Hugh White, in his new book How to defend Australia, calls for a complete revision of Australia’s grand strategy and the force structure we maintain for our defence. His basic premise is simple. China is now so powerful that its domination of the East Asian and Southeast Asian periphery is inevitable, if not an accomplished fact. The era of America’s primacy has ended, and the result can only be the weakening and likely collapse of the alliance and security arrangements that have prevailed largely unchallenged for many decades.

In this situation, middle powers like Australia must look after their own security without the expectation—or even hope—of great-power support. White doesn’t believe that there are either sufficiently aligned interests or enough collective resolve for Australia to rely on any of the other actors in the region. Indeed, he suggests that there are enough possible sources of contention with India, Indonesia and even Japan that these nations need to be factored into Australia’s risk assessments.

White’s solution is to fall back on the defence of the Australian continent (which includes Tasmania but not our Indian Ocean islands) through what he terms a strategy of ‘maritime denial’ in which a combination of submarines, strike aircraft and long-range precision weaponry will constitute so formidable a proposition for any would-be aggressor that Australia can be sure of maintaining its territorial integrity.

He recognises that a force powerful enough to be an effective deterrent will involve much greater expenditure on defence than in the recent past. The money and the people will be found by the ruthless disposal of unsuitable capabilities (most notably, most of the current and planned surface combatants and amphibious units) in combination with increased taxation.

White has employed his unique place in the nation’s ‘strategic mafia’ to make a loud call for a different approach to grand strategy and to national defence. He is right to do so at a time when our strategic environment is becoming both more complex and more threatening. Above all, he’s right to urge that we take a dispassionate and coherent approach to Australia’s national security, one that truly reflects Australia’s independent national interests. But whether his proposals are right for Australia is another matter.

There are several problems with this book and its basic thesis. The first is the way the argument is made. White is one of the best writers in contemporary public life. His prose is eloquent and he has a remarkable ability to mount and sustain a debate. Yet there are rhetorical tricks which, once recognised, must create doubt in the mind of the reader, while loaded language is employed to describe decisions or events he doesn’t approve of.

The truth is there’s a certain amount of White’s own past as a senior defence bureaucrat infused in the text. Old policy and acquisition battles lost and won are reflected in the analysis, perhaps with residual bitterness about the ones lost. Criticism sometimes appears to be for its own sake—as in strictures against the navy’s new offshore patrol vessels, despite their appearing to fit almost exactly the form and function of the residual surface fleet which White proposes.

What are offered as possibilities early in the text eventually evolve into outright assertions, while in citing (not always correctly) historical examples, White is quick to insert counterfactuals—but only on his side of the argument. In his analysis of the Falklands War of 1982, for example, White comments that more powerful Argentinian air and submarine forces would have produced a very different result.

That’s true, but, to come at it from the other way, if the British had possessed basic airborne early warning and control—a capability which they were able to make operational just after the end of the war—their losses would have been much, much smaller. In short, the writing is fluent, but the analysis unbalanced.

Another problem is that the thesis not only focuses on classical state-on-state conflicts but rests upon a belief that nations must act solely to protect their own interests. White even cites Britain’s 19th-century prime minister and foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, to that effect. The result is that White largely rejects the value of alliances in our new strategic environment.

The fact that the British were always prepared to involve themselves in alliances when and where needed is given little recognition. White is right not to minimise the challenges of our relationships with India, Indonesia and Japan, but he is wrong to be so dismissive of our potential to work together to mutual benefit. Much more should have been said about why he thinks partnerships can’t work in the 21st-century Indo-Pacific.

The fixation with traditional state-on-state rivalries creates another concern. Our strategic environment is becoming increasingly complex not just because of changing power balances, but because of other developments in the world around us, of which climate change is perhaps the most important.

No future grand strategy can ignore this reality, either in the requirement to manage these problems directly or to cope with the knock-on effects, which may well result in new sources of interstate conflict. White says very little about this and the book feels curiously old-fashioned as a result. Nor is much thought given to the ways in which a potential adversary could seek to apply strategic pressure on Australia indirectly—for example, by fomenting instability in Australia’s environs.

Lower- and higher-order threats are not easily separable as White’s thesis implies. Indeed, his prescription for investing so narrowly in high-end military capabilities reads like a virtual invitation for potential adversaries to think of innumerable ways to make life difficult for an isolated Australia, against which White’s highly specialised, high-end force structure would be ill-equipped to respond.

Despite his lucid exposition of the concepts of sea control and sea denial, White fails to grasp that not all strategy is about territory. This has long been a fundamental problem with his approach to Australia’s defence. In part, White’s constant failure to recognise how vital the continued passage of shipping is to our existence can be excused by his conviction that the protection of merchant ships is now an impossibility.

He believes not only that attacks on shipping will come only as part of a major, unlimited conflict but that any threat to one’s own sea lanes can best be met by threatening the adversary’s sea communications in turn. There are ironies here. First, many of White’s arguments about the complexity of commerce and ownership making the targeting of merchant shipping improbable, if not impossible, were made before 1914. Second, as recent events in the Strait of Hormuz have confirmed, threats to merchant shipping still manifest themselves in many ways and at many levels of conflict.

Most critically, White gives very little time to Australia’s energy dependence and how it would affect his strategy of denial. He proposes stockpiling fuel and looking at our refining capability, but doesn’t say much about how supplies could be managed in the long term, whether to operate our military assets or to keep the nation itself at work.

In this aspect above all, White’s proposals are analogous to designing the fortifications and defensive weapons for a castle without ensuring provision of its water supply. Without the latter, no matter how sophisticated the catapults, it will only be a matter of time before the fortress must fall—and without the need for much action by the besieging force.

It’s significant that White should use his own interpretation of Britain’s historical strategy as the foundation for analysing the Australian situation. It’s true that the British sought to secure the English Channel, ensure that no great power gained control of the low countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), and prevent any single power from dominating the European continent. But this is incomplete as a description of what the British needed to do.

By the end of Palmerston’s career, the combined effects of Britain’s adoption of free trade and the industrial revolution were creating new dependencies. Britain had become vulnerable not in relation to energy—its coal fields prevented that—but food. Where Australia has only a few weeks of fuel to hand, Britain had only a few weeks of wheat and other staples, creating the same need to ensure the protection of such vital supplies.

The technological factors which White employs to support his ideal force structure are also curiously dated and incomplete. In this context, White’s ideal reflects a paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s, not 2019 and after—which may indicate that White is no exception to the problem all of us have in keeping up with technological change.

What’s particularly surprising is the limited space given to the networks and sensors which will be vital to making ‘maritime denial’ work, as well as limited acknowledgement of the challenges Australia would face in maintaining the ‘system of systems’ of sensors, communications, targeting and platforms such as the F-35 without substantial external assistance.

What’s even more surprising is the relative absence of analysis of the stresses that cyberattacks will put on these systems, the extent to which cyber warfare will be interwoven with kinetic effects, and the extent to which we will need to develop capabilities that can operate in electromagnetic and data environments that are highly contested. This may be because some of the assertions as to the absolute superiority of White’s favoured systems in combat could thus be called into question.

In sum, How to defend Australia is an engaging read on a very important subject, but must be studied with great care, a critical eye and constant awareness that there is more to national strategy than fortress defence.

Its value lies not so much in the credibility of the author’s construct for our future security but as the start of a conversation that Australia needs to have in the light of new uncertainties.

Australians—and not just members of the media—are right to be alarmed about police raids on the ABC and a newspaper journalist’s home.

Every nation has an obligation to safeguard information that might threaten its security.

But a worrying aspect of the raids on the ABC’s Sydney offices is that they appear to be closely related to a parallel investigation into very serious allegations which, if proven, will certainly expose a major national security issue. The raids appear to have been focused on finding the sources of information given to journalists who were investigating allegations that a small number of Australian special forces soldiers killed children and unarmed prisoners in Afghanistan.

If those allegations, now under official investigation, prove to be true and if war crimes have been committed by Australian personnel, then exposing them and preventing them from being repeated is clearly in the national interest. If the allegations prove not to be true, having had an effective investigation is also in the national interest.

In Afghanistan, the ‘OPSEC’ cloak may have contributed to an unintended consequence of making it possible for individuals involved in questionable behaviour to keep it under wraps. Those who did object to actions they considered potentially illegal or immoral could find themselves ostracised or driven out of a unit for betraying their brothers.

But, while there have been repeated dark hints that ‘this is all about jealously’, the reality is that the concerns about the behaviour of some in the special forces were raised by former members of those units who were appalled by what was alleged to have happened.

In 2016, the then special forces commander, Major-General Jeff Sengelman, is understood to have been concerned enough about the persistent allegations to have raised them with Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, who was then chief of the army. General Campbell, now chief of the ADF, is also a former special forces commander.

They commissioned a sociologist, Samantha Crompvoets, to interview soldiers from the special forces and other ADF units and members of agencies who worked with them to assess whether there were serious cultural issues in the units.

Dr Crompvoet’s report confirmed that there appeared to be serious problems with the behaviour of some members of the Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan that may have extended to unsanctioned and illegal violence.

Journalists had also been made aware of claims which emerged separately from former special forces members that Australians had killed unarmed civilians. In some cases, witnesses within the ADF suffered serious mental health consequences that drove them to leave the ADF or to redeploy within it.

Campbell and Sengelman called in New South Wales Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton, an army reserve officer, to head an inquiry on behalf of the inspector-general of the ADF. Brereton’s initial brief was to separate fact from fiction and to ascertain whether there was truth in the allegations.

In September 2017, Brereton made a public call for anyone with relevant information to come forward. Some former soldiers responded.

His inquiry is expected to continue until late this year, and possibly into next year. It appears that it is no longer about rumours. Serious matters have emerged.

As that investigation quietly progressed, Campbell appointed the former director-general of intelligence and security, David Irvine, to examine what had to be done to strengthen the lines of command and accountability in the special forces.

One issue of concern to the authorities appears to be that the material leaked contained the names of special forces soldiers. But the ABC did not include those names in its reports in what seems to have been responsible journalism cognisant of national security.

As concern and confusion reigned this week over the raids and what they meant for press freedom and the need to protect whistleblowers, acting AFP commissioner Neil Gaughan called a media conference at which he said the police were investigating the fact that top secret and secret information was disclosed to the Australian community. ‘The issue of whether or not the public had the right to know was not an issue that came into the investigation process’, Gaughan said.

Such complaints were made by departmental secretaries, he said. In this case, it was deemed to be likely that an offence had been committed so the police made their independent decision to investigate.

Gaughan said the two people alleged to have been involved in the disclosure of that material to journalists did not avail themselves of the public interest disclosure defence.

The acting commissioner said it was important that people realised that the police were strongly of the view that top secret and secret information must be protected.

The government, and particularly the law enforcement and intelligence communities, relied on top secret and secret information from international partners such as the fellow members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing community, the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, to keep the Australian community safe. ‘If we can’t be seen to protect our own internal information, we are concerned the information flow to us dries up.’

Gaughan said the ABC was told in advance that the police were coming.

While Gaughan clearly set out to throw some facts into the mix, another key question that remains is whether the information reported by the journalists is actually top secret, or did they just reveal problems someone might prefer were kept quiet?

Gaughan said If Australia is to continue the decades-old pattern of sending troops on peacekeeping and peacemaking operations, then it faces no more serious national security issue than resolving these war crime allegations and doing so with a level of public transparency and accountability.

They may ultimately be proven or found to be untrue. But seeking to track down and punish those with the courage to raise concerns about unlawful behaviour and the journalists who made the allegations public will only serve to discourage others from exposing any future bad behaviour.

And that is certainly a major national security issue.

Australia’s defence force structure has evolved over many years around defending the ‘sea–air gap’ as a perceived strategic moat. That construct dates back to the late 1980s, when the outlook was far more benign and Australia’s military–technological edge in the region was unchallenged. The reality in 2018 is that the strategic context has changed dramatically. The next defence white paper cannot simply suggest we drift forward on autopilot from the 2016 edition, in which the first strategic defence objective (paragraph 3.12) was clearly still centred on the sea–air gap.

I’ve argued that Australia needs to move on from the sea–air gap and embrace a new strategy of ‘forward defence in depth’ that seeks to project our military power and presence deep into the Indo-Pacific and the Southwest Pacific, with an emphasis on anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities and tactics.

What forward defence in depth means in terms of actual force structure choices is the final piece of the puzzle.

We’re talking about long-range power projection, first and foremost. The retirement of the F-111 from the RAAF in 2010 tore open a large gap in our power-projection capability that has yet to be filled. The F-35, while technologically at the apex of combat aircraft development, lacks the range and payload to really project power in a responsive manner.

Two solutions are obvious. The first requires new initiatives in defence diplomacy to negotiate access agreements with regional partners to deploy the F-35 (and other combat aircraft) to forward bases beyond the Australian mainland. ASPI’s Peter Jennings makes this point with regard to Manus Island, and Anthony Bergin recently went further, suggesting that Micronesia, including Guam, may be useful for the ADF. It’s a model that could be applied elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.

The second step is to acquire new military capabilities through US foreign military sales. As a matter of urgency, the RAAF should look towards equipping forward-deployed aircraft with longer range missiles. Both the F-35 and Super Hornet could carry the JASSM-XR cruise missile, which will have a range of 1,800 kilometres.

For the navy, I’ve argued previously that land-attack cruise missiles like the Block IV Tomahawk should be installed on our Hobart-class destroyers and the future Hunter-class frigates. The Tomahawk and its stealthier cousin, the LRASM, would give the RAN a long-range anti-surface warfare capability which it currently lacks with the Harpoon missile.

In the longer term though, as Kim Beazley recently argued, there’s a serious problem with Australia’s force-readiness. The current plans for our future force structure depend heavily on Attack-class submarines to provide long-range strike and deterrence. However, political interests in sustaining naval shipbuilding mean that the first of those won’t appear until the mid-2030s (at the earliest) and a sizeable force won’t be available until the late 2040s. They are a capability for the war after next, not the next war. In the meantime, the RAN must depend on ageing (though upgraded) Collins-class boats.

An approach that means our next major platform won’t be available for at least 13 years is not an adequate response to our rapidly changing security outlook. The next defence white paper needs to identify capabilities and deployments that will enable the ADF to project power quickly at very long range (such as into the South China Sea or deep into the South Pacific) in the next few years.

A good A2/AD system must combine a survivable and effective intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) component with a strike capability. Australia’s current long-range ISR approach is centred on acquiring 15 P-8A Poseidon aircraft, and six (possibly seven) MQ-4C Triton high-altitude long endurance unmanned aircraft to undertake maritime surveillance. They will be supported by the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN), which offers surveillance up to 3,000 kilometres from three bases in central Australia.

Extending JORN coverage north could be achieved by adding new transmitters. An additional transmitter at RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory would significantly extend the network’s reach into the southern part of the South China Sea. Negotiating with New Zealand to host a transmitter on the North Island would extend coverage deep into the South Pacific and provide complete air and sea surveillance support to the New Zealand Defence Force.

The decision to limit Australia’s fleet of Tritons to six or seven gives the RAAF a minimum capability depending on operational demands. Buying additional aircraft would give greater mission assurance. The number of airframes required would be determined by the complexity of operational demands.

Triton and JORN could also be supplemented with a robust space-based ISR capability that would enable us to see deeper into a hemispheric battlespace. From low-earth orbit, we could cue and employ long-range strike capabilities more rapidly and effectively. Defence’s DEF-799 Phase 2 project provides a golden opportunity to acquire such capabilities quickly and affordably.

We should open our minds to the new strike capabilities that could be considered in the next white paper. First on the list should be hypersonic standoff weapons that could be launched from land, air or sea to undertake rapid, long-range land strike and anti-surface warfare.

Australia is a leading player in the research and development of hypersonics and this capability shouldn’t be left in the lab. The likely collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty would, ironically, open up opportunities for Australia to develop non-nuclear long-range, high-speed strike capabilities.

Unmanned combat air systems (UCAS) are also on the horizon. These aircraft could restore the long-range punch the RAAF lost with the retirement of the F-111, complement the F-35 into the 2030s and support Australia’s strike and surveillance capability into the 2040s and beyond. The next defence white paper should commit to the acquisition of UCAS, perhaps in collaboration with the US or our European partners, either for AIR 6000 Phase 6 or as an entirely new project.

Developing these capabilities will cost money. The 2016 white paper’s commitment to increase defence spending to 2% of GDP has been overtaken by events. It’s far from clear that 2% of GDP will be enough to fund Australia’s defence. It’s now time to make the political case that defence spending should be driven by strategic need and not by an arbitrary figure.

The Australian Army did pretty well post-INTERFET, gaining two extra battalions and some new tanks and artillery. But today the Army has pretty much taken a back seat to Air Force and Navy in the headlines in the defence press, and in public and government discussions of Defence projects and spending. Expensive and/or controversial jets and fluoro vests in shipyards are more saleable for politicians and punters alike.

The Army also seems to be the poor relative in terms of major projects, consistently receiving a smaller fraction of the capital investment budget than the other services. To some extent that relative lack of capital funding is understandable, as the Army has far greater personnel costs. The public profile makes sense too; the sums involved in the naval building program and the visibility of the fast jet acquisitions make them more contentious (and often more photogenic) than Army’s more dispersed capability investments. Because of its structure, in times of tight budgets Army is the most susceptible to ‘penny packeting’, by cutting vehicle fleets or spreading purchases out over longer periods.

Army’s LAND 400 project to up-armour its vehicle fleet is just getting into its stride. Shortlisting for Phase 2, to replace the ASLAV armed reconnaissance platform with just over 250 vehicles, was announced recently. But the next phase for 450 Infantry Fighting Vehicles is an even bigger part of the perhaps $15 billion project. And it’s also where opportunities could open up for Army to exploit if it’s agile enough.

The 2016 Defence Budget contained promises of some big spending boosts over the next decade—somewhere between $160 and $190 billion, compared to just $70 billion in the past decade. Providing that nothing happens to weaken the bipartisan resolve to increase defence spending (such as a tantalisingly close budget surplus preceding an election), Defence is likely to have more money than it can spend, creating opportunities for anyone who can fast track spending.

By Mark Thomson’s estimate (p.142) the annual rate of increase in the investment budget will be a whopping 7.7% in real terms. The Howard government’s post-2000 White Paper and 9/11 spending increases saw Defence get an extra 5.3% a year, with investment increasing by 5.4% a year. But Defence handed back unspent money in four years and deferred tens of billions of dollars of spending. (Thomson, p.148)

That’s enough to cast doubt on the feasibility of being able to expend the promised funds over the next decade. But the Turnbull government’s taken some policy decisions that’ll make it harder still. The Howard government spending included a number of big off-the-shelf purchases (Super Hornets, C-17s, Abrams tanks, HMAS Choules) and the hybrid ‘hull off-the-shelf fitting out done locally’ approach taken to acquire the LHDs. It was relatively easy to shovel money into those purchases. Less successful in terms of moving dollars through doorways were the developmental projects undertaken post-2000 (air warfare destroyers, Wedgetail and multi-role tanker transport aircraft, and two developmental helicopters in the MRH-90 Taipan and ARH Tiger). The take home lesson was that spending is easiest when buying proven equipment from established production lines.

But the government now has a defence industry policy that emphasises innovation and local spending. The word ‘innovation’ appears in the Defence Industry Policy Statement no fewer than 186 times, while ‘off-the-shelf’ appears once—in a box looking back to the post-2000 White Paper period. And the PM said that ‘every dollar we spend on defence procurement as far as possible should be spent in Australia’.

There’s nothing wrong with innovation, in its place. It’s what provides the ‘capability edge’ so beloved by White Paper authors and underpins hopes for a new ‘offset strategy‘. And Australian industry can certainly contribute some great ideas. But it takes time to move from innovation to production. Trying to rush it leads to big problems down the track, which leads to schedule delays and, paradoxically, slower than expected spending. A corollary of Augustine’s XXIVth Law is that ‘the best way to slow down a major project is to accelerate it’. And, before I ease off on beating the dead horse, I’ll just note that the more developmental and more ‘Australianised’ the project, the more it’s likely to be delayed.

The timeframe for the cutting of steel on the future frigate and offshore patrol vessel projects, driven in no small part by the politics of shipyard jobs, is pretty aggressive. It’s possible that once serious scoping work is done there’ll be a delay in getting to work, as the alternative’s to rush into production with designs still in flux. If so, a plan for LAND 400 that’s flexible and able to be ‘surged’ might be just what a department staring down the barrel of a significant underspend is looking for. That much of the work can be done in Australia without a lot of tooling up and industrial restructuring can only help.

Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that LAND 400 would acquire an additional 1,300 vehicles, rather than the 450 currently in Phase 3. The error was the author’s.

Way back when, we started our professional lives in theoretical physics. And sometimes it shows; we’ve never met a data set we didn’t like, and from time to time there’s an outbreak of ‘let’s see what we can do with this’.

So it was with the database of more than a quarter of a million contracts let by Defence or the then defence Materiel Organisation between 2007 and 2014. As well as being a useful source of information about expenditure on particular items or projects—thus offsetting to some extent the lamentable lack of transparency that’s otherwise the case from Defence—there’s enough data there to conduct some macro analysis.

With such a large data set, we can check that the overall statistical properties are what we’d expect. If we were to find any anomalies, we’d have an interesting line of investigation regarding Defence’s contracting practices. As it happens, we didn’t turn up anything untoward, which is reassuring, but we did manage to demonstrate a couple of interesting mathematical properties of the data set. (You can take the boys out of the physics department…)

The first observation concerns the distribution of contracts by value. It’s not surprising that there are fewer contracts as the value increases, but it is surprising just how predictable the numbers are. The graph below plots the number of DMO projects between $10 million and $100 million (in bands of $10 million) over the period 2007 to 2014. All nine data points are remarkably well fitted by a simple Power Law function with only two parameters. That means that knowing any two values on the curve allows us to predict any other. For example, if we know how many contracts were let between $10–20 million and $20–30 million, we can predict the number between $70–80 million with high confidence. (For the statistically minded, the regression value is 0.9824.)

The obvious question is why? It turns out that this is a general property of large data sets with a couple of not-so-unusual properties and Power Law distributions are common in science and economics. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, Power Law distributions were observed in income distributions (Pareto), word frequencies (Zipf’s law) and the distribution of population size in cities (another Zipf’s law, explained in a technical paper here (PDF). Journal citations, book sales, earthquake magnitudes, company size, stock market movements, web hits, individual net worth, executive remuneration and even the diameter of craters on the moon (PDF) follow the same pattern.

It’s not entirely clear (at least to us) what aspects of Defence contracting cause it to fit the power law model—though it’s possible that the distribution of contract size mirrors the distribution of the size of firms that are counterparties to the contracts, which is known to follow a power law (PDF). (You can find a more thorough discussion in chapter nine of this year’s ASPI budget brief.)

Regardless of the reason, the distribution does what it ought to, and it also mirrors the distribution of contracts let by the US government. Presenting the data in a slightly different way, the graph below shows the value of the top 100 contracts let by the US government and by DMO, ordered by contract size. The scale is different (the largest American contract is US$36.3 billion to Lockheed Martin, while Australia’s largest is a little over AU$4 billion as part of the air warfare destroyer project) but both follow a power law with more than 97% correlation.

One other property we can check is a quirky aspect of many data sets known as Benford’s Law, which concerns the leading digits of entries in the data. The law says that the leading digit is more likely to be a ‘1’ than any other digit, that ‘2’ is the next most likely, and so on, in a predictable relative frequency. It’s not intuitively obvious, but it’s a common enough pattern that it can even be used for forensic accounting (recommended video); people fiddling the books tend to distribute their dodgy numbers in a non-Benford pattern. (And if the first digit doesn’t betray them, the second or third will.)

The graph below shows how DMO’s contracts stack up against Benford’s Law. It’s not an exact match, but the relative frequency falls off progressively by digit as expected. The difference is probably due to threshold effects in the contracting and approvals system—a glance at the raw data shows a sudden leap in the number of contracts at $10,000, for example.

Source: ASPI analysis of AusTender database.

Overall, our analysis results in what a scientist would call a ‘null result’. That is, there’s no clear evidence of anything beyond the ability of mundane explanations to describe. In this case that’s a good thing—we don’t want to find exotic phenomena in Defence’s spending habits!