Tag Archive for: AUSMIN 2020

Defence and industry could fund cutting-edge university research with Five Eyes allies

The recent AUSMIN cabinet-level meeting between Australia and the US pointed to the growing importance of ‘collaboration on civilian science, technology, and innovation’ as being critical to ‘develop new industries, drive economic growth, and enhance [Defence] readiness’.

Increasingly our university sector is being looked to to develop the critical ‘enabling technologies’ that provide a capability edge, not only for important defence projects but also for a wide range of broader national security needs.

Released just prior to AUSMIN, the government’s new strategic update focuses not just on major defence equipment upgrades but also redoubles efforts on science and technology. On information technology the policy sets out that Defence will need to plan for developments including next-generation secure wireless networks, artificial intelligence and augmented analytics, as well as robotics and immersive and quantum technologies. Beyond Australia, our traditional allies in the Five Eyes partnership (the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand) have similar technology needs.

The relatively short science and technology paragraphs in the defence statement show that $1.2 billion has been earmarked across the coming decade for research and development of next-generation technologies, $800 million for the Defence Innovation Hub with its focus on prototype development and $5 billion for IT.

All of this presents a significant opportunity for universities that are willing to work with Defence across the Five Eyes countries and take steps to protect their systems and research, particularly when their funding base has been hit hard by Covid-19 impacts. This has been amplified by worrying geopolitical trends in our region and a heightening of cyberattacks on Australian interests.

As one of the mechanisms to address the funding issues of our universities and our security needs, we propose a Defence Department and defence industry funded and prioritised university research partnership with alliance nations. This would be strategic and timely. It adds a new dimension to strengthen our alliances and contribute to Australia’s defence and national security capability edge and to the economy. We believe it would have the support of the Australian public, alliance partners and university researchers alike.

The core of the university problem is that a substantial proportion of Australian research relies on cross-subsidy from international student teaching revenue, predominantly students from China. Universities have additionally looked to China for research funding support through direct research partnerships of significant scale. Australian universities do world-class research and rate well in world rankings. The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the excellence of university medical research administered by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Equally excellent non-medical research, in science and technology and the humanities, is administered by the Australian Research Council through the National Competitive Grants Program. The problem is not one of excellence but of funding. Research funds would need to double to cover the widened gap that is filled by international student cross-subsidy.

Of equal excellence is mission-oriented research carried out by our important government agencies—CSIRO, the Defence Science and Technology Group, Geosciences Australia, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and others. These agencies alone cannot, however, cover the bases in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

Fundamental and applied research carried out by the university sector, with its substantial postgraduate research student and capital equipment resources, is an essential and complementary element and force multiplier to our sovereign defence industry and capability edge. In this respect university research is increasingly being viewed by governments through a national security lens.

In a benign and peaceful world, the current university model would not necessarily be a problem. A diverse and proportionate spectrum of international students have always and rightly been welcomed at our universities dating back to the Colombo Plan.

The significant increase in foreign students in recent years, notwithstanding a loss of diversity with the predominance of China, has been proclaimed an important multi-billion-dollar Australian export industry. The deep concern, however, is that we are in a period of escalating geopolitical tension, not of our making, where the evolved dependency on international students to fund research can be used by China as an instrument of coercion and where joint research in key and often dual-use technologies with military and intelligence application potentially could be used against us in a period of conflict.

With the range of urgent demands and other priorities across the government budget to restart the economy and keep Australians in productive jobs, the timing of this issue coming to a head could not be worse financially and its solution is not straightforward. Government will rightly want assurance that any additional investment in university research will be relevant to the real-world pressures Australia faces.

Late last month federal Education Minister Dan Tehan announced the convening of a vice-chancellor group to devise a new way of funding research as the sector confronts this serious issue.

This is a timely development. Australia needs funding schemes to better translate university research to business and industry outcomes, rebalancing for an increased focus on domestic students, diversifying the inter­national student cohort, devel­oping more flexible short courses and micro-credentials aligned to jobs and skills—the list is long.

Within this mix our proposal of prioritised additional funding for international research partnerships of Australian universities with university counterparts of Australia’s defence and intelligence allies is an important consideration. Within the long­standing Five Eyes alliance, arrangements with the US for science and technology engagement form an important guiding example of how this might work across the five nations. Equally important is research engagement with Japan and India within the regional ‘Quad’ framework.

The bilateral Australia–US innovation, science and research relationship is formalised by a treaty-level agreement for science and technology cooperation between the two governments. Australia and the US have other treaty-level agreements documented in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Australian treaties database. Under this S&T framework, a US–Australia Joint Commission Meeting on science and technology is held every two years. The US is also a key S&T partner through the Global Innovation Strategy and all funding schemes of the ARC-administered competitive grants program permit international partnership, allowing Australian and US researchers to form linkages.

The framework’s impact would be significantly elevated by initiating a substantive and focused collaborative program that is funded appropriately by Five Eyes governments at both ends. We see great value in encouraging, for example, the Australian Group of Eight publicly funded research-intensive universities to engage with the publicly funded research-intensive universities within the US University of California system in this context. The bilateral linkage need not necessarily be Go8–UC but could be a similar grouping of like-minded and willing universities in both countries.

Governments could set priority areas for bilateral research collaboration, such as those set by the Department of Industry’s 2016 policy statement for the Next Generation Technologies Fund that include cyber, sensor, quantum, autonomous and space technologies. The focus could also include targeted biomedical and energy research.

The leverage gained by this strategic bilateral university research partnership could be of enormous value for both countries. The US–Australia alliance holds important ministerial-level meetings involving the Defence Department and DFAT. Expanding this in a manageable way to include a strategic university research alliance would add an important dimension and strengthen the alliance overall. We should have no illusion that China is vigorously shaping and accelerating its domestic university research towards its military and state security apparatus, via its civil–military fusion strategy.

A ‘Five Eyes-friendly’ university sector will open new and substantial sources of funding and help strengthen Australia’s defence and security capabilities and those of our democratic allies. We hope the university sector will embrace the idea. Importantly, within this scheme, government and the university sector would be pulling in the same direction. If asked to ‘do something for your country’ within such a framework, we believe Australian university researchers would respond creatively to embrace a new opportunity.

AUSMIN 2020: Social distancing while setting the agenda

Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds pulled off a magic trick at this week’s AUSMIN meeting. Australian decisions and directions—on military power, digital technology, misinformation and military supply chains—set the scene for the meeting and the agenda. And it was all about dealing with an assertive, coercive Chinese state while in the midst of a pandemic. But the public discussion of China came from the mouth of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

This allowed Australia to work with the US on the substance of how to handle Beijing while not being identified with the particular rhetoric and tone of the US administration’s messaging. By doing this, Payne and Reynolds role-modelled how other US partners—whether in Europe or the Indo-Pacific—want to work with the US. That’s good news for Australia’s ability to work in the alliance framework and with a range of other regional and international partners who are increasingly seeing common interests in working together in light of the People’s Republic of China’s coercive incarnation under Xi Jinping.

Compared with AUSMINs in recent years, the 2020 event was refreshingly practical and active. The fact that there’s an agreed assessment in Washington and Canberra of the trajectory of China under Xi no doubt helps, but the driver now is the shared sense of urgency in doing practical things together as a result. This fits with the Australian government’s recent defence strategic update, which moved away from the 2016 defence white paper’s focus on a distant force turning up during the 2030s and 2040s and instead focused on improving the Australian military’s ability to engage in sustained combat and its power to deter others from seeking military advantage in our near region.

This comes from the shared assessment that the time to begin to shift the PRC’s trajectory, whether in the South China Sea or in the broader Indo-Pacific, is not 10 years from now, it’s right now. So things that have been talked about for years will now actually happen. Fuel availability and security from Australia’s north will be addressed by new strategic fuel storage in Darwin, paid for by the US and supplied commercially. That’s a result of years of analysis about shortfalls and vulnerability in this critical input to military operations, including from my ASPI colleagues John Coyne and Tony McCormack.

Similarly, long discussions on providing alternative supplies of critical minerals for defence purposes have now led to action: the Pentagon is funding the Australian company Lynas to do engineering and feasibility work for a facility in the US for extracting heavy rare earth elements, no doubt using rare earths supplied from Australia.

On how our militaries will work together—and use the fuel stored in Darwin and elsewhere—the US and Australia agreed on a classified statement setting out principles and priorities for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, with the likely goal of deterring Chinese aggression and supporting the security of regional partners. At least two of the strategic priorities here are clear: deterring further Chinese control of the South China Sea and preventing intimidation and use of force around Taiwan from creating the conditions for any attempt by Beijing to forcibly bring Taiwan into the PRC’s control.

The meeting was also a welcome recognition by the alliance partners of the fundamental power of partnerships—notably with India and Japan through the Quad, with ASEAN and through the East Asia Summit. Far from ‘militarising foreign policy’ as critics have worried, the outcomes show the US and Australia working together to use military power and deterrence to provide a platform for diplomacy. Aside from the roles of these multilateral forums and groupings, our nations’ foreign policy agencies—the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the State Department—will lead a new joint initiative to counter misinformation, enabled by intelligence and security agencies.

That’s going to be a busy area, given the prolific propaganda machine that is the PRC and the need to stop Beijing’s narratives form being lazily picked up and used in commentary and analysis in our own nations and around the world—whether it’s obscuring the pandemic’s origins or pretending that Beijing’s belligerence is actually peaceful win–win mutual benefit behaviour. There’s an immediate need to keep the focus on Beijing’s intrusive and coercive actions and not let debates be diverted by its attempts to portray those who oppose or criticise the PRC as the causes of tension.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. Signals of closer industrial cooperation and implementation of the US decision to consider Australia as part of its defence industrial base are great. This is yet to move from concept to action, though. AUSMIN 2020 has no doubt added momentum here, but we have yet to see concrete plans that remove vulnerabilities in defence supply chains beyond fuel, particularly around production and resupply of missiles and munitions, along with the urgent need to accelerate getting hypersonic weapons and autonomous undersea systems into the hands of our militaries. That’s going to take more than this trip to Washington, but it’s an essential element in how the Australia–US alliance needs to work to advance both nations’ security and prosperity in the next few years.

US–Australia talks: relationship returns to ‘normal’

Past communiqués from Australia–US Ministerial Consultations often contained pages on international developments and few ‘action items’ shaping what the US and Australia really do. Wednesday’s joint statement reverses that pattern by offering a long list of practical measures.

This starts with plans to deliver urgent medical equipment and know-how to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and others in a region that looks to be only on the early foothills of the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the harder end of the security spectrum, we have a commitment to ‘increased and regularized maritime cooperation’, while the allies ‘strengthened their resolve to support Taiwan’.

Australia is coy about saying it will send ships or aircraft inside Beijing’s South China Sea maritime claims, now described as ‘not valid under international law’. Perhaps we have already done this in recent military exercises. There will be many such opportunities coming up.

What is more important is that Washington and Canberra are letting Beijing know that threats to Taiwan and further adventurism in the South China Sea will be resisted. There will be no repeat of the Obama administration’s dithering over rocks and shoals.

Supporting that allied precision is a list of China’s ‘coercive and destabilizing actions’, ‘disinformation efforts’, ‘campaign of repression of Uyghurs’, undermining of Hong Kong, failure to ‘negotiate in good faith’ on nuclear weapons, intelligence ‘targeting of intellectual property and sensitive business information’ and ‘burdening’ developing countries ‘with unsustainable debt’.

The language is calm but exceptionally pointed. From 5G to freedom of navigation operations, it’s clear that Canberra has thought through its own policy prescriptions. The standard Chinese Communist Party line that we are just following Washington should be dismissed as amateurish propaganda.

Australia and the US are developing closer supply-chain links. Australian rare-earth miner Lynas will receive Pentagon funding to establish a processing plant in Texas. This will reduce American dependence on China for a range of materials critical to defence manufacture: for example, every F-35 contains 418 kilograms of rare-earth materials.

These connections extend into shared research and investment in technology and innovation. Our cash-starved university system should watch this closely as there are financial benefits for universities that sever research links with Beijing and opt instead for a Five Eyes–friendly research environment.

The decision ‘to establish a US-funded commercially operated strategic military fuel reserve in Darwin’ is welcome. The Americans must wonder why we don’t appear to appreciate the strategic value of Darwin as much as they, the Chinese and the Japanese do. No one builds a big petrol station without planning to use it. That suggests we will see significant enhancements to the US Marine Corps presence in northern Australia.

The AUSMIN communiqué reads like a return to ‘normal’ US engagement with friends and allies. There is nothing in it that a Biden administration could not live with. It points to the strength of cooperation between like-minded democracies as the best way to resist a growing authoritarian assault on global norms and human decency.