naval submarine forces for AUKUS, told Defense News that Australia had eight officers in the inaugural training cohort that began in 2023. Three of those eight will be moved into an accelerated training pipeline, and one will eventually be the first Australian Virginia-class commanding officer.

Packer said the US was helping Australia build its submarine force from about 800 personnel to 3000. This year the US would bring 17 Australian officers, 37 nuclear enlisted and 50 non-nuclear enlisted into its training program. ‘And we’re going to up that number every year.’

These personnel would be fully integrated into US attack submarine crews until Australia could stand up its own training pipeline.

At some point, he said, the US Navy would have 440 Australians on 25 attack submarines, with each fully integrated crew including two or three Australian officers, seven nuclear enlisted and nine non-nuclear enlisted sailors. ‘They will do everything that we do’.

Mead says Australian navy personnel have been aboard the US submarine tender USS Emory S. Land for several months learning to maintain and sustain nuclear-powered submarines, and a US Virginia-class boat will visit HMAS Stirling for maintenance this year. Parts will come from an evolving Australian supply chain.

That visit will not include reactor work, ‘but ultimately, we will undertake work on systems that support the sealed power unit, within the compartment that houses it on the submarine,’ Mead says.

He says providing the industrial base to build and sustain the submarines, and crewing them, will involve about 20,000 jobs. A lot of work is being done with universities, technical schools and industry to prepare this formidable workforce.

Mead has long been a student of international relations and says the decision to equip Australia with SSNs was based on recognition that the Indo-Pacific is becoming a more dangerous place and ‘nuclear submarines provide a very effective deterrent’.

He rejects the argument that technology will soon make the oceans too transparent for crewed submarines to operate safely. ‘Our allies and partners and other countries in the region do not see it that way, and neither do we. We’ve done our analysis, and we see that crewed, nuclear-powered submarines will be the leading war-fighting capability for the next 50 to 100 years.’

He’s at pains to stress that the submarines will always be under full Australian sovereign control.

‘They will always be under the Australian government’s direction, operated by the RAN, and under the command of an Australian naval officer.’

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Celebrating 10 years of ASPI’s Women in Defence and Security Network’

Originally published on 4 November 2024.

When Hayley Channer and Nicole Seils attended a defence-related event in Canberra in 2014, they realised they were two of only a handful of women in the room. Stranger still, they had not known each other before that evening.

That meeting between an ASPI analyst and the then head of government relations at Lockheed Martin Australia sparked the idea for ASPI’s Women in Defence and Security Network. Later supported by another ASPI analyst, Natalie Sambhi, their aim was to create a forum for women across defence, national security, government, industry and civil society to connect, build their networks, and mentor and support each other on the difficult path towards changing the status quo.

A decade on, ASPI last month hosted a gala dinner for 150 guests to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the WDSN. Much of the discussion and sage advice shared during the evening reflected on key points from Elizabeth Cosson’s inaugural speech when WDSN was launched: the value of good leadership; authenticity; the willingness to listen; the importance of giving yourself the time and space to think and reflect; and the courage to take a chance.

The women leaders who spoke at the dinner—Catherine Burn from ASIS, Michelle Chan from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Hayley Channer from the United States Studies Centre, Stephanie Copus Campbell Australia’s Ambassador for Gender Equality, and Jessica Hunter from the Australian Signals Directorate—shared hard-earned insights with the audience. Each has paved a way for women in their fields.

WDSN has been fulfilling the mission that the three founders set for it—spotlighting women’s impact in national security, creating opportunities for women and men to gather and talk about their journeys and achievements, and the challenges of navigating this traditionally male-dominated field.

The network has hosted networking and speed mentoring events, panel discussions, roundtables, podcasts and professional development workshops. These have traversed themes of gender, peace and security, women in the Australian Defence Force and defence industry, counterterrorism and intelligence, human rights and international law. They have engaged women and girls from students and early-to-mid-career professionals to senior leaders, as well as male champions and allies.

Both the 2016 Defence White Paper and DFAT’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Strategy recognised that gender equality and increasing female participation in defence and leadership roles were vital to Australia’s defence capability, national security, foreign policy, diplomacy and development programs. Studies have proven that the private sector also benefits enormously from women’s participation.

Since its creation, the WDSN has grown to more than 3500 subscribers—and it is still growing. The gala was a chance to reflect on the progress, while acknowledging the work to be done to ensure that inequalities and challenges arising from the intersection of gender with other aspects of people’s identities continue to be addressed so that all women and people of diverse backgrounds can advance their careers.

A theme that stood out was the tendency for women not to pursue opportunities because they felt they were not ready, reflecting a lack of confidence that statistics show is less common in men. Panellists spoke about the need to raise awareness of unconscious biases in hiring managers, employers and colleagues. With retention of women and people of diverse backgrounds an ongoing challenge, it is vital to cultivate work environments that are attractive and inclusive to ensure everyone’s continued and meaningful participation.

The panellists discussed the ways that girls were socialised from a young age to be more risk-averse than boys. Unlearning these lessons can be a challenging experience that also highlights the importance of taking the time to explore your passions.

They advocated a ‘curious not furious’ mindset—one panellist citing the hit show Ted Lasso—to understand the viewpoint and behaviour of others, and to understand our own passions, ambitions and frustrations. That said, rage and frustration at obstacles can be a ‘fuel that never runs out’, provided it is channelled into positive action. ‘Watering your garden with humour’ was one way to offset frustrations and serve as a pressure valve.

We find inspiration in all sorts of places, including TV shows and movies about law enforcement and intelligence. As the audience heard, the only difference between a dream and a goal is having a plan.

The panellists and audience members shared their faith in the importance of tending to yourself. While empathy for others is indispensable, you still need to ‘put the oxygen mask on yourself first’.

The dinner was a celebration of a decade’s effort to create a space to share, connect and support one another. The difference this time, compared to 10 years ago, was that nobody was alone. From three came 150.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Exclusive: Inside Beijing’s app collecting information from Belt and Road companies’

Originally published on 27 September 2024.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs operates a secure digital platform that connects it directly with Chinese companies operating abroad, requiring participating companies to submit regular reports about their activities and local security conditions to the government, internal documents reveal.

The documents obtained and verified by ASPI’s China Investigations and Analysis team show how the platform, called Safe Silk Road (平安丝路), collects information from companies participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative. The BRI has facilitated Chinese infrastructure projects and other investment in more than 100 countries, particularly developing regions. The Safe Silk Road platform was initially launched in 2017 and is now used by at least dozens of Chinese companies across several continents.

By tapping into the extensive network of Chinese companies engaged in projects around the world, the platform demonstrates how Beijing is finding new ways of improving its global information and intelligence collection to better assess risks, and ultimately protect its interests and its citizens, even in the most remote corners of the world. The Safe Silk Road platform is one more building block in the growing global infrastructure that seeks to place the Chinese government at the center of the Chinese experience abroad, and that replicates some of the structures of information collection and surveillance that have now become ubiquitous within China.

The MFA’s External Security Affairs Department (涉外安全事务司), which operates the Safe Silk Road, has said the platform is a direct response to the difficulty of obtaining information relevant to Chinese companies abroad. The information the app collects feeds into the department’s assessments. The platform is also part of a trend across Chinese government ministries of creating apps to facilitate some of the work they were already doing.

ASPI is the first organisation to report on the Safe Silk Road platform. It is mentioned on some regional Chinese government websites but has not been covered by Chinese state media. The platform operates through a website and an associated mobile app that can only be accessed with registered accounts.

The platform is not available for download in app stores. The documents state that the platform is only intended for companies’ internal use, and that users are strictly prohibited from circulating information about it online. Companies can apply for an account through the MFA’s External Security Affairs Department or their local consulate and, once approved, designate an official contact person within the company, called a ‘company liaison officer’ (公司联络员), who is authorized to submit reports and use the app’s full functionality. The MFA provides companies with a QR code to download the app and requires companies to use the platform’s bespoke VPN with the app and desktop version.

 

 

Companies are asked to submit quarterly reports through the app. Those reports include basic information such as the name, national ID number and contact information of the owner, the region in which the company operates, its sector or industry, the amount of investment in US dollars, the number of Chinese and local employees, and whether it has registered with a local Chinese embassy or consulate, according to internal company documents viewed by ASPI analysts.

The app has a feature called ‘one-click report’ for ‘sudden incidents’ (突发事件) that allows users to report local security-related incidents directly to the MFA, according to the documents and other materials. The reporting feature includes the following categories: war/unrest, terrorist attack, conflict between Chinese and foreign workers, protest, kidnapping, gun shooting, production safety accident, contagion/epidemic, flood, earthquake, fire, tsunami, and other. The user can then provide more information including date, location and other details about the incident.

The reporting form also asks the company to provide information about its ‘overseas rights protection object’ (海外权益保护对象) and ‘police resources database object’ (警务资源库对象). An ‘overseas rights protection object’ may refer to patents, trademarks, and copyrights held by the company; the Chinese government has made protecting the intellectual property of Chinese companies a key focus in recent years. ‘Police resources database object’ is a vague term that may refer to security contractors, Chinese overseas police activity, or physical assets or company personnel that need protecting.

Users can subscribe to real-time security updates for their region and register to attend online safety training classes. There is even a video-conference feature within the app that allows embassy officials to call the app user directly. It is common for foreign ministries to create digital services that provide information and security alerts for their citizens abroad—such as Australia’s ‘Smartraveller’, the US Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), and China’s own ‘China Consul’ (中国领事).

The Safe Silk Road platform, however, is different. It is not public-facing, it is tailored specifically for BRI companies and, most importantly, it asks for detailed information from those companies about their own activities and local conditions, rather than just offering helpful information. For some companies, participation may even be compulsory.

ASPI’s analysis of the Safe Silk Road platform underscores Beijing’s determination to safeguard its global infrastructure and investment power play under the BRI. As China’s investment in developing regions has grown, so has Beijing’s emphasis on protecting its citizens, companies, and assets abroad.

As of December 2023, about 150 countries had joined the BRI. According to the official Belt and Road Portal, China has 346,000 workers dispatched overseas. BRI-affiliated companies often run projects in regions with underdeveloped infrastructure, high poverty, poor governance, lack of quality medical care, domestic political instability, violent crime, and terrorist attacks. Private security contracting companies are increasingly offering their services to Chinese companies abroad. The number of Chinese private security contractors has expanded dramatically in recent years as BRI companies have faced growing security challenges.

Several events over the past few years, including the pandemic and a string of attacks in Pakistan in 2021 targeting Chinese nationals supporting BRI projects, have underscored to Beijing the need for better security measures. At the third Belt and Road symposium in 2021, Xi Jinping said China needed ‘an all-weather early warning and comprehensive assessment service platform for overseas project risks’. The External Security Affairs Department said the same year that ‘the difficulty of obtaining security information is one of the major problems faced by companies who “go out”’, referring to Chinese companies that invest overseas. To address this concern, the department ‘launched the Safe Silk Road website and the related mobile app to gather information about security risks in Belt and Road countries to directly serve company personnel engaged in projects overseas’. The department said that in 2021 the app was used to disseminate 13,000 pieces of information, including more than 2,800 early warnings.

More broadly, the platform is illustrative as a digital tool to help Beijing protect its interests abroad. The External Security Affairs Department was established in 2004 in response to a perceived increase in kidnappings and terrorist attacks targeting Chinese nationals abroad, but its role in China’s security policy has expanded since then.

The department’s leading role in ‘protecting China’s interests abroad’ (中国海外利益保护) meets an objective increasingly found in official Chinese Communist Party documents and Chinese law. This objective appears in China’s National Security Strategy 2021–2025, the new Foreign Relations Law 2023, and new regulations on consular protection and assistance passed in 2023. The party’s ability and readiness to protect China’s interests abroad is considered one of the historic achievements of the party, according to a resolution it passed in 2021.

But the exact scope of China’s interests abroad is still a matter of debate in the public commentary among Chinese national security and foreign policy academics and analysts. Are China’s interests just the physical security of Chinese nationals and commercial or strategic assets in foreign countries? Or do they also include ‘intangible interests’ (无形利益), such as protecting China’s national image and reputation, and anything else that should be within China’s national interest as a major global power? How the Chinese government currently defines China’s interests abroad is probably somewhere in the middle, and may broaden.

China has a widely recognised deficiency: gaps in its overseas intelligence collection capabilities. Safe Silk Road is part of the toolbox that the External Security Affairs Department uses to extend the range and effectiveness of Beijing’s information-gathering and to better understand the situation on the ground everywhere that China has interests.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘The curiously cozy relationship between Taiwan and Japan’

Originally published on 18 June 2024.

Because Taiwan lacks formal diplomatic ties with most countries, it works hard at developing cultural and social links with them.

But not with Japan. Far more than is widely understood in other countries, Taiwan and Japan have an unusually close cultural and social relationship that doesn’t need government promotion. Their relationship might even be called cozy.

This must be an influence in international policy. Japan has its own national-security reasons for backing Taiwan’s preservation from Chinese conquest, but the mutual fondness between the two countries can only reinforce Tokyo’s resolve.

Most surprisingly, the close Taiwan-Japan relationship is based largely on nostalgia for colonialism. Many Taiwanese even feel reverence for their former Japanese colonial masters, who modernised the island during an occupation that lasted from 1895 to 1945.

More than anything, that colonial nostalgia is the doing of the Kuomintang, the nationalist party that lost China’s civil war to the Communists and came to the island in 1949. Japanese rule had been tough, but the Kuomintang’s was brutal.

Comfort, or even fascination, with a history of Japanese colonialism is a strong cultural factor that sets Taiwan apart from China and South Korea, where occupation by Japan is remembered with revulsion. Last year, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Japan found in a survey that 77 percent of Japanese said they felt close to Taiwan and 73 percent believed that Taiwan and Japan had good relations. A year earlier, Tokyo’s representative office in Taiwan had conducted a similar survey, finding that Taiwanese had much the same feelings towards Japan.

Japan suddenly became aware of the depth of Taiwan’s affection for it after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, when an outpouring of Taiwanese donations exceeding 20 billion yen (US$230 million at the time) outdid contributions from every other country. It was a watershed moment for Japan.

Since then, Japan has repaid this friendship. For example, after China suspended imports of Taiwanese pineapples in 2021 in an apparent attempt to squeeze the island’s economy, Japan stepped in to buy loads of the fruit.

When a powerful earthquake hit the Taiwanese city Hualien in April this year, Japanese local governments and private citizens ran fund-raising campaigns. Hualien subsequently suffered from a drop in tourism, so diplomats in Japan’s de facto embassy in Taiwan encouraged Japanese expatriates on the island to visit the city.

Taiwanese visitors were the biggest spenders in Japan last year, even edging out Chinese ones. Taiwan is an unusually popular travel destination for Japanese. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic distorted Japanese travel patterns, 11 percent of overseas trips by Japanese were to Taiwan, compared with 9 percent to Thailand, which is far more famous elsewhere for holidays.

Although Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese, they are culturally very different to the people of China. Much of that difference comes from Japanese colonial influence that permeates Taiwanese society. In Taiwan, the local Chinese dialect includes Japanese words, tatami mats are found in many homes, and big dollops of wasabi are routinely served with seafood. As for more modern influences, many young Taiwanese are keen to learn Japanese so they can read original editions of manga. They copy Japanese fashion, too.

The closeness between Taiwan and Japan isn’t just cultural and social. Mutual trade is booming. Japan is Taiwan’s third-largest trading partner and Taiwan is Japan’s fourth-largest. Japan has also voiced support for Taiwan’s participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed multilateral free trade pact

Amid concerns that concentration of advanced integrated-circuit manufacturing in Taiwan creates a global vulnerability, Taiwan’s star chipmaker, TSMC, has been lured to set up shop in Japan, the United States and Germany. In February it said it would add a second chip factory in Japan and increase investments there to more than US$20 billion. The word in Taipei is that TSMC’s Japanese ventures are operating more smoothly than those it has in the United States, thanks to cultural similarity.

In 2021, Taiwan worried that its stock of Covid-19 vaccines was running low, because, the government said, China had interfered with the island’s supplies. Japan responded with a donation larger than any other country’s.

Political connections are getting closer, too, even though they are more sensitive than culture and trade, because of China’s hostility. Also, old-guard members of the Kuomintang, remembering Japanese atrocities in China during and before World War II, are not fond of Japan. But the party has not held the presidency since 2016.

Parliamentary diplomacy serves as a Taiwanese channel for discussing security issues with another country. It’s vibrant with Japan. In 2021, Taiwan, Japan and the United States launched a trilateral strategic forum involving lawmakers from all three nations. That year, Taiwan and Japan also launched what they call 2+2 talks, in which two ruling party lawmakers from each side with expertise in defence and foreign affairs would meet twice a year.

The message from all this is simple: to each other, Japan and Taiwan are much more than near neighbours.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘The long arc of Australian defence strategy’

Originally published on 11 May 2024.

Kim Beazley was appointed as Minister for Defence on 13 December 1984. He oversaw a revolution in Australian defence, as profoundly important in shaping the nation as were the economic reforms of the time. His enduring legacy is the idea of self-reliance in the defence of Australia. The 1987 Defence White Paper that Beazley delivered, taken together with the 1986 Review that he commissioned (prepared by Paul Dibb), stand—like Newton’s Principia—as the foundational model for defending Australia.

Beazley acknowledges humbly that he benefited from the work of others, including Dibb, and academics such as Tom Millar, Hedley Bull, Bob O’Neill, Coral Bell, Des Ball, and Ross Babbage. This credit is well due. However, only an actively engaged minister, intellectually as well as politically committed to the task, could have brought forth such a revolution at the time in thought and practice.

Australian defence strategy during the 1950s and 1960s had been framed around forward defence. At the time, Australia was a strategic backwater, where no questions of geopolitical significance were going to be settled militarily, or otherwise. The establishment of the joint facilities at North West Cape, Nurrungar, and Pine Gap, over the period 1963-69, did nothing to change this. Their profound implications for Australia’s defence, and its alliance with the United States, were not crystallised until the 1980s. Again, Beazley played the pivotal role, something to be examined at another time.

Australia received a number of strategic shocks in the late 1960s. First, the United Kingdom announced in July 1967 that it was withdrawing from ‘East of Suez’. Then, more significantly, Richard Nixon announced in July 1969 what became known as the ‘Guam Doctrine’. In Asia, allies of the United States would be expected to take up the principal burden of defending themselves, with minimal US support, unless they were threatened by nuclear-armed adversaries, and where the United States had applicable alliance commitments or interests which would warrant direct combat involvement.

Policy thinking within the Department of Defence had already started to shift in the direction of self-reliant defence. (Stephan Fruehling’s research on this quiet shift is the benchmark.) However, it was the Guam Doctrine and the commencement under Nixon of the long US withdrawal from Vietnam that tolled the bell for forward defence. The Fraser Government announced self-reliant defence as policy in the 1976 Defence White Paper, without however changing military strategy, or force structure priorities.

This is the situation that Beazley inherited in 1984. In the face of the Department of Defence and the three services—the army, navy and air force—not being able to agree on what the ‘defence of Australia’ actually meant in terms of military strategy, force structure, and funding, Beazley commissioned Dibb in February 1985 to examine Australia’s defence capabilities. Dibb was able to draw upon the groundbreaking work of the Strategic Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University—one of the most consequential contributions to policy by the Australian academy.

Based on Dibb’s 1986 Review, the 1987 White Paper established the self-reliant defence of Australia as the organising principle of our defence strategy. Given the prevailing strategic environment, it concluded that the ability to deal with ‘low level’ and ‘escalated low level’ threats, which could be mounted with little warning, would drive decisions on force structure.

The 1987 White Paper did not exclude the possibility of Australia’s having in future to contend with the possibility of more substantial conflict. Australia could prepare for such a contingency by means of ‘strategic warning time’. It could use time effectively to expand the force to meet a growing threat. It was judged that the Soviet Union would not likely mount a conventional attack on Australia (but would target Australia during a strategic nuclear exchange), and that regional powers would require at least a decade to develop the capabilities which would be needed to mount a substantial attack. During that time, Australia would be able to expand its force in anticipation.

Self-reliant defence did not mean armed neutrality or isolationism. The alliance with the United States retained its salience in Australian grand strategy, but the 1987 White Paper declared that Australia would not seek, or expect, unrealistic—and therefore non-credible—levels of commitment to the defence of Australia by US combat forces, save for the protection afforded by US nuclear weapons through extended deterrence. Further, Australia would contribute to US security, and global stability, by way of hosting the joint facilities. Self-reliant defence and the Australia-US alliance cohered in this model.

The 1987 White Paper expounded the ‘law’ of defence in depth, which meant, crucially, denial of access by an adversary through the sea-air approaches to Australia. This ‘law’ functioned as the overriding discipline on the development of the force. This approach turned into a strength the vast expanse of northern Australia, the extensive sea-air surrounds of the continent, and the archipelagic arc that extends from Sumatra to Fiji, a strategic barrier through which any adversary would have to project force against Australia, creating defensively advantageous choke points and operating areas.

Two decades later, the 2009 Defence White Paper sought to apply and update this model in light of China’s strategic and military rise. From around 2006, worrying disturbances had begun to be discerned in Australia’s strategic environment, of the kind that would warrant consideration of force expansion. At the same time, the United States, concerned about China’s growing military heft, was formulating military strategies in response, such as Air Sea Battle.

The 2009 White Paper was a systematic attempt by the Rudd Government to tackle the following strategic problem: the warning clock had started to tick; Australia might in future face the prospect of being in armed conflict with a major power; consequentially, a larger force would need to be built over time as a hedge. The maritime-focused ‘Force 2030’ was the result (note the choice of year). Force 2030 was to be the initial base upon which force expansion could further occur, as judged necessary over the 2010s and beyond.

Careful and deliberate consideration was given to the military strategic implications of ‘more substantial conflict’, to use the 1987 formula. The 2009 White Paper directed that an enlarged ‘primary operating environment’ for the ADF be adopted, expanded further north and west, in order to more effectively seek to deny access through the sea-air approaches against a major power adversary. Force projection as far forward as maritime Southeast Asia was contemplated, an evolution of the 1987 model—not its repudiation.

The 2009 White Paper stands in the arc of Australian defence strategy as the road not taken, when we still had time. A further 15 years on, Australia today has to contend with the very prospect of ‘more substantial conflict’ that was contemplated theoretically in the 1987 White Paper, and considered specifically in the 2009 White Paper.

Over this time, the Indo-Pacific strategic order has been transformed. US primacy is being challenged. China has accelerated its military expansion (including of its strategic nuclear forces). It has become more assertive and coercive in its behaviour, while still calibrating its actions so as to avoid, for the foreseeable future, direct military confrontation. Its partnership with Russia is becoming effectively a military alliance, creating the possibility, should it come to a clash, of a two-front war. China appears to have decided to be ready to use force to achieve its strategic aims, perhaps from 2027.

An examination is required of the strength of China’s resolve to go to war, as well as the respective perceptions of China and the United States of each other’s resolve to wage war against the other. There is no more strategic question. For strategic planning purposes, we should assign a 10 percent probability to the likelihood of major war in our region in the 2020s. This could arise from coercion and assertiveness on China’s part, which could raise the risk of misadventure, and which could in turn lead to conflict. Or war might come more deliberately, a function of Beijing’s calculus of victory.

While Australia would retain always a sovereign right to determine its interests in the light of prevailing circumstances, it is likely that we would be a combatant in any such war. China would not be in doubt as to our geostrategic utility to the United States. Of course, there would be the issue of ANZUS treaty obligations, and the reality of the deep strategic integration that now exists between Australia and the United States, formed through the joint facilities, and more recent Australia-US ‘force posture’ initiatives.

Australia’s security dilemma is now acute. Force expansion should have occurred over the past 15 years, as warning time counted down. Instead, the force remains configured for what was termed 40 years ago ‘escalated low level conflict’—when defence spending as a fraction of GDP was 2.5 percent, as compared with 2 percent, a difference of around $13 billion, in 2024-25. While the defence-GDP ratio is not in itself a planning tool, it is a valuable aid for analysis—a shorthand for the structural funding of defence, which can be tracked across time. In order to have built the force that we would now need for ‘more substantial conflict’, defence spending over the past 15 years should have been lifted steadily to at least 3% of GDP. We spent more at times during the Cold War, without being seriously threatened by major conventional attack.

There are, of course, competing demands on the budget which have to be balanced responsibly. The difference with other areas of spending is that structural underfunding in defence could one day lead to military defeat, and national peril as a result. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP should be increased quickly to at least 3%. This is a broad estimate of what it would take to address capability deficiencies that would be exposed in high-end combat with a major adversary. This increase in funding would be fiscally daunting, and would challenge Defence and industry, both of whose capacity to deliver would have to be dramatically enhanced in very short order.

Faced with the credible prospect of the jaws of war leaping violently at us during this decade, we are going to need a bigger force. Without this, Australia would be hard pressed to defend itself in a major war without a substantial degree of force augmentation from the United States in a number of areas of capability deficiency. So much for defence self-reliance. Recent policy directions, in the form of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, and the 2024 National Defence Strategy, the latter being informed by the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (the most comprehensive examination of defence since the 1986 Review), have recognised this. Remediation is underway. How quickly or effectively is something for another day. Nations go to war with the force that they have, rather than the one that they need. We now have to make do with what we have, and what we can quickly build. How we got to this position of looming peril is not a useful question, for now. History will render that judgement.

Defending against a major power adversary would still require a strategy of defence in depth, and the denial of access in the sea-air approaches. Being prepared to operate forward of the archipelagic shield, along a north-south axis in maritime Southeast Asia, and in the Central Pacific (for instance, in the Guam-Bismarck Sea corridor), would represent a further evolution of the 1987 model, not a repudiation. Similarly, being prepared to operate along an extended east-west axis in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as part of a coordinated sea lane protection effort would be in keeping with the 1987 model, which indeed anticipated such operations.

New technologies and methods are of course today evident, not least in relation to cyber- attacks, technology-enabled cognitive warfare, space warfare, and advanced forms of strike weapons such as long-range hypersonic missiles. While complexity has increased and, in some cases, proximity is not always as critical, the geography of warfare has not been fundamentally altered. While the evolving interplay of technology, the character and logic of war, and the saliency of geography is a larger issue, and would require a more detailed exposition, the 1987 model still applies, even though engagement distances have increased, ‘kill chains’ have become more complicated, and the cyber and space domains have overcome some geographical constraints.

In the absence of being able to conjure instantly into being an expanded force, there are measures that we could take immediately which would allow us to make best use of operational warning time (such warning time is measured not in years, but in months). Here is an initial outline, not listed exhaustively nor in any detail:

  • The National Security Committee (NSC) should commission from the Secretaries Committee on National Security a periodic strategical appreciation of the prospect of major power conflict in the Indo-Pacific, to be prepared by a dedicated national security planning staff, which would cover indicators and warning signs; possible conflict triggers and pathways to war; the likely shape of such a war, by phases (conflict initiation, duration, and termination); and possible courses of hostile action against Australia (in the cyber, cognitive and kinetic domains).
  • Operational plans should be reviewed by the NSC, with the minister for defence leading on military defence, and the minister for home affairs on civil preparedness and national mobilisation. A new War Book should be prepared on the latter, covering, for instance, disruption of critical infrastructure and essential services, and cognitive warfare on national will and morale.
  • Australian-US operational planning should be overseen by the minister for defence and the US secretary of defense, under the auspices of AUSMIN, as political authority for such planning matters, with a view to ensuring that plans for the defence of Australia cohere with broader US operational planning. Consideration should be given to expanding such planning in due course, in the first instance through staff-level discussions with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand and possibly others.
  • The Australian Military Theatre should be formally established, led by an Australian allied force commander and based on clear boundaries, with flexible provision being made at the edges for selective forward force projection by the ADF in maritime Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific. A sea lane protection strategy should be developed, in accordance with the principles set out in the Radford/Collins agreement of 1951 (which should be urgently reviewed and updated).
  • The government should assure itself that the ADF could rapidly mount sustained around-the-clock operations in relation to the following key tasks in the Australian Military Theatre, and beyond as required:
    • situational awareness covering the sea-air approaches, the eastern Indian Ocean, maritime Southeast Asia, the Central Pacific, and the South Pacific, as well as relevant sea lanes, and offshore and undersea infrastructure;
    • sea denial (especially anti-submarine warfare) and sea lane protection;
    • air superiority and air defence, especially against long-range air threats;
    • strategic strike, especially for the purpose of denying sea-air access;
    • land operations, especially in remote northern Australia, with a view to defeating raiding forces, and in the littoral environment; and
    • key installation protection, including ports, airfields, and offshore and undersea.
  • Capability areas that would require urgent remedial effort, such as missile defence and possibly naval mine warfare, should be addressed, with a view to accepting force augmentation from the United States (as might be available), until such time as self-reliant solutions could be implemented.
  • Plans to rapidly activate ADF bases should be reviewed, especially in relation to the line of airbases that runs through Cocos (Keeling), Curtin, Tindal, Scherger and Townsville. Plans for base hardening and dispersal of the entire ADF should be similarly reviewed.
  • Mobilisation plans should be reviewed, covering logistics, war stocks, maintenance and sustainment (fuel supplies require particularly close attention). Rapid production and restocking agreements should be put in place, either with Australian firms, or as required within the context of allied supply chain and defence production arrangements.
  • A national cyber defence shield to protect critical infrastructure and essential services should be activated, based on real-time threat sharing, public-private cyber defence arrangements, and pre-agreed plans for the Australian Signals Directorate to lawfully act as required to defend the most crucial systems.

These and other efforts could be undertaken soberly and responsibly, without undue alarm being caused. Given the state of the world, a well-informed public would understand their necessity. These measures would be precautionary and defensive. At the same time, statecraft that is designed to reduce tensions and secure peace should, of course, continue to be pursued.

As Beazley would appreciate, there are many ironies to be found in this 40-year arc of policy. The United States avoided deep engagement in Australia’s defence in the 1950s and 1960s, when we sought its protection. Today, the strategic backwater of Australia has become a bastion for a US military strategy of denial. In the event that Australia and the United States were to decide to act together to meet the common danger of armed attack in the Pacific area, our forces would effectively constitute an integrated order-of- battle. The successful defence of Australia would for us be an existential act in our national interest. It would at the same time be a vital strategic objective for the United States, as a matter of its own hard interests.

Despite having opted for self-reliant defence in the 1980s, in a major war Australia would find itself having to rely to an uncomfortably significant degree on US force augmentation. This is the price of not building the force that we needed as the warning signs flashed, when we still had time to do so. Today’s force could well handle low level conflict. To that extent, the logic of the 1987 model holds true. A cold comfort, as no such conflict is in prospect.

Ironies aside, Beazley also has a keen sense of the tragic in world history. He is a strategic pessimist, seeing the world as it is. This includes an appreciation that there is an even darker possibility. If a well-armed major power, unchecked by the United States, were to decide that access to our resources or land, or both, would be in its interests, and that Australia would be useful to it in other ways, we would not necessarily have the strategic, economic, demographic and military means to preserve our sovereignty or stave off national subjugation. How we would defend ourselves were US primacy to fade gradually, or shatter suddenly, and how much military heft would Australia require in such a world? Beazley’s Principia would be the starting point for arriving at an answer, but perhaps we would need an Einstein to build on the Newtonian model, as Australia grappled with a completely different, and more hostile, power relativity.

No amount of astute diplomacy, skilful statecraft, or the building of regional architectures would offset the strategic shock and adverse ramifications of a world where US primacy was a memory, like that of British naval mastery and strategic preponderance in the nineteenth-century.

Beazley gave us the conceptual tools with which to formulate, and reformulate, Australian defence strategy. As in physics, so it is in defence—concepts have a long arc, and models are bequeathed for future use, and refinement. Beazley is modest, and so he will probably be embarrassed by this praise, but to adapt Alexander Pope on Newton:

The laws of defending Australia lay hid in night; God said, ‘let Beazley be’, and all was light.

In these darkening days, thankfully we have that light.

Norway is a Ukraine War profiteer

When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine in February 2022, he surely did not expect that one of Russia’s neighbors would be the main beneficiary of his war. Yet as Russian hydrocarbon exports to Europe cratered in the wake of the invasion, Norway emerged as the continent’s largest supplier.

Owing to the steep increase in gas and oil prices that followed the outbreak of the war, Norway ultimately enjoyed a massive financial windfall. In 2022 and 2023, it reaped nearly 1.3 trillion kroner ($111 billion) in additional revenue from gas exports, according to recent estimates from the finance ministry.

Why, then, has Norway allocated only a little more than $3.1 billion for support to Ukraine in its 2025 budget? Combined with what it contributed in 2024, Norway’s support for Ukraine amounts to less than 5 percent of its two-year war windfall. For comparison, Germany, Europe’s largest single contributor, provided $16.3 billion in military, financial, and humanitarian support for Ukraine from January 2022 until the end of October 2024, and the United States has contributed $92 billion. But while Norway’s two-year windfall is larger than the US and German contributions combined, Norway’s support for Ukraine as a share of GDP, at 0.7 percent, ranks only ninth in Europe, far behind Denmark (2 percent) and Estonia (2.2 percent).

Not only does Norway have the capacity to be making far more of a difference to the outcome of the war and the subsequent civilian reconstruction; it has an obvious moral obligation to do so. Given that its excess revenues are a direct consequence of Russia’s war, surely a greater share of them should go to those fighting and dying on the front lines to keep their country free.

Instead, Norway’s government has effectively decided to be a war profiteer, clinging greedily to its lucky gains. To their credit, opposition parties have proposed higher levels of support for Ukraine, ultimately pushing up the sum that the government initially proposed. No party, however, has come anywhere close to suggesting a transfer of the total war windfall to Ukraine.

The Norwegian government’s position is puzzling, given that Norway shares a border with Russia and has long relied on its allies’ support for its defense. Its own national security would be jeopardised if Russia wins the war or is militarily emboldened by a peace agreement skewed in its favor.

Moreover, it is not as though Norway would be immiserated by transferring its war windfall to Ukraine. This windfall represents about 6 percent of its sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, with assets valued at $1.7 trillion—or $308,000 for every Norwegian.

True, Norway channels all government revenue from oil and gas production to its sovereign wealth fund, and no more than 3 percent of the value of the fund can be drawn down and transferred to the government budget each year. This rule helps limit the effects on inflation and the exchange rate, and ensures that the fund exists in perpetuity.

But as a macroeconomic and national savings instrument, the drawdown rule was not designed with wartime demands in mind. It therefore should not be seen as an obstacle for a larger transfer to Ukraine. Since such a transfer would not enter the Norwegian economy, it would have no domestic inflationary or other macroeconomic implications. (With the 2025 budget largely set, it would need to be an extrabudgetary measure justified by the wartime circumstances.)

This is not the first time that Norway’s hoarding of its war windfall has been an issue. But it is the first time that we have been given an official estimate of the windfall’s value. The finance ministry has assigned a number to natural-gas export revenues in excess of what they would have been had gas prices remained around their five-year pre-invasion average. Although such counterfactuals will always be subject to uncertainty and debate, the official estimate is the closest we will get to a value for Norway’s war windfall. In fact, the actual number is probably much higher, as the estimate does not include excess revenues resulting from higher oil prices following the invasion.

With Europeans wringing their hands about the implications of Donald Trump’s return to power, Norway’s government and parliament should transfer the windfall to Ukraine in the form of military and financial support. Norway has a powerful national-security interest in doing the right thing.

Varghese review will undermine think tank independence

For China watchers, there’s a grim irony contained in the 14 principles that former senior official Peter Varghese recommends in his long-awaited review into national security think tanks, released last week.

Fourteen was also the number of grievances the Chinese embassy notoriously unveiled in 2020 and that Beijing expected to be addressed if diplomatic relations were to improve – the 10th of which was defunding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Beijing hasn’t quite got its way through the recommendations of Varghese, who is now chancellor of the University of Queensland. But the embassy’s champagne stocks may be a little depleted once its officials have measured his list against their own.

Beyond the impact on ASPI itself, there is a deeper danger in the principles, accepted by the Albanese government: the push to exercise more control over think tanks and to dampen the contestability that researchers provide.

ASPI was set up in 2001 precisely to contest the advice that the Howard government was receiving from the Department of Defence. We have since grown into a broader national security think tank that looks at modern threats ranging from cyber and disinformation to authoritarian abuses of power in places such as China’s Xinjiang.

We are recognised globally for our groundbreaking work on China—none of which is convenient to the government’s narrative of diplomatic stability with Beijing. The idea that the security issues ASPI has pursued independently—and often well ahead of national and global trends—may in future be given the thumbs up or down by ministers and bureaucrats is deeply unsettling. Yet the Varghese report recommends this command-and-control approach.

After delivering the 50-page report, Varghese then wrote an op-ed in The Australian at the weekend responding to the responses to his report. This is ironic given his report’s criticism of ‘op-ed overreach’. The problem with Varghese’s insistence that we all just need a Bex and a good lie-down is that a veritable chasm exists between his rhetoric expressing support for think tank independence and the actions he’s actually recommending.

First, think tanks would have to bid against one another for operational funding. That sounds superficially appealing, but if two institutes are competing for a grant and one has been nicer to the sitting government, who is better placed? Not all think tanks will resist self-censorship when they know fearless critiques may jeopardise future funding.

Second, ministers and their departments would set priorities for research, meaning anything that didn’t match the government’s agenda or was sensitive could be discouraged.

If an organisation wanted to look at China’s political and hybrid warfare, or the rapid and opaque modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, this might not go ahead if it didn’t suit the government. The government’s response here went further than Varghese by adding ministers, not just department heads, as gatekeepers.

Third, the government will require government officials to sit on think tank councils, making them at least an observer during think tanks’ internal deliberations and perhaps even a voice to influence meetings. Again, the government’s response went further than Varghese’s recommendations.

This is inconsistent with the many other organisations that receive federal funding.

And while Varghese points out some entities already have government officials on their boards, he leaves unanswered his own question of whether they have had independence compromised. The answer is yes, a government official sitting on a non-government board likely has impact, including to censor criticism.

Fourth, specific federally funded research projects would be ‘co-designed’ by bureaucrats, potentially putting guardrails on the researchers’ instincts.

The government gives grant money to the arts but nobody expects a bureaucrat to stand over the artists telling them how to stage a performance of Hamlet or do an interpretative dance.

Finally, there is the shutting of support for ASPI’s Washington office. Here, Varghese appears simply not to understand the role of think tanks’ overseas offices—saying it’s a problem ‘having ASPI freelance’. Freelance is a synonym of independence and, to be clear, we are independent and not there to push the views of the government of the day.

We are there to foster debate on issues that are important to Australia and its people, such as Indo-Pacific security and global rules. This has long-term value.

ASPI is known and respected across the political aisle in Washington for its nonpartisan and hard-hitting work, with many in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, including incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, citing our research numerous times.

So it makes zero sense that the Australian government would narrow rather than expand Australia’s options for engaging with Washington when the US is moving into a new Trump administration that will bring challenges for the Australian bureaucracy.

Varghese himself acknowledges that the kind of contestability ASPI was established to provide is essential and refers to our research as ‘groundbreaking’. Regrettably he also refers to our China research—on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Beijing’s interference in Australia and other countries—as controversial. Let’s face it, it was controversial only in the sense that Beijing didn’t like it.

Some of this review’s recommendations are reasonable and welcome, but the problems at its heart represent an abandonment of principles that successive governments for more than 20 years have recognised and respected.

Still, ASPI believes in our mission to pour sunlight on security threats to Australia and to help improve understanding—whether among policymakers or the public—of the steps needed to keep ourselves safe. We will continue to build on our proud legacy—because this work has never been more vital.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Faster, cheaper ways to expand Australia’s maritime firepower’

Originally published on 22 March 2024.

Following the release of the Australia’s Surface Fleet Review, a big problem remains: the Australian Defence Force lacks sufficient maritime firepower to credibly implement deterrence-by-denial in the next 10 years. 

Building ships and submarines is complex, eye-wateringly expensive and slow. Fielding ground-based strike systems and asymmetric naval capabilities can be much faster and cheaper. 

While new frigates are under construction, and before the first Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine arrives in 2032, what else can be done? How could the ADF more robustly deny access to Australia’s northern approaches? 

Fortunately, there are a few maritime-firepower efforts underway in the army that we could expand and accelerate. Meanwhile, the navy can embrace unpredictable capability ideas generated within its own ranks and industry. Pursuing this would mean applying the force-design guidance from the Defence Strategic Review (DSR): mindsets must change, overcoming ‘the current bias towards platforms.’ 

So, here are three affordable ways in which the army and navy could counterintuitively field new options in a strategically relevant timeframe. 

First, the army should accelerate and expand its existing land-based anti-ship missile plans, which are based on using launcher trucks, such as the HIMARS. They are agile, easily hidden, rapidly deployable by air or sea and can be acquired far more cheaply and quickly than ships. 

The plans have been under consideration for some time, although they have been more modest than US Army and Marine Corps efforts and have had lower priority than Australian acquisition of new tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Equipped with PrSM Increment 2 missiles, for example, the army will be able to strike maritime (and other targets) out to 500km. When combined with counter-space and air defence systems, and matched with new littoral watercraft accelerated for delivery by 2026, the army will be able to field credible area-denial complexes over archipelagic chokepoints in Australia’s northern approaches. 

But the army will need more money to do this faster and at larger scale. Responding to the DSR, the government announced a second HIMARS regiment capable of maritime strike would be grown, but it reportedly won’t be ready before 2030. With new or reallocated money and more flexible recruitment, including by harnessing the reserve, the army has the can-do that’s needed to quickly adapt and deliver this option by the end of 2026. 

Second, since the navy can’t deploy sufficient mass at sea before the mid-2030s, it should give the army some of its early deliveries of Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6s, which are surface-to-air missiles that can be used ballistically against ships and ground targets. The army would deploy them on land. Production capacity of the missiles is limited and there’s competing demand from US and Japanese forces, but if Canberra can negotiate sufficient timely stocks, the army could establish a single long-range anti-access battery by the end of 2028. 

The army could learn and adapt from the US Army’s nascent Typhon system, which is fielding Tomahawks and SM-6s. The navy could even share some of its people to help set up the team and gain valuable experience for its future deployment of the missiles. Supporting systems already being bought for the navy, such as the Theatre Mission Planning Centre and Tactical Tomahawk Weapon Control System, would enable land-based Tomahawk employment, though the army would eventually need its own multi-domain intelligence and targeting staff. 

US rotational presence in Australia can potentially help with training and on-the-job experience as the army executes its current plans for maritime firepower and potentially adds to them with navy missiles. That’s because the US Army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTF) and the US Marine Corps’ Marine Littoral Regiments are already being built to apply land-based maritime firepower. 

Canberra should pursue more long-term rotations of such units. This would also benefit Washington, since the US Army is yet to find a forward home for its third Indo-Pacific MDTF. Offering to accommodate it might also allow Canberra to gain earlier deliveries of Tomahawks and SM-6s, either new or borrowed from US stocks. 

Finally, the navy should generate its own asymmetric maritime force. This would offer a family of clandestine capabilities designed to create surprise and unpredictable advantages from the sea, generated from the naval workforce and by leveraging Australia’s defence and civil maritime industry. Many of our allies and major partners have sophisticated naval special-forces capabilities, but we don’t. Naval drones used by Ukraine, commercial-like projection platforms for special forces and World War II auxiliary raiders hint at the potential. 

A rejoinder to all of this might be that alternative maritime options are already being pursued. The navy’s Hobart-class air warfare destroyers will shortly be upgraded with Tomahawks and SM-6s. That’s a great development, but there are only three of these ships, each with only 48 vertical launch cells. As the new missiles are added, the ships’ combat systems are also being upgraded to Aegis Baseline 9. This will be a lengthy process which won’t add firepower depth anytime soon, even if the upgrade runs to schedule.  

With asymmetric intent, the navy is also introducing sea mines and extra-large underwater drones. But for each of these equipment categories, there’s still an associated military signature in deployment. More novel options cloaked with deception beyond these are still needed. 

Delivering faster and cheaper is easier said than done. The proposal argued here would be challenging to put into effect. But with warning time dissipated, we must heed the DSR’s call to dispense with business as usual. The government’s expanded surface fleet plan is commendable, but trends in Australia’s strategic environment won’t stop and wait for the 2030s and 2040s. It’s time to move faster and think differently. 

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Australia should grow its own fuel’

Originally published on 18 March 2024.

Australia really does run on the smell of an oily rag. Our fuel reserves are pitifully low by international standards, and we produce very little fuel domestically. This is a risk, both strategically and economically. But it also presents an opportunity we should grasp.  

The opportunity is to ramp up domestic production of fuel made from plants, creating a secure local supply that isn’t exposed to the risk of disruption beyond our shores.  

Australia imports about 90% of its liquid fuel and has just two operational oil refineries, and those run only thanks to federal government support. The industry has almost shut down because buying refined products abroad and importing them just in time for consumption is more economical.  

This reliance on just-in-time supply is also one reason why we have tended to store very little fuel locally. In fact, Australia holds 54 days of fuel supply onshore, according to the latest data, well below the 90 days of net oil imports we should hold under International Energy Agency rules.  

None of this is news. But it does explain why various governments have sought to boost the country’s storage and supply—including the previous Coalition government’s purchase of crude oil placed in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (which we would need to ship here for use) and earmarking of funding for extra diesel storage capacity. Since then, the Labor government has told large importers and refiners they must hold minimum levels of fuel locally to see them through supply disruptions.  

Having additional storage is all well and good, but it overlooks the tanker-sized elephant in the room. We need to fill that storage capacity with something, and, because we produce very little fuel ourselves, that something must be shipped from abroad. Since the point of a strategic fuel reserve is to see a country through troubled times, relying on free and open shipping lanes, not to mention the availability of ships and crews, is a bit of a risk.  

Just look to the Red Sea for a current example of how shipping routes can be seriously interrupted by an adversary using simple means such as drones. Then imagine the disruption a fully-fledged kinetic conflict might cause. You need not imagine too hard: just ask Europe about the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on its energy supplies. Now imagine trying to arrange imports of fuel to Australia during a conflict, even fuel you have paid for that is sitting safely on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.  

That leads us to the inevitable solution: we need to produce more fuel domestically to fill the local storage facilities we have been building. To do that, we have three options: use more of our existing supplies of crude, seek out unconventional supplies, or look to alternatives.  

By global standards, Australia is not a major player when it comes to conventional geological oil reserves. Our modest supplies have been declining as new fields have failed to make up for the depletion of old ones. While the opening of new Northwest Shelf fields reversed the situation somewhat, the bottom line is that we hold little in the way of geological reserves of conventional offshore oil. They’re likely to be exhausted in about 20 years. Onshore oil exploration is hampered by lengthy and circuitous community engagement and regulatory and environmental approvals that add time, cost and complication to any project, often to the point of unviability. In any case, our two remaining refineries are an inconveniently long way from the source and are not well-suited to refining the oil we extract from the seabed.  

An alternative that is theoretically inexhaustible is the use of biofuels in our energy security mix. Using plants to fuel vehicles is not new technology—it has been around since the 1930s—and Australian motorists currently have access to ethanol-blended petrol and biodiesel. Even the US military and its NATO partners are getting in on the act, looking at biofuel not only to improve sustainability but to cut down dependence on conventional oil supplies.  

Biofuels present several benefits in terms of energy and economic security. In 2022, liquid biofuels internationally avoided the consumption of almost 2 million barrels of oil per day in the transport sector. While that met only about 4% of global transport demand, it showed the potential for growth.  

Moreover, biofuels can be produced from non-food crops grown on marginal land, removing the food-versus-fuel tension and providing an additional income source for rural communities. We are already doing this, in a way. More than half of Australia’s canola crop is exported to the European Union, with at least 60% of that being used in biodiesel production. That product could be sold domestically if we had a local biofuel industry providing demand for the raw inputs.  

Late last year, the CSIRO and Boeing released the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Roadmap, which looked at how Australia could develop a sustainable aviation fuel industry using Australian feedstocks. According to the roadmap, non-edible oilseeds ‘offer the opportunity of cultivating and utilising crops that do not have to compete with food markets and can use marginal or degraded land’. In fact, Australia will have enough feedstocks to produce 90% of local jet fuel using biogenic feedstocks by 2050, according to the roadmap, giving an insight into how a sustainable biofuel industry can be developed to take advantage of marginal land growing non-food crops.  

Success in this area will not happen spontaneously, however. It will take a concerted push by government and industry to realise its potential. The US, India and Brazil have been pushing ahead with the development of policies that will support and drive biofuel production, which includes supporting innovation, addressing sustainability issues and sending the right investment signals. Their efforts have seen annual biofuels providing 22% of Brazil’s transport energy in 2022 and 7% in the US. Meanwhile, ethanol’s use in India’s petrol-fuelled vehicles doubled to 6% from 2019 to 2022.    

Bioenergy Australia provides some practical policy ideas for the federal government in its 2024-25 budget submission, among them a commitment from the Australian Defence Force to be a ‘cornerstone customer’ of locally produced synthetic aviation fuel and renewable diesel. According to Bioenergy Australia, this would be a significant driver in the development of a domestic industry, providing certainty and demonstrating the federal government’s commitment. This could be backed up with funding from the National Reconstruction Fund, Powering the Regions Fund and Australia Renewable Energy Agency.  

For a country such as Australia, with limited reserves of offshore oil and difficult-to-exploit onshore oil, farming our own fuel makes sense. It would provide opportunities for agricultural development and diversification, reduce our dependence on imported oil that is at risk of geostrategic disruption, and allow us to fill those extra storage tanks we have built.  

All it needs is some political will.