Tag Archive for: ADF

Australia needs more defence grunt in its Pacific policy

When it comes to Australia’s policy in the Pacific islands, what’s first needed is a changed mindset. We need to recognise that the region is key terrain. It’s essential for US and Australian defence; it’s not a secondary theatre where we do ‘just enough to keep the locals calm and on side’. What we do in the Pacific islands region will tie directly to success or failure in a war with China over Taiwan.

Consider the challenges posed by a Chinese presence (military and otherwise) in the Pacific islands, even in peacetime. For Australia, it’d be tough to try to fight our way up towards Taiwan without getting whittled down in the process. The same goes for the US having to fight its way across the central Pacific.

The second key point is that our approach should be one of no ‘cargo cults’. We should look at the totality of what the US and Australia (and our partners) are doing in the region. If it looks like a cargo cult—showing up, putting on a good show and then leaving—then we’re doing things wrong.

It should be a permanent presence and should leave no part of the region untended. If you’re not there, you’re not interested. It doesn’t matter how handsome a party you put on when you pitch up. We should look at things from the locals’ perspective, not from a ‘theatre engagement matrix’ perspective where being busy is the main thing.

The third point to bear in mind is that money spent in the Pacific islands is like a maintenance fee or insurance. It is far cheaper than having to fight a war to recover them.

It’s also useful to consider the World War II analogy: China is interested in the Pacific islands for the same reason Japan was interested in them. It’s all about complicating US access to the Western Pacific.

From an Australian military perspective, it’s not about bases but rather ‘rotational access’, which we should now deepen and broaden, along with the US. Australia should create a Pacific regiment. The focus should be on building island capacity in areas like disaster mitigation and response. The regiment could be headquartered in Fiji or Papua New Guinea with Australian Defence Force personnel integrated into it under a South Pacific command. We should find some junior officers who want to contribute to regional resilience in areas such as small unit tactics, surveillance and boat operations.

Working with locals, this would develop skills for local youth along with discipline that pays off later in life and feeds directly into local societies. It would seem to be a natural activity for the US Marine Corps’ new littoral combat regiments, offering valuable experience while influencing and facilitating US access. Australia should encourage the US to consider opportunities for bringing us and Japan into the effort.

We should set up national guard programs in certain island nations with US and Australian defence support. Disaster response can be the main focus. One or two such relationships should be with a combined national guard and Australian Army reserve unit. And maybe in a few cases we could designate a reserve unit to a Pacific island as well. The Australian government has promised to establish a defence training school in the Pacific. Along with the host nation, we should make it a joint effort of the US, Australia and Japan and make it a priority.

Australia should encourage the US to establish a marine expeditionary unit or amphibious ready group operating out of Darwin and elsewhere in northern Australia. It would be multinational. But with US, Australia and Japan as the core. This means that the Australian government needs to end the lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company. The lease is preventing the rapid development of the port for more important security purposes and is slowing and complicating greater US Marine Corps and ADF use of the port.

Enabling greater US access to expanded facilities here in Australia is about our security and improving our defence facilities for our own use and for the use of our allies and partners. If Washington can capitalise on Palau’s offer for the US to establish a base there, then Australia should offer some military assets there. We’re now building 12 offshore patrol vessels. There could be a rotational access of, say, four OPVs through the area.

US and Australian defence forces should deliver health assistance to the islands. The Mercy, a 1,000-bed US Navy hospital ship, has sailed throughout the Pacific offering medical care to many island populations. Australia now has a Pacific support vessel that will expand the range of support we provide across the region, including delivering medical assistance. Australia should also work with the US to develop regular rotations of teams of military clinicians through host-nation hospitals for around four weeks each to leave a more lasting impact by developing a cadre of local health experts.

Australia, working with support from the US, should initiate a joint Australia–PNG project to enhance the port facilities and airfield at Milne Bay. It offers better potential defensive coverage of the vital Solomon and Coral Seas than Manus Island more than 900 kilometres to the north. Australian forces could operate from Milne Bay in support of PNG and other Pacific Islands Forum partners.

South Pacific defence ministers last year agreed to a Pacific-led initiative to develop a regional humanitarian and disaster response framework to refine the way countries in the region work together when disaster strikes. Why not take this to the next level with Australia and the US working with the islands to create a regional stabilisation and disaster response force?

Finally, Australia should be recruiting Pacific islanders into the ADF. Pacific recruitment sits comfortably with the goal of security and economic integration with Australia over time and at a pace and scale that’s welcomed by Pacific island countries. Military service is a unique offer we can make that China can’t and won’t. No changes to defence legislation would be required, only a change of policy.

Australia and the US must respond to both development challenges and geostrategic competition in the Pacific islands region. We can’t afford the luxury of choosing. And the military forces of the US and Australia have a vital contribution to make.

Aggressive action required to meet Defence’s ambitious emissions-reduction target

Despite the inevitably heavy redactions, the Department of Defence’s brief for the incoming government makes for interesting reading, including its section on climate change.

The briefing, released under freedom of information laws, acknowledges that Defence’s cooperate with the Office of National Intelligence on an assessment of the national security implications of climate change. It also states that ‘Defence will continue to provide … support to disaster response within the context of climate risk’—but says this is placing increasing pressure on the Australian Defence Force’s capacity to fulfill its other missions.

Much of the information outlined was already known, but its reiteration among key points for the new government signals the seriousness with which Defence’s leaders are taking climate change.

An even stronger signal about these concerns is provided by the emissions-reduction targets the brief reveals:

Defence has initiated a range of investments to drive a 43 per cent reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2040. The Defence Renewable Energy and Energy Security Program is delivering renewable energy and associated technologies, leading high-level feasibility assessments of low-emission technologies including hydrogen, battery energy storage, micro-grids and alternative liquid fuels.

Defence is matching the government’s overall 43% target by 2030 (presumably relative to the same 2005 baseline, though that isn’t said in the brief). Moreover, it has apparently committed to a net-zero position a decade ahead of the government’s overall national target.

This is a remarkable commitment. Defence operates a range of capabilities that are very difficult to decarbonise because we don’t have viable replacements for things like powerful jet and marine engines, and nor do we yet have access to alternative fuels for such systems. Moving the defence estate to green electricity is one thing; getting the air force’s F-35 jets and the navy’s giant landing ships off legacy fuels is another.

Nevertheless, an ambitious approach to emissions reduction is entirely justified for Defence. First, it faces genuine social-licence concerns in the long term. While Australia lacks readily available data on the defence organisation’s contribution to public-sector or national emissions, the numbers from allied countries are significant and indicative.

The UK armed forces account for 50% of the UK government’s emissions. The US military similarly accounts for 56% of US government emissions, is the world’s single largest institutional petroleum user and carbon emitter, and would rank as the 55th largest CO2 emitter if it were a country. One widely cited estimate puts it at around 6% of total US emissions. Even if that estimate is on the high side, a single institutional user accounting for even 1% or 2% of national emissions is significant.

If underlying military emissions remain steady or even rise, their portion of public-sector and national emissions will increase significantly as decarbonisation proceeds in the broader economy. It is certainly true that criticism of military emissions isn’t yet mainstream and that exemptions for militaries like the ADF are not domestically controversial. But we should expect that these issues will be increasingly contested as military emissions take on greater relative significance.

A second reason for taking an ambitious approach is that the legitimacy of those emissions is also likely to be increasingly contested as climate-change impacts deepen and worsen. Without compromising its ability to deliver military power, Defence should be doing everything it can to avoid contributing to the climate-driven problems to which Defence itself will need to respond (for example, disaster responses at home and abroad, or increased regional instability). Avoided climate change is not a mere footnote.

Third, there are numerous benefits of alternative energy sources from a military point of view. For example, Australian Army leaders placed great emphasis on the tactical benefits of the Bushmaster all-electric protected mobility vehicle when it was unveiled last month in Adelaide: it is quieter, quicker and mechanically simpler than its conventionally fuelled sibling. Dependency on fossil-fuel supply chains is a longstanding anxiety of some strategic thinkers. Military bases with independent renewable power supplies are more resilient and operationally useful than those that aren’t, which is another reason for the great emphasis in the defence brief on solar supplies at various bases.

At this point, it’s unclear how Defence will achieve these bold targets and what is wrapped up in the ‘Defence Renewable Energy and Energy Security Program’, though the briefing does indicate some of the technical priorities that will be required. In estimates of US Department of Defence energy use, ‘operational energy use’, defined as that ‘required for training, moving, and sustaining military forces and weapons platforms’, represents 70% of the department’s energy consumption. More than two-thirds of that total is jet fuel.

If the ADF’s energy use and emissions profile (they are not same thing) are anything vaguely like the US military’s proportions, even complete decarbonisation of the defence estate and non-operational activities may not be enough to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030. Aggressive action to approach complete decarbonisation of that part of the portfolio will be required in parallel to work attacking the operational side of the problem.

As we outlined in our report, The Australian Defence Force and its future energy requirements, earlier this year, solving the more difficult technical problems required to shift away from legacy fuels at scale requires long-term thinking in partnership with industry.

Such partnerships could include collaboration among researchers, key industry players like Qantas and Virgin, and the defence organisation to realise promising technologies like ‘power-to-liquid’ at a meaningful scale. The jet fuel example is also central because the ADF, Qantas and Virgin make up such a significant portion of the Australian consumer market that concerted action by this relative handful of players would have a potentially outsized effect.

Airport and port operators are other key partners in realising alternative fuel use at scale across the country. Defence is partly dependent on such commercial facilities, but they are also critical because they represent the physical nexus at which many of these technologies and inputs need to be pulled together.

Targeted but significant investment in research on hydrogen and battery technologies should also be in the policy mix, and hopefully that’s all part of what the department refers to when it cites these technologies in the brief.

How Defence’s efforts on this front are integrated with those of our allies, whose economies and militaries operate at significantly greater scale than our own, is another important open question.

Our conversations with major industrial and investment players in this space have indicated that there’s significant investment appetite remaining, beyond existing and high-profile initiatives like the Sun Cable venture. The right policy levers need to be pulled to ensure that a portion of this capital is allocated to potential technologies and capabilities with strategic military, not just economic, relevance. As much transparency as possible about Defence’s strategy to meet its targets should be part of such an approach, because it’s necessary to facilitate engagement with partners across the economy.

We now know that Defence has set itself remarkably ambitious emissions reductions targets. Modest innovations like the electric Bushmaster and investment in solar power across the defence estate are important steps forward. If a net-zero commitment for 2040 is to be met with more than huge purchases of carbon offsets, still larger policy steps will be needed without delay.

New government can deliver what Australia needs to defend itself in a dangerous decade

Skilled diplomacy, a powerful and achievable deterrent capability developed with urgency, and the highly trained personnel to drive a technically skilled defence force will be crucial to Australia’s defence in the uncertain decades ahead.

A big dilemma confronting the incoming defence minister is how to resolve the disconnect between the 2020 defence strategic update, which signalled that Australia might find itself embroiled in a major conflict without the 10 years’ warning time that has long been considered likely, and the 2020 force structure plan which set out a plan to re-equip the Australian Defence Force that would not be delivered for decades.

During the election campaign, Labor’s defence spokesperson, Brendan O’Connor, signed up to the Coalition’s increases to Defence spending, with the March budget increasing it to $48.6 billion and further growth set to take it to $70 billion by 2030. Labor also agreed with the big investments being made in frigates and nuclear-powered submarines.

The challenge for the new government on defence, though, isn’t about the headline budget figures, or the massive, long-term projects it’ll have to manage. It’s to use the large and growing defence budget to make Australia more secure this decade—over the next 1, 3, 5 and 8 years—not from 2035 and out to 2050 as the new frigates and submarines slowly arrive.

The 2020s look to be a dangerous decade for Australia and our region because of an aggressive China under Xi Jinping. And that aggression isn’t just a long way away, in places like the South China Sea and around Taiwan. It’s close to home given China’s growing presence in the South Pacific and the implications of the security deal Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has made with Beijing. Unravelling that agreement will be another major challenge for the incoming minister and their counterpart in foreign affairs. It’s a time to gather strength with friends and allies, as in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s priority dash to the Quad meeting in Tokyo.

The good news for the new government is that there are things to build on and accelerate—like the work underway to get at least some of the guided weapons our military use produced in Australia so that we aren’t dependent on risky and vulnerable international supply chains. As we’re seeing every day in the war in Ukraine, these essential military supplies are needed in numbers.

Like militaries all over the world, the ADF is watching closely the lessons from Ukraine, right down to footage of model aircraft enthusiasts dropping grenades from small commercial drones and of the Moskva, Russia’s Baltic Sea flagship burning and sinking.

Do the columns of wrecked and rusting hulks of Russian tanks signal the end of armoured vehicles as an effective force? Probably not. Armour was very badly handled by the Russians despite the Ukrainians being badly outnumbered. It needs to be used as part of a system including infantry, artillery and air support, which the Kremlin did not provide, but armour’s vulnerabilities to cheap weapons are undeniable.

The new government will need a comprehensive early briefing from the ADF on all the complex detail of the AUKUS agreement with the US and UK and plans to help Australia obtain eight nuclear-powered submarines.

That will include the content and progress of the talks the Royal Australian Navy’s nuclear-powered submarine taskforce is involved in with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that the plan doesn’t weaken the international non-proliferation regime.

The navy has said it will ensure the project embraces such high safety standards that it will set a rigorous new benchmark under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT.

The reactors on both US and UK nuclear-powered submarines use highly enriched, or ‘weapons grade’, uranium that does not need to be replaced for the boat’s 30-year life. Such fuel could be used to make nuclear bombs.

Other nations, including France, use low-enriched uranium in their submarine reactors but they need to be refuelled several times through the life of the submarine. That uranium is not suitable for bombs, but the refuelling process is a complex one that would probably require ongoing help from the provider country.

The submarine enterprise is as massive as it is ambitious.

It is likely to see Australia obtaining an advanced new boat, still being designed, from either the US or the UK.

In the meantime, Australians will find themselves crewing US or UK submarines to gain experience and professional skills.

When its AUKUS allies are satisfied that Australia can meet the highest nuclear-safeguard standards, the RAN may eventually ‘borrow’ a nuclear-powered boat from one of them.

But AUKUS is about much more than submarines.

As defence minister, Peter Dutton chose the big US companies, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, as industry partners for missile production. The new government must push these companies to start production in Australia by 2025, not allow them to slow-roll things over a decade. And it would be wise to bring in some faster-moving competition through companies like Norway’s Kongsberg and Israeli-Australian partnership Varley Rafael, which would each get production of missiles the ADF have chosen started fast and push our American friends to also get moving quickly.

The new government can push the navy to do what it should have done all along and arm the only new ships Australia is getting into the fleet before 2035, the Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels. These warships are more relevant than ever given the Chinese navy’s push into our near region.

Labor can focus where it traditionally likes to in defence, on local industry. Medium and small Australian firms can provide the military with technologies from artificial intelligence capabilities, cyber systems and armed and unarmed small drones. They can get these new technologies into the hands of our military to use and adapt much faster if they aren’t forced to navigate the labyrinth that is the Defence bureaucracy and procurement system.

It will take a strong prime minister and determined defence minister to break through this internal process logjam, but that can be a satisfying role for a new minister—and it’s one our security environment demands. The MQ-28A Ghost Bat drone also known as the loyal wingman and the investment in large unmanned undersea vessels announced by Dutton during the election campaign are tantalising glimmers of what’s possible.

Delivering new capability to the Australian military over this decade—not just in the mid-2030s—will show taxpayers they are getting something for the billions going into Defence in economically challenging times. And, with Australia’s powerful partners in Washington, Tokyo, Delhi and Seoul, it’ll help deter Beijing from thinking conflict is a quick way to achieve its goals. The Chinese military does respect countervailing military power. So, how novel and fortunate for an Australian defence minister to have the prospect of starting projects and seeing them deliver results to our military while they are still in the job.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that nothing short of a courageous armed defence can stop a violent and autocratic aggressor, war can also be an unnecessary consequence when diplomacy and armed deterrence fail.

But diplomacy remains a crucial first element and a stronger and better resourced Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is a strategic imperative. The vastly experienced and capable Penny Wong will be influential in cabinet to make that happen. Tone may help, but policy substance still needs to deal with structural realities.

The new government also needs to free up and encourage the ADF to play a much greater role in informing the public about the strategic threats posed by climate change with the strong possibility of competition for resources such as food and water and the likelihood of mass international people movements from areas that become inundated or otherwise uninhabitable. That’s the practical, security side to the new government’s climate agenda.

Difficult decisions which will shape the ADF for decades need to be made soon on armoured vehicles and the future of special forces.

On integrity and accountability, the new government gets the chance to deliver what the overwhelming majority of Australia’s serving military personnel want—accountability for any among them who are proven to have committed unlawful killings in Afghanistan as well as changes to the command chain and the way allegations of misconduct on operations are investigated and handled in the future.

A previous defence minister, Linda Reynolds, undertook to inform the Australian public, through statements to parliament, about the implementation of the Brereton inquiry’s forensic investigation and recommendations. That has not happened. Now those processes can be pursued more publicly with the full backing of the new government, both through the Office of the Special Investigator outside Defence, and through Defence’s internal disciplinary and administrative systems.

This will align Defence with steps to increase integrity and government transparency that look like being a key part of the new parliamentary program of Labor and the independents.

It’ll be symbolic here to have the new defence minister do what Brereton recommended and give periodic statements in parliament updating on progress with implementation and change.

So, inheriting bipartisan structural policy settings and a growing defence budget is a foundation. The next three years, though, will be busy time of delivery and decision for Albanese and his national security committee colleagues.

Understanding the military’s role in space

The establishment of defence space organisations among space-faring nations means they must explain their purpose and rationale alongside well-established branches of militaries. Three distinct camps have emerged in the attempt to characterise the role of defence space organisations. The first group argues that the space domain should not be militarised and warns that even using language describing it as a contested environment will turn space into a warfighting domain.

The second group argues that space is an operational domain and cautions that any other language would make war in space inevitable.

The final group argues that space has been a warfighting domain since the beginning of the space age. They say that adversary counterspace developments suggest that space as an operational domain will quickly become a warfighting domain.

Viewing space in such stark terms, however, ignores reality while creating a belief that states can identify and control the strategies of malign actors. The fact is that space has become another area in which humans interact to trade and grow prosperous. And where there are human interactions, war is an ever-present danger. Such is the human condition.

Attempting to frame the space domain through binary concepts such ‘operational and warfighting’ hinder the effectiveness of defence space organisations’ ability to foresee crises and avoid wars.

The 19th century US maritime thinker and writer Alfred Thayer Mahan’s answer to the question ‘Why do we need a navy?’ was that access to the sea was a nation’s path to long-term prosperity obtained through the interrelations between trade, wealth and power. In his view, the aim of naval power was to create political leverage to achieve the advantage at sea by applying economic pressure to an adversary. Participating in battles was secondary to that objective. Through this lens, Mahan was able to articulate the importance of maritime power to his country.

Mahan’s nuanced argument is important for modern space organisations, including the military, because it allows them to convey the importance of having access to and the ability to operate in the space domain. For instance, space-based technologies, such as global navigation satellite systems, are critical in today’s society. The UK government estimates that the loss of access to global positioning, navigation and timing services for just five days could lead to an economic loss of £5.2 billion ($9.2 billion).

The fact that most space assets are dual-purpose and owned and operated by civilians and military alike highlights that it’s virtually impossible to separate the two uses. This is because the security and prosperity of the state and its people are not mutually exclusive. Improved technology and innovative approaches have reduced costs while democratising access to space and creating challenges and opportunities. These developments have also increased congestion and competition in space.

For democratic states, military space organisations exist to enable the continued friendly growth of the space sector, deter malign actors through credible capabilities and respond with clear strategic aims when required. To do that, they need to be able to operate and generate effects in, through and from space. And they need to develop the capabilities to achieve these outcomes as individual organisations rather than being viewed as providers of enabling functions.

But it is also paramount that they support the development of agreed rules for responsible space behaviour. The laws of armed conflict for the terrestrial domains evolved over many centuries, but that’s a luxury we don’t have in developing equivalent frameworks for space. Settling these issues will remove any ambiguities on the role of defence space organisations up front. And it will allow the argument to be framed by what nations seek to achieve rather than the means available to do so.

Two key tasks of military space organisations are to assure defence forces’ access to it by establishing resilient space capabilities and to deter or prevent an adversary from using counterspace capabilities to deny access to space systems.

For Australia’s Defence Space Command, situated within the Royal Australian Air Force, these two tasks are vital to the Australian Defence Force’s ability to support national policy through the application of military force. In the first task—assured access—the command oversees space policy, strategy and doctrine, which in turn drives capability choices to meet ADF operational and tactical needs. This is about developing space architecture, including through the commercial sector, to support space operations and provide upstream elements such as satellites and launch capabilities. It also requires developing conceptual, doctrinal and strategic thinking. Capability decisions don’t emerge from an intellectual vacuum and must be based on a realistic understanding of the operational domain. It can’t be based on the hope that all actors will observe norms of behaviour under all conditions.

This reality leads to the essential space deterrence role, which is linked to developing assured access and encapsulates the space control mission. It is this mission—which the 2022 Defence space power manual describes as ‘offensive and defensive operations to ensure freedom of action in space by defeating efforts to interfere with or attack Australian or allied space systems and, when directed, deny space services to a competitor’—that has the potential to generate controversy when considering the rationale for a defence space organisation.

For Australia, it’s important to adopt a clear-headed perspective on the emerging nature of the space domain. Adversary development of counterspace capabilities and doctrine suggests that space is likely to quickly become weaponised, and quickly evolve into a warfighting domain, prior to or at the outset of a military conflict.

With this reality in mind, it’s important that Australia sustain the development of defence space capabilities, including for space control. This doesn’t preclude continued efforts in diplomacy through the United Nations open-ended working group on norms of responsible behaviour in space. There needs to be a dual-path approach, combining legal and diplomatic efforts with the establishment of credible space control and assured space access, both of which recognise the nature of a contested and congested space domain. It would be wise, however, not to build any expectation that major-power adversaries will honour any norms of responsible behaviour or show restraint in the development of sophisticated counterspace capabilities.

Russia’s Ukraine invasion must be Australia’s clarion call

As Ukraine slowly turns the tide on Russia’s assault, Australian leaders must quickly heed the warning of their resistance. War between major powers is no longer a remote possibility in the 21st century. But Canberra isn’t moving fast enough to prepare for a future in which our sovereignty and strategic interests are directly challenged by a hostile great power.

Right across the Indo-Pacific, China’s growing military presence and aggressive grey-zone coercion are threatening the regional order, undermining Australia’s security from the South China Sea to Solomon Islands. Faced with the most dangerous strategic environment since 1942, Australia urgently needs a more robust and imaginative statecraft.

Regardless of who wins the 21 May federal election, at least five things are needed to chart a more decisive regional strategy.

First, Canberra should follow Berlin’s lead and establish a one-off, multibillion-dollar fund to build a stronger Australian Defence Force for the 2020s.

Today’s ADF lacks the range and depth to pose dilemmas for a highly capable adversary in Australia’s immediate region. Although Defence has dismissed its longstanding assumption that Australia would have a 10 years’ strategic warning in advance of conflict, too many of its planned military investments are set to deliver in the never-never of the 2030s and 2040s.

More diversified capabilities are needed now—purchased off the shelf—to expand the options available to future governments. This includes large stocks of long-range missiles for deterrent effect, enabled by larger investments in mobility, theatre-level logistics and forward basing.

The ADF should buy the US Army’s long-range hypersonic weapon, further expand its electronic warfare portfolio, rapidly field lethal autonomous platforms, and develop more counter-space means. Expanding the Australian Signals Directorate’s offensive cyber and signals intelligence capabilities is a welcome start. But new unorthodox manoeuvre and intelligence options are also needed for the ADF to pose its own grey-zone challenges—going beyond the window-dressing reforms in the wake of the Brereton inquiry into special forces.

Second, the ADF’s force structure, size and operational fighting concepts must be critically reviewed against the principal adversary that Australia faces: China.

This review should be conducted externally, akin to Paul Dibb’s seminal mid-1980s work, and occur early in the new term of government. While the 2020 defence strategic update brought a sober and clear-headed strategy, the accompanying force structure plan was a misfire.

The ADF can’t afford to perpetuate a legacy ‘balanced force’ in which all services are made to feel special. Instead, hard choices must be made to design a force and way of fighting tailored to Australia’s strategic geography.

ADF personnel growth needs to be a quick march to a minimum 80,000 this decade, not a ‘strollout’ by 2040. Crucially, if spending 3% of GDP on defence is to be fiscally credible, Canberra must stop wasting billions on non-performing or irrelevant capabilities like heavy armoured vehicles and a $45-billion Hunter-class frigate program that won’t deliver its first ship until 2033, with the last to arrive in 2047.

Third, Australia must expand its value proposition as a ‘partner of choice’ to deepen and diversify its defence partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.

While progress is being made with established partners like Japan and Singapore, it’s far too slow and, in key aspects, continues to favour form over substance. Australia must pick up the pace to transform these relationships into vehicles for coordinated regional strategy, both bilaterally and with the US and other partners.

Elsewhere, Australia must be humble and strive to build deeper defence ties with Indonesia, India, Vietnam and the Philippines. This means providing more of the direct and tangible collaboration these nations want, such as expanding military intelligence sharing, routinely conducting combined operational activities and increasing the sophistication of exercises. Buying Australian military hardware and supplies also needs to be made easier.

Realising two-way trust in this process will be hard and require more discipline. But it’s only by offering practical cooperation that exceeds expectations that Canberra can build the robust alignments essential for defending and preserving a resilient Indo-Pacific order.

Fourth, Australia must pursue a more ambitious diplomacy and bolster its capacity to wield regional influence and foster meaningful engagement.

Diplomacy needs to be valued as a national capability, like military and intelligence means, led by seasoned professionals and funded accordingly. But the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been under-resourced for too long.

Dismantling AusAID, the Australia Network and Radio Australia during the Abbott era was an own goal that squandered established advantages, especially in the Pacific. While infrastructure financing initiatives have delivered some results, the Solomons Islands’ security pact with China highlights the limits of this tool in the absence of a comprehensive Australian statecraft.

A regional influence agency should be considered to synchronise Australia’s public narrative, broadcasting, financing, humanitarian aid and disaster recovery efforts. Here, business, cultural and sporting bodies are Canberra’s best tools. But Australia’s regional interests demand a hybrid approach that brings the nation’s mandarins and non-government leaders under one roof.

A larger civil crisis capability is also needed, beyond the ADF, that can be deployed quickly and sustained overseas for longer. So long as global temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, the incidence and severity of climate-related disasters impacting our Pacific neighbours will increase—and Australia has a moral and strategic responsibility to do more.

Finally, the bipartisan Advisory War Council mechanism that guided Australia’s World War II effort should be reprised and adapted for today’s challenges.

By bringing together the cabinet’s National Security Committee with two or three opposition representatives, Australia could pursue an integrated, long-term strategy more effectively. A new national security council–like organ should enable this approach, organising Australian statecraft at a whole-of-nation level. To be effective, it must have a flat structure, be small in size and have a top-down mandate for conducting net assessments and grand strategy. Like its international peers, it should be staffed with leading talent from across politics, government, think tanks, business, the sciences and academia, bringing foresight and direction to what is currently an unimaginative interagency process for driving Australia’s regional strategy.

These aren’t the only answers. But they will help Canberra accelerate preparations for a more perilous future. Australia must leverage its strengths, exploit its asymmetries and genuinely invest in its Indo-Pacific neighbourhood.

If Ukraine’s resistance teaches Australia anything, it’s that now is the moment to get ready for great-power competition in our region. This is a race, and time is against us.

Designing an Australian DARPA

In The Strategist in July, we outlined our concept for an Australian equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), mooted by ASPI. We envisaged this Australian version of DARPA filling the ‘valley of death’ between lab testing and demonstration of a prototype (that is, between technology readiness levels 4 and 7). It would utilise private as well as public funding, and it would provide a sovereign approach to development.

This new organisation was envisaged as working quickly, taking risks and focusing on developing the asymmetric capabilities that will be critical in any future conflict.

The importance of a new approach to Australian innovation, particularly for defence-relevant technologies, was acknowledged earlier this month in the government’s announcement of a ‘comprehensive review of Defence innovation, science and technology to help ensure the Australian Defence Force has access to the most cutting-edge capability in the world’.

But the track record of bringing Australian defence innovation into being isn’t great, with byzantine processes hindering both speed and risk taking. And the situation will worsen when we concern ourselves with software-based technologies rather than pure domain-specific hardware.

Technology advances rarely take hold in isolation and are unlikely to develop in a slow, steady and predictable fashion. They expand via the convergence of a few different technical improvements and enjoy tailwinds and feedback loops from adjacent and new products and markets.

New technologies are rarely a one-to-one replacement. Innovation opens new horizons and new capabilities and properties with new uses.

Australia also faces the economic challenges of developing systems within small markets, which means that efforts for innovation should also have dual uses in mind, not just defence.

As an example, the context for electric vehicle development was consumer electronics, mobile phones, power tools and the years of technical and economic development of lithium–ion batteries in those markets.

Would we expect the best-of-breed LiDAR-enhanced autonomous drones to be developed in isolation without ancillary-use cases and feeder markets for parts of the technology stack? Do we think cybersecurity is simply staying on top of the game of classified systems access?

The announcement of the AUKUS security partnership with an initial focus on cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and undersea capabilities provides an opportunity for change.

So, how might an Australian DARPA work?

First, technological or operational areas of interest would be advanced from the myriad organisations doing research in Australia. Research from these areas would be filtered by an independent board to identify technologies to be pursued. The agency’s role would be to take calculated risks and embrace the approach that projects don’t really fail—they provide lessons to build future success on.

Since the DARPA would develop technologies and systems with game-changing potential, the board would need the engineering, commercial and financial skills and experience to navigate technology industrialisation through the valley of death. Board members would network widely across industry and academia; they should not just be retired military officers or political appointees.

The Australian DARPA would go to industry with calls to address the selected topics, receive and evaluate proposals, and manage the development. Staff would not be public servants but would be experienced people with industry backgrounds and would be appointed for no more than five years. This staffing arrangement, based on the US DARPA practice, is extremely important to ensure that the agency is consistently refreshed with dynamic people and fresh ideas.

The director would be a respected industry person experienced in developing novel technologies and would on a time-limited tenure. The director would report to the independent board, which in turn would report directly to the minister for defence, or a delegated junior minister.

A key part of the Australian DARPA will be funding, particularly the way in which the private and the public funding streams combine. In one sense, the public funding is easy. There’s a budget allocation from government through the minister’s office and the DARPA accounts for the expenditure back through the same channel.

Private funding can play a critical role in both the provision of capital and direct industry engagement. According to Goldman Sachs, there have been 770 private international deals so far in 2021 by hedge funds with a valuation of $153 billion, and early-stage venture capital investments account for nearly three-quarters of that sum.

Private funding would be sought on a case-by-case basis depending on the technology under consideration and the potential for generating a commercial return, based on secondary (non-defence) use and the ability for licensing of that technology in several commercial subsectors. The specific opportunity to receive such licence fees—negotiated on a case-by-case basis­—would be the incentive for specific private-sector funding.

The geostrategic situation is deteriorating. Australia’s challenges are growing and coming closer. While new security arrangements may be useful, they are not the only answer. Australia needs to be able to move quickly to address technological opportunities and operational imperatives. To do this, we need a dynamic innovation organisation that’s able to utilise Australia’s substantial private investor pool and that’s willing to take risks and to move decisively.

An Australian DARPA would build national industry. It would build and retain important capabilities and skills. It would build national resilience. And it would contribute to the national economy by retaining important technologies domestically.

It’s time for an Australian DARPA.

ASPI’s decades: Leaving Afghanistan

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

In October 2013, seven weeks after Australia’s federal election, the new prime minister and new opposition leader stood together in Afghanistan to declare the end to Australia’s longest war. The message from Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten as the Australians left Uruzgan was of a job nobly performed.

There was no claim of victory after 12 years of military effort, and the mission-well-done language was marked by its hesitancy. Duty had been done, the troops were told, and at that point the rhetoric meter started to falter.

Abbott captured both the tone and the balance with his opening words at the ‘recognition ceremony’ at Tarin Kowt: ‘Australia’s longest war is ending, not with victory, not with defeat, but with, we hope, an Afghanistan that’s better for our presence here.’

Neither victory nor defeat was the most provisional of political epitaphs; the military summing up extolled the ‘professionalism and work ethic’ of the Australian Defence Force.

One political judgement was definitive: the bipartisan unanimity of every stage of the Afghanistan saga. The cross-party consensus was remarkable for showing few cracks and never publicly wavering.

Afghanistan joins World War II and Korea as conflicts that did not see Australia’s political parties at war over the war. Afghanistan, indeed, brought broad unity in Canberra on how the war should be fought, as well as the agreement that it was a war worth fighting. That distinguished Afghanistan from World War I, when the agreement on purpose was deeply shaken by the fight over conscription.

The unusual joint visit by Abbott and Shorten expressed the political reality that Labor and the Coalition had both supported an Australian role in the Afghanistan conflict all the way through. Both sides owned the war in government and neither deviated when in opposition.

During our longest war—as anything that looked like victory faded to invisibility—that bipartisan unity persisted; the consensus held even as the nature of the war changed and evolved, Australian casualties rose and popular Australian support fell away.

Unlike in any previous war, Australia’s leaders went to the funerals of those who died serving in Afghanistan, joining with families in mourning while giving assurance on the worth of the mission.

The centrality of the US alliance explains much—probably most—about the unbroken consensus of the Australian polity, as expressed by the four different prime ministers—two Liberal and two Labor—who owned the commitment to Afghanistan: John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Abbott.

Howard, in Washington on the day of the September 11 attacks, never wavered from going along with the US. Rudd performed the difficult balancing act of withdrawing from Iraq while hanging on to the US alliance; a central element in that was the turn back to Afghanistan as the ‘good war’. Whatever elements of the Rudd legacy Gillard disowned, Afghanistan was a mission she embraced as strongly as did either Howard or Rudd.

Beyond the US alliance, what sustained that unanimity? How were Australia’s politicians able to stay committed to Afghanistan when opinion polls showed that the great majority of Australians opposed the war?

One answer is that the Australian people supported the alliance while also being deeply doubtful about the war. And, while the voters expressed their rejection of the Afghanistan war when talking to pollsters, the national mourning at the return of the bodies of Australia’s fallen sons didn’t translate into any political action or activism; only the Greens stood against the Liberal–Labor consensus.

The bipartisan backing for Afghanistan rested on the US alliance, but it drew strength from the professional nature of the ADF. Liberal and Labor leaders were sending volunteers, not conscripts.

That three-way relationship between the people, a professional military and Australia’s politicians was the dynamic that allowed a series of governments to uphold the mission. The true cost was carried by the ADF. What the long mission did to Australia’s soldiers is a reality that is becoming clearer long after the withdrawal from Uruzgan.

Marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between Australia and Afghanistan in 2019, William Maley judged that what ultimately bound the countries was Australia’s strong interest in Afghanistan’s progress down the broad path set in 2001. This was a complex mixture of state-building, institutional development, economic change, civil-society activism, and enhancement of human rights and freedoms. A failure in Afghanistan, Maley wrote, would be catastrophic for regional and global security:

To start with, such a failure would undoubtedly fuel a narrative similar to the one that appeared following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989: that radical religion is a force multiplier that can defeat even a superpower. This would likely have the effect of stimulating the growth of radicalism all the way from the Arab Middle East to the Indonesian archipelago, undermining years of effort directed at countering violent extremism in Australia’s neighbourhood and beyond. A failure in Afghanistan could also trigger very large new flows of Afghan refugees.

In November 2020, after a four-year-long investigation into allegations that members of Australian special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan, 25 soldiers stood accused of murdering 39 unarmed Afghan civilians or prisoners and cruelly treating two others.

The inquiry, led by New South Wales Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton, a major general in the Army Reserve, found credible information about 23 incidents in which one or more non-combatants or prisoners were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian soldiers in circumstances which, if accepted by a jury, would be the war crime of murder. Some of these incidents involved a single victim, and some multiple victims. None of these incidents occurred under pressure in the heat of battle, the report said.

The chief of the ADF, General Angus Campbell, said the report detailed credible information regarding deeply disturbing allegations of unlawful killings: ‘To the people of Afghanistan, on behalf of the Australian Defence Force, I sincerely and unreservedly apologise for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers.’

The executive editor of The Strategist, Brendan Nicholson, made repeated visits to Afghanistan as a correspondent. He penned a piece, from both the heart and head, in response to the Brereton report’s finding:

The war in Afghanistan has profoundly changed the Australian Army and had a significant impact on the whole defence force. Around 30,000 ADF personnel served in Afghanistan and 41 died there. The vast majority of them fought and worked with great courage and decency, many living in small, isolated patrol bases in remote valleys with the Afghan soldiers they mentored.

They did not just teach the Afghans to shoot and then send them on their way; they fought, and some of them died, with those Afghan soldiers.

At the same time, Nicholson wrote, there was another war going on in the mountains and valleys a helicopter ride away. Australian and allied special forces battled through one dangerous operation after another in a conflict fought in darkness, out of sight of the media and the world at large. The special forces had become isolated from the rest of the army. A small minority of them got out of control:

This became a true corporal’s war in which junior NCOs had the authority of kings. On top of that, some officers were treated with contempt by a small number of NCOs who’d spent endless nights on dangerous operations and who undoubtedly did know more about fighting and surviving than those sent to command them. There was also a view by many in the regular army that they’d largely been marginalised through a determination to minimise casualties by using the special forces for just about everything.

When concerns were raised about possible unlawful killings, the army ordered its own investigations. What they uncovered was profoundly disturbing. Something had gone badly wrong on the Afghanistan missions—a deep-seated and distorted warrior ethos permeated parts of the SAS and an entrenched culture of impunity had taken hold there.

US President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021 was ‘an unseemly bolt for the exit’ and Biden’s ‘first big blunder in office’, Peter Jennings wrote: ‘Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump are on a unity ticket, locked onto a bizarre sabotage mission, negotiating, and now honouring, a “diplomatic agreement” with the Taliban, while deserting the very Afghans who have fought with our forces over the past two decades.’

Because of the ‘imminent international military withdrawal from Afghanistan’, Australia closed its embassy in Kabul on 28 May.

Amin Saikal wrote in June that Canberra must ponder whether it had pursued the right strategy, and if it had ever had an appropriate end game. Australia’s diplomatic and military operations had made a positive contribution, he said, especially to the reconstruction and security of Uruzgan:

Yet, most of the good work that Australian diggers and aid workers performed in Uruzgan is now in ruins, as the Taliban have regained control over much of the province.

The closure of the embassy ahead of total military withdrawal releases Australia from a very costly and unwinnable war. Yet, being the first country to disentangle itself from Afghanistan, basically cutting and running, is not a very good look.

And the closure is bound to hamper the investigation of the circumstances surrounding 39 Afghan civilians alleged to have been killed by Australian special forces and the justice that needs to be delivered in this respect. The initial justification of fighting terrorism rings hollow.

Australia served Afghanistan, standing with its US ally and with the ISAF, which delivered a tenuous stability to the country, kept reasonable regimes in power and the Taliban out of power, and helped to begin to build a better country.

The 2021 withdrawal tested the meaning and the resilience of those achievements. As the Taliban predicted, we had the clocks, but they had the time. Twenty years after being evicted, the Taliban retook Kabul.

In mid-2021, Australia’s spending on military operations was at its lowest level since before the ADF deployed to Timor-Leste in 1999.

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

An Australia DARPA would need to do development as well as research

In a recent ASPI report, Robert Clark and Peter Jennings argued for the establishment of an Australian version of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Conceptually, it’s a very good suggestion. However, we need to think deeper about how to take advantage of Australia’s pools of private capital, which are among the largest in the world due to compulsory superannuation. The problem isn’t just about overcoming current budget allocation issues in universities. We need to industrialise innovation and marry it to our strategic purposes.

The need for a new approach to domestic innovation was also raised in a Strategist post by Charley Feros that posed a very relevant question: ‘Why is it so hard for Australia’s innovators to win acceptance by Defence?’

The same question has been asked by innovative Australian companies over decades. To answer it simply, the Department of Defence sees local innovations as carrying a higher risk than those coming from traditional providers overseas. The DARPA proposal advanced by Clark and Jennings is unlikely to overcome this dynamic. Nothing turns the private capital tap off faster than when the pathway of technology development and commercialisation is obscured by opaque and uncertain bureaucracy.

The 2016 defence industry policy statement recognised the problem highlighted by Feros, promising that ‘Defence will change its culture and business processes to systematically remove barriers to innovation’. But not much has changed. In fact, no substantive improvements have occurred since the Howard government’s 1998 strategic policy statement with its claim that ‘Defence and industry will create a culture of one team—Team Australia.’

The strategic environment, however, has changed, and it is becoming increasingly less forgiving. In the past we could promote technological superiority over potential regional adversaries to offset our obvious lack of numbers, but now we are likely to have neither qualitative nor quantitative advantages.

So, we have two significant challenges in addressing this innovation problem. The first is the Defence Department’s culture. The proposal to form an Australian DARPA is correct, but to house it within the Defence Science and Technology Group, with its department-oriented organisational structure and reporting lines, is unlikely to produce the outcomes that the nation needs.

The other challenge is developing asymmetric capabilities to help balance the operational equation, for which we need rapidity and risk-taking. Hans Ohff and Jon Stanford have also highlighted the need for asymmetric capability development.

The answer to both challenges is to establish an Australian DARPA, but to bypass Defence’s culture and bureaucracy. We need an organisation that fosters innovation through constructive risk-taking that addresses the highest potential payoff and develops the most forward-looking technology, not just research. This means a focus on technology readiness levels 4–7.

It also means bringing in people from industry who understand risk in an organisational structure that is agile and not burdened with process-oriented bureaucracy. At the very least, such an organisation would have to have independence from Defence, with its own budget and its own staffing arrangements outside of the Australian public service. It would need to be free to set its own goals and it should have direct reporting lines to the defence minister or an appropriate junior minister. Everything will flow from getting the right people in place.

An Australian DARPA could also take advantage of the immense pools of private investment capital in Australia to augment public funding. Public funding can still provide the backbone of the activity, but private investment could be sought on a case-by-case basis to increase the capital available, or to potentially accelerate the process. Private investors typically have a considerably greater propensity for risk-taking than public-sector organisations, and private investor funding would conceivably be available if innovation projects were likely to result in commercial returns in commercially attractive timeframes.

A public–private partnership approach is therefore necessary, with clear terms and a framework that recognises that it won’t be the usual master–servant relationship, but a partnership with mutual recognition of each other’s needs. Agreements would need to be reached about how and for how long private capital would be tied up, and what the rights for use would be on conclusion.

This type of Australian DARPA could be tasked specifically to investigate and develop asymmetric technologies within a sovereign construct so that we have maximum flexibility to address a rapidly changing strategic environment. Given the strategic nature of sought-after ends, potential developmental projects that could provide asymmetric effects could be regularly sought from academic institutions, research organisations and the private sector.

Collaboration with alliance partners would need to be judiciously assessed. In this increasingly dynamic regional environment, we want to avoid being restricted in what we can do by the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations and US policy more generally.

The benefits of a DARPA-esque organisation in Australia during this time of increasing regional tension would be immense. We would be able to identify projects and technologies that would provide asymmetric effects of direct relevance to our force structure and our modus operandi. We would be better placed to take control of our own destiny rather than relying upon external parties. The Australian Defence Force would directly benefit from being in an improved operational position.

We could use these projects to build the nation’s industrial capability and capacity, not only in the defence industry but in our wider industrial base.

In addition, we could harness the largely untapped funds of private investors for the national good and the development of national capability. And we could potentially contribute to the efforts of our allies by being a source of innovation rather than just a consumer.

Crafting a way ahead for effective Australian deterrence against Chinese threats

ASPI recently published an important report by Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith that focuses on how to plan for Australia’s defence in an environment with reduced warning time. The report raises a broad set of questions about how to know when an event might set in motion a chain of events that pose a direct threat to liberal democratic nations and how to respond early and effectively.

It also raises the question of how to shape the Australian Defence Force’s capabilities so that they can be inserted into a crisis early enough to provide confidence that effective tools to manage escalation are available as well. In essence, the report focuses on ways for Australia to enhance the government’s and the public’s ability to understand the events that affect them and provide a warning in time for Australia to prepare for and manage any crises that arise.

A key example of the warning-time challenge is China’s current posture towards Australia. A particularly noteworthy development is the Chinese ramp-up of pressure on Australia, namely, directly threatening the use of force. Here’s how Dibb put it in a recent interview we did with him:

The Chinese have been clearly communicating for some time that it is now time to teach Australia a lesson. They used similar language against Vietnam in 1979 prior to their invasion. And there are many ways they could generate force to pressure Australia, without directly striking the country, such as take us on in our 200-mile exclusive economic zone, threatening our offshore energy platforms. And by so doing put the challenge directly to Australia.

The Australian government has committed to acquiring a long-range strike capability and to spending serious money in that area. But that is in the mid-term. What should Australia do now as part of a crisis-management approach to such a threat?

A growing focus in the Australian defence community is on options for providing the ADF with a long-range strike capability more quickly. For example, Marcus Hellyer recently raised the possibility of Australia acquiring B-21 Raiders from the United States, but that’s a mid-term option at best.

Again, what can we do now to respond effectively to dangerous sabre-rattling? Clearly, this is an area in which cooperation with the US can provide both allies with enhanced deterrent options now and shape a more effective way ahead. For Australia, it’s about how to build long-range strike into the ADF over the mid- to long term. For the US, it’s about getting a better understanding of how bombers and the US Navy fleet can work more effectively together.

In other words, there’s an option that provides a building block for the way ahead to a long-range-strike-enabled ADF and for the US to learn how to more effectively operate its joint naval and air capabilities in the Pacific both within its own services and with allies.

In the past, the US has brought B-1 bombers to participate in exercises with the ADF in northern Australia. Now, a rotational force of B-2s could bring a stealth bomber capability to Australia’s defence. It would not only be an important input to responding to China but would also underscore to the Chinese that their military build-up in the Pacific and specifically directed against Australia is not in their own interests.

For now, it would be a modest response, but the integration of US Air Force bombers into the ADF has to be taken seriously in the face of continued direct threats against Australia. By training the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Australian Navy to work with the B-2s, B-1s and B-52s, those two key Australian power-projection forces can train with an operational long-range strike asset. That would demonstrate that long-range strike isn’t primarily focused on reaching downtown Beijing, but rather on providing rapidly deployable enhancements to air–naval taskforces throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

Such a strategy would also enable Australia to determine if the B-21 is the right fit or whether there are other ways to bring long-range strike to the operating force. And it would help guide decisions on building the kind of sovereign missile industry Australia desires—which is not simply about buying off-the-shelf US or European kit. For it’s also clear that allies like the US need a different approach to the one they have followed to date to get a less expensive and more effective mix of strike assets.

And as the US shapes a more effective support strategy for allies’ approaches in the region, the US Navy and the US Air Force will need to work on more effective integration of the bomber force with the operating fleet. In our forthcoming book for US Naval Institute Press on maritime kill webs, 21st century warfighting and deterrence, we argue that a kill-web approach that integrates bomber and fleet operations can empower significantly greater collaboration between air and sea services and provide a more survivable, lethal and distributed force. And this is not about preparing to fight World War III; it’s about effective crisis and escalation management.

Part of the way ahead would be to build reinforced bases from which US bombers could operate in the near to mid-term as Australia builds out its own desired capabilities. These bases could be used for rotations to exercise with the ADF or to reinforce Australian defence in a crisis.

These proposals are about taking the US–Australia alliance forward in an effective way to deal with the defence of Australia today, and not simply speculating about the long-term options. It’s also about demonstrating to Beijing that bullying isn’t going to lead to the compliance of the liberal democratic states to a future Chinese global order. China’s leaders need to pause and consider what Australia as an arsenal for democracy might mean to their future as well.

ASPI’s decades: Building submarines and warships

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

Australian naval shipbuilding has a long history. Calling it a chequered history only just captures the drama and the dollars of the determination to make our own ships and submarines.

More than any other area of defence procurement, shipbuilding consistently captures the nation’s attention, Hugh White, ASPI’s first executive director, observed in 2002, ‘from the troubled Government shipyards of the 1950s and 1960s through to the Collins submarine project of the 1990s. Naval construction is a challenging, and at times risky, billion-dollar business’.

After selling off its defence factories, the federal government spent the final two decades of the 20th century insisting on arm’s-length competition for all defence contracts.

Then, in 2001, the government announced a new approach. It would reduce competition and instead build long-term relationships with major defence suppliers. Shipbuilding—‘the jewel in the defence industry crown’—would be the testbed, and an ASPI report offered proposals for ‘modest but valuable’ reform:

  • Do not force an outcome on the industry as a whole. Let commercial forces decide how many shipbuilders we can support in this country.
  • Smooth out the shipbuilding workload later in the decade, so the industry does not face a boom and bust cycle.
  • Reform naval repair and maintenance, to better support the ships at sea and the industry.
  • Sell ASC [Australian Submarine Corporation] to the highest competent bidder, allowing new firms to enter the industry which might be able to bring non-defence work to the corporation.
  • Avoid buying Australian-unique systems which seldom offer operational advantages to offset the very high costs and risks they impose.

Reviewing the Collins-class submarine in 2006, Patrick Walters called it Australia’s most ambitious and controversial defence project:

No major defence procurement project in Australian history has generated such an extraordinary saga of strategic, commercial and bureaucratic rivalries, technical snags, cultural misunderstandings, political interference and genuine national achievement as the building of the Collins Class vessels.

Walters concluded that the Commonwealth’s $5 billion investment in Collins had given Australia a key strategic asset and greatly boosted the skills of our naval construction industry.

In Keeping our heads below water, Andrew Davies in 2008 advocated going from the six Collins boats to 12 future submarines:

The project risks arising from the ‘stop start’ approach to building submarine classes could be mitigated by a rolling production model of continuous building. That would require a fleet of probably twelve boats to sustain, but the unit cost of each would be brought down and industry sustainment would be much more manageable. This approach would require a sustained government funding commitment beyond the usual forward estimate period.

The desire to load the new design with high-end capabilities at the leading edge of submarine technology, Davies wrote, must be balanced against the need for a design that could be delivered close to schedule and budget.

Davies gave the 2009 defence white paper a tick for announcing 12 new submarines, but also a kick for a significant omission: it gave no cost estimate for the project. To fill that hole, Davies and Sean Costello offered their estimate—$36 billion (in 2009 dollars)—a controversial calculation, subject to much argument, that eventually became the benchmark figure.

At $3.04 billion each, the most expensive conventional submarines ever built would be large, complex and expensive—and a bespoke Australian design. Because ASC had been retained under government ownership, Davies and Costello wrote, the Commonwealth would be better placed to evaluate the designs, but ‘ASC should not be handed the build contract as a fait accompli’.

In 2010, ASPI went Naval gazing to consider the future of Australia’s shipbuilding and repair sector, drawing views from the federal and state governments and industry:

Some common themes emerged: the challenge of delivering the Defence White Paper’s planned expansion of the naval fleet, the need to manage the workflow for industry to avoid a ‘boom and bust’ pattern, and the need for Australian industry to be competitive in a global marketplace.

At the end of 2011, Andrew Davies lamented that the nation’s biggest ever engineering undertaking, Subaqueana australis, was listing. The saga of the Collins fleet made Canberra uncomfortable about ‘throwing good money after bad’ on the future submarine. The principals in charge of the project weren’t making an authoritative case to steer ahead.

Treating Collins and the future submarine as stand-alone problems, Davies said, increased the chance of a future capability gap between the two classes. Fixing the Collins’ problems and developing technologies to go into the future boats could be the same activity. Davies’ judgement was that an ‘evolved Collins’ looked the best bet.

In 2012, Davies and Mark Thomson pronounced that the promise of the 2009 defence white paper for 2030—a force of 12 new, highly capable, long-range submarines—wasn’t going to happen: ‘We’re already past the point at which a force of that size and capability can be in place even by the mid‑2030s.’

Mind the gap explored the options to fill the gap, to get serious about subs: ‘The government needs to ratchet up the priority of the project and marshal the resources needed to accomplish the task.’

After the election of the Abbott government in 2013, ASPI held a conference to discuss Australia’s submarine choice. Feedback from the 220 attendees pointed to a striking message: ‘the lack of agreement from Defence, the Navy and the Australian Government on design, capability requirements and numbers for the Future Submarine project’.

The Abbott government turned towards a version of Japan’s Soryu-class submarine (dubbed ‘Option J’), setting up a competition with designs from Germany or France.

The battle over the new boat bounced in many directions, from the billions to the battery technology. Why should Australia build its own submarines? What were the benefits of deepening the Japan defence relationship? In Japan versus Europe, would Prime Minister Tony Abbott would do a ‘captain’s pick’ for Japan. The sub was a wonderful case study of defence acquisition, Davies observed:

Because of its scale and time frame, it spans every aspect of defence decision-making from long-term strategic crystal ball gazing, including the possible impact of future technologies, through military strategy development and force structuring, all the way to robust politics of shipyard jobs.

For The Strategist, the submarine has consistently generated headlines, with arguments for big submarines, little submarines, conventional submarines, nuclear submarines, no submarines, and the protest that Australia’s ultimate choice was a preposterous submarine.

The Turnbull government’s 2016 choice of France’s DCNS (now Naval Group) as the international partner for the design of the 12 subs merely ended one stage of the saga.

The dollars being fed the boat made it ‘the very hungry future submarine’.

Submarines: your questions answered, published in November 2020, had nearly 40 significant questions to answer. The specialist world of defence procurement could provoke argument at an Aussie barbecue, Peter Jennings noted:

Why are they so expensive? Why do we need 12 of them? Why build them here? Why not nuclear propulsion? Why a French design? Why not an American, German, Japanese or Swedish design? Aren’t submarines obsolete, to be replaced by drones? Won’t technology make the oceans transparent?

Australia set out on a multi-decade undertaking to build ships and subs, but in 2018 Andrew Davies worried that we were making it up as went go along in a high-risk enterprise, with inadequate governance, and a piecemeal approach to managing risk.

Reflecting on ASPI’s two decades of worrying about the cash–kit–capability nexus, Davies lamented:

I think we’re still paying too much, both in dollar terms and in broader opportunity costs, for our defence capability. And we’re being too patient about getting it. I haven’t won many friends in defence industry with my views on local procurement versus off-the-shelf purchases, but that’s something I’m unrepentant about. What we have today is an uneasy amalgam of defence capability development and defence industry sector support, hiding behind a veneer of ‘sovereign capability’ or ‘jobs and growth’.

If Australia’s strategic circumstances looked more benign, Davies wrote, this would be only a misuse of resources, ‘but it runs the risk of also being a dreadful strategic oversight’.

Since Vietnam, Michael Shoebridge wrote in 2018, Australia had had a small defence force with a clear technological edge over potential adversaries. That had given governments confidence that Australian forces would prevail—and suffer minimal casualties.

Unfortunately, Shoebridge noted, that edge had dissipated because of military modernisation across the region. Regional militaries operating near-peer capabilities would inflict combat losses on the Australian Defence Force:

Ships, aircraft and vehicles that are lost in combat with their ADF operators are almost impossible to replace in a timely way given their complex nature. The lead time for getting a new ship is at least five years. For an F-35, it’s a matter of joining a global queue.

But even if a new platform was available, the bigger limiting factor to sustaining combat of this type is that replacing skilled military personnel takes years, and, in some cases, over a decade. That means we might be deploying a force that’s unable to sustain itself against losses long enough to prevail. That’s a fancy way of saying it would probably lose.

The changing risk equation meant the Defence Department should focus beyond the low-number, high-capability formula it had used for decades.

As well as protecting advanced kit from loss, Shoebridge said, Defence needed lots of complementary consumables that could be deployed, lost and replaced in numbers.

Australia’s chequered history of shipbuilding faces a crowded and complex strategic chessboard.