Tag Archive for: Australia’s security—a Plan B

The persistent illusions of the 2016 defence white paper

Enough time has passed for the presumptions about the international environment, the strategic logic and the national objectives of the 2016 defence white paper (DWP 2016) to be assessed. This record of Australia’s strategic policy rates poorly in 2019. Australia’s strategic policy is based on misjudgements and needs resetting.

A core proposition of DWP 2016 was that the ‘stability of the rules-based global order is essential for Australia’s security and prosperity’. That order meant a world where ‘all countries’ had ‘a shared commitment … to conduct their activities in accordance with agreed rules which evolve over time, such as international law and regional security arrangements’. A corollary was that the ‘global strategic and economic weight of the United States will be essential to the continued stability of the rules-based global order on which Australia relies for our security and prosperity’.

Moreover, DWP 2016 judged that, ‘The world will continue to look to the United States for leadership in global security affairs and to lead military coalitions that support international security and the rules-based global order.’

While it might be unfair to expect the government to have anticipated the extent of the harm the Trump administration would cause to international institutions, norms and behaviour, the credulousness displayed about the continuing role of the US showed little appreciation of the emerging risks. The government was blinded by an inability to distinguish Australia’s security interests from those of the US.

Events since 2016 have shown that the confidence put in the US was seriously misplaced. None of the major European powers regards the US as the protector of the global order, and nor does China, Russia or India. The prospect of seeing major US-led coalitions in the future seems remote.

On the contrary, the US has been corrosive of the rules-based global order. The Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and recognition of the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights have damaged the previously close alliance between Europe and the US. So have the administration’s speculation over withdrawing from NATO; ambiguous stance towards Russia, Europe’s primary strategic concern; and ending of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, regarded by the Europeans as a vital bulwark against a nuclear arms race on the continent. The Trump administration seems intent on starting a trade war with Europe.

US policies in the Middle East have only served to heighten tensions and undermine security. The ham-fisted attempt to build a coalition against the Iranians has led to closer strategic cooperation between Turkey, Russia and Iran. The administration thoughtlessly encourages Israel’s illegal encroachment on Palestinian and Syrian lands—actions that directly undermine the UN Security Council.

If Israel were to annex the West Bank settlements with US endorsement, a near fatal blow would be delivered to the authority of the Security Council. Annexation would inflame pro-Palestinian passions around the world, including in Indonesia. The US has mishandled engagement with North Korea and failed to take advantage of opportunities for a staged reduction in the nuclear threat it poses to the region. Through these and other disruptive policies, Australia’s security is weakened by America’s actions.

Making short-term strategic predictions is problematic and fraught, let alone getting right ‘a thorough process of review and assessment of Australia’s security environment spanning the next 20 years’. That was always a naive fantasy, but one undertaken by every white paper and driven by the necessity for capability planning and acquisition. The 2000 defence white paper couldn’t possibly have anticipated 9/11 and the two decades of the ‘war on terror’ that followed. But reorienting policy after that document was simpler than the readjustment to strategic policy required now.

‘A strong and deep alliance is at the core of Australia’s security and defence planning’ and ‘maintaining interoperability with the United States is central to maintaining the ADF’s potency’, says DWP 2016. Unfortunately, the US that the government had in mind was illusory. Australia’s third strategic defence objective under the white paper is ‘to work closely with our ally the United States and other international partners to provide meaningful contributions to global responses to emergent threats to the rules-based global order that threaten Australia and its interests’. That approach no longer makes sense.

The task of reorienting Australia’s strategic policy is not simple. Few more difficult, or more important, projects confront the next government, and probably every government that follows for decades. Extracting Australia from the suffocating symbiotic US relationship will be a long and complicated process. Not only is the US no longer the unchallenged global hegemon, or the recognised leader and champion of the rules-based order, its national and strategic interests no longer align as closely with Australia’s.

Policy on Israel and the Middle East shows how the ill-considered belief in the US has already put Australia in an awkward position. It might be difficult to find a stance on Israel, the two-state solution and the West Bank after blindly and unnecessarily following the US in recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. President Donald Trump may find that position domestically useful, but it potentially leaves Australia on a policy trajectory that puts it at odds with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Islamic world and most Western nations.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s November foreign policy speech stuck to the usual line. The unwavering support for the US persists. ‘[T]he United States remains vital to the sort of region we want to see’, he said, adding that Australia supports ‘the strongest possible US political, security and economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific’.

Over the coming decades, beginning with the next government, the validity of that view will be profoundly tested.

All planned out

Open any report, article or blog piece on the contemporary strategic environment and you’re likely to find two contradictory statements. Uncertainty has never been higher, and yet we’re told the need for long-term planning has never been greater.

Australia is awash with long-term plans. We’ve had three defence white papers in the last decade, along with an Asian century white paper and a foreign policy white paper. There are regular national security statements by prime ministers, and, with an election looming, plans are underway for more plans to plan how we plan to go.

To a degree, this is all useful. As Dwight Eisenhower famously said, ‘Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.’ White papers force governments to confront first principles and long-term challenges, rather than the day-to-day morass of details. They are learning exercises as leaders and the bureaucracy size each other up and work out their relationship.

What is not clear is whether Australia has benefited from the mass of planning over the last decade.

Long-term plans, especially in the large official structures, are not vehicles for introducing significant change. The more inclusive and transparent the process, the less likely it is to depart from the status quo. This was the case in the US with the quadrennial defence review, and seems true in Australia. Thus, the use of such processes today, at a time of great uncertainty, needs to be carefully considered. The 2009, 2013 and 2016 defence white papers are still locked in a concentric circle model for Australia, and a defence force that is still largely the same shape (albeit far more lethal) as it was in previous decades.

The desire for long-term planning has also come at the cost of debate about what is going on in our region. The desire for bipartisanship stems in part from a belief that we need structured, long-term plans and that debate hinders planning and may introduce big shifts. As I’ve outlined elsewhere, bipartisanship has impeded good policy and national unity and hasn’t protected the armed forces as promised. Yet it is beloved of the long-term planners. Our uber-planner of the last decade, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, said prior to taking office that ‘we can ill-afford, in our circumstances, to chop and change our fundamental policy orientation for dealing with the rest of the world every few years’. Looking back as we scramble to deal with the new environment, a little more willingness to change could have been a very good thing.

Consider, then, the long-term plans we have settled on, such as the bid for 2% of GDP for defence. What was held up as the gold standard in 2013 by a wide variety of commentators and officials has now become a ‘floor’, with critiques growing over the tying of defence to an ‘arbitrary figure’. The Defence Department faces the choice of either sticking with the certainty of insufficient funding or undertaking the whole planning process once again and hoping the next ‘certain’ figure will be more meaningful.

The rising dissatisfaction with our planning outcomes shouldn’t really be surprising even if it is often unacknowledged. Humans are poorly equipped to be long-term planners. The activity itself assumes a level of knowledge and judgement that we just don’t have, and no amount of big data or even AI will overcome that. Psychological research also shows that people can do okay at putting ‘ends, means and ways’ together over the short to medium term, but long term their thoughts drift from viability to desirability. So not only is uncertainty over the long term far higher, but our brains are poorly equipped to think over that length of time as well.

With Donald Trump and Xi Jinping disrupting our neat plans, Australians have begun looking around for a new approach, which, of course, has been labelled the search for ‘Plan B’. We therefore seem to be reaching for the same policy toolkit we’ve embraced over the past decade and which in part has contributed to us getting here: a reverent belief in planning, ideally of the long-range variety. Alongside this is the growing search for a ‘grand strategy’ as a new and even higher level of planning.

None of this is to suggest we sink into a national live-in-the-moment haze and take up finger painting instead. Decisions have to be made, today, about long-term capability issues and ad hoc casting around won’t suffice. But it is a caution about the influence of intellectuals, academics and a kind of thinking which overestimates our mental capacity and has an aesthetic preference for neat, clear grand strategic ideals over the messy present. It is also an encouragement that we need serious public debate, today. We also must develop a willingness to chop and change precisely because we don’t know what the right answer is, or the question, or the public’s willingness to agree to the result and fund the answer in full.

Australia needs a real debate on a national security strategy

In a series of contributions to The Strategist over the past few months, Senator Jim Molan has been making the case for Australia to develop a national security strategy. It’s a notion that has merit. As Molan notes, ‘there’s only limited consensus on the main security challenges we will face in the years to come’. This a highly contested policy area and even the process of debating the purpose, horizon and value of such a document would be an important exercise.

Molan has set out some boundary markers for the scope of a national security strategy. The analysis, he argues, ‘must go beyond purely military concerns to include social and economic factors that could affect Australia’s ability to fight a future war’. Australia needs ‘a brutally realistic national security policy’ that tests ‘the coherence between policy, national strategy, concepts for national resilience, security and defence, and the steps needed in preparing a nation for war’.

Molan advocates ‘a whole-of-nation obligation led by the government’ that encompasses ‘infrastructure, spare parts, liquid fuel, industrial base, contingency plans, political leadership, national resolve and support from the nation’. His national security strategy is a blueprint for major, if not total, war.

In this Molan is largely right. A war between China and the US in East Asia would be utterly unlike the recent military actions in which Australia has been involved. It wouldn’t be conducted in distant locations like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or North Africa against an adversary that lacks the capacity to launch significant conventional military force at a distance. And it wouldn’t be in a part of the globe where strategic objectives with some prospect of partial achievement were shared by allies and the international community alike.

There’s no recent experience of major conflict between great powers on which current leaders can draw. Studying past major wars won’t reveal anything directly useful about the next war—except, hopefully, to instil in decision-makers caution and prudence, and deflate any hubris about the prospects of achieving national strategic objectives through military action.

Wars break familiar things and make strange, unexpected things out of the debris. Major wars often push societies and international arrangements in new and unpredictable directions. It must be front of mind for decision-makers contemplating military action that ‘great wars are transformative events; they destroy not only lives and property, but also established world orders—norms, institutions, ideas, perceptions—in short, the old ways of thought and practice’.

To go into a major war with the intention of preserving something, be it values, alliances or prevailing institutions, is a vain hope. That truth is borne out by even a cursory examination of the legacies of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the Napoleonic wars (1803–1815), the American Civil War (1861–1865), World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945).

Therefore, an important question before we get to Molan’s need to clarify ‘a consistent set of assumptions about how to fight, where to fight, who can fight, or how long we can fight for’ is, why should Australia fight? Governments need to develop a view on the possible course or courses that a major great-power conflict might take and balance the risks and benefits inherent in the short- and long-term postwar situations Australia might face.

That is not to argue for appeasement or pacifism. There will be many strategic situations in which Australia would be justified in employing military force in pursuit of its values and the security and welfare interests of its citizens. As in the past, occasions will arise when the cause demands action.  For these purposes, Australia needs to maintain effective military forces capable of realising achievable objectives and, to the extent practicable, protecting the lives of service personnel on operations. But major war is such a momentous step that it cannot be contemplated without mature caution.

The recent differences of view expressed on the issue of a conflict over Taiwan add greater weight to Molan’s plea for an open and robust debate over Australia’s national security policy. Existential issues are often at stake in major great-power conflicts, as history shows, but always at risk are an enormous cost in civilian lives, the destruction of ways of life and prosperity, and prolonged misery and suffering for millions of people.

The decision to prepare for a major great-power war will draw heavily on national resources, aside from enhancing the military, to build the necessary national resilience. And that requires a brutally realistic national debate.

What should a Plan B for Australia’s military strategy look like?

In the lead-up to each federal election, ASPI releases its Agenda for change: Strategic choices for the next government to help shape election platforms and public debate. This year the report contains 30 short essays by leading thinkers covering key strategic, defence and security challenges, and offers short- and long-term policy recommendations as well as outside-the-box ideas that break the traditional rules.

Agenda for change 2019 will be published on Tuesday 26 February. Over the coming days, The Strategist will post a selection of essays from it on a range of topics.

The challenge

In 2018, the commentariat pronounced the rules-based global order to be dead, and that nothing but uncertainty was replacing it. Now that the dirges have been sung, the certainties of the Cold War nostalgically pined for, and the calls for a Plan B shouted from the rooftops, where should the incoming government take Australia’s military strategy in 2019?

Of course, military strategy must be aligned with broader national strategy. But has our national strategy fundamentally changed? If we look at the classic triumvirate that makes up strategy—ends, ways and means—the ends or goals of our national strategy haven’t changed. We still want to achieve the things we’ve consistently sought, such as freedom of action on the international stage; an international system that respects the rights of all states and individuals; and freedom from coercion or military threats.

The ways to achieve these ends haven’t fundamentally changed. We can’t achieve them alone and so, while the nature of the international system is changing, we’ll still seek to engage with it and shape it, through multilateral forums when possible and through bilateral arrangements when necessary. As an active middle power (or something even greater) at peak power, we won’t simply accept a passive role and wait for whatever comes.

What has changed in the strategic triumvirate is that we’ll need to apply greater means. This is in part because states with different interests from ours now have increased power, and the great power that we’ve relied on appears to be less committed to pursuing the same ways as us (at least under the current administration) and has fewer means (at least relative to the powers that seek ends inimical to ours).

Now, we could change the ends that we seek and accept something less, but I’ll assume the incoming government isn’t yet ready to say that we’re happy to live in a world where the strong oppress the weak, or other countries tell us how to run our affairs. So greater means will be necessary to achieve our national strategy. We’re already seeing this being applied, for example in the recent ‘Pacific step-up’.

Since our military strategy must align with our national strategy, the big picture of our military strategy is similar to the big picture of our national strategy. That is, the ends of our military strategy are fundamentally unchanged. The three ‘strategic defence interests’ and corresponding ‘strategic defence objectives’ of the 2016 defence white paper are still about right, even if the idea that all three are of equal priority is obviously a poor guide to decision-making and resource allocation. As for ways, we should still work with a broad range of international partners to achieve those interests while continuing to rely heavily on our close alliance with the US, but, as with national strategy, we’ll need to invest more in our own means to compensate for the changing balance among regional powers.

Quick wins

It’s essential that the incoming government confirm its commitment to those additional means. To provide continuity to Defence and industry planning, it should reaffirm the goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2020–21. But it should also state that that isn’t a cap. More will be necessary—determining how much more would be the work of a strategic review that should kick off soon after the election.

The government will also need to assist defence planners by confirming what they can assume the role of the US in our military strategy will be. The most pessimistic forecasts of US disengagement from the region haven’t come to pass. While the Western Pacific is no longer an uncontested US lake, the US hasn’t withdrawn to Hawaii. Even in the worst case, it’s reasonable to assume that the US will continue to provide access to military technology and intelligence.

But while Australia has traditionally sought self-reliance in its combat capabilities in the defence of Australia, it would be useful for the government to confirm what sorts of regional contingencies it expects the ADF to play a more prominent or leading role in, should US capacity be stretched.

Such early decisions, taken together, will provide essential guidance to defence planners; reassure the US that at least one of its key allies in the Asia–Pacific is willing to step up and share the burden of collective security; and demonstrate to all countries that we’re willing to back up our commitments to the community of nations.

The hard yards

Analysis of the fallout from competition between the US and China has focused on what Australia would bring to the table in the case of a US–China conflict, or how we could defeat a direct Chinese attack on Australia. Quite rightly, our strategy needs to accept that the benchmark for adversary military technology will be Chinese and we should strive to both understand it and keep ahead of it.

But when the balance between great powers changes, that inevitably has second- and third-order effects that are difficult to predict as old certainties break down. China’s divide-and-conquer strategy towards ASEAN could reawaken slumbering tensions. By fostering corruption and debt, it could weaken governance in regional states, opening opportunities for insurgent groups whose goals are completely unrelated to US–China competition.

While we can’t predict those events precisely, it’s important that our military strategy acknowledge that there’s a vast range of potential regional contingencies with varying levels of lethality that the government may wish to use military options to resolve, whether alone or in coalition. The ADF can’t be a one-trick pony.

Our military strategy also needs to acknowledge that the application of military power is just as much about shaping the environment outside of conflict as it is about conflict itself. The ADF is good at this. Again, its refocusing on the region has already made great strides. But engaging, training, exercising, demonstrating, showing presence, mentoring and building capacity in others require capacity of our own. This requires numbers and sustained commitment, not just technology, and consequently more means— both people and platforms.

And importantly, military power is only one tool for resisting the efforts of others to coerce us or shape the world in ways that are inimical to our interests. It doesn’t matter how big a navy we have if we roll over and grant a great power whatever its wishes as soon as it threatens to reduce its imports of Australian iron ore. Building our society’s psychological resilience to coercion is as vital as building military capability.

Breaking the rules

As we enter an age of uncertainty, there will be good reason to break some of the old rules, but the government should be cautious about making one particular dramatic change in our defence strategy.

There are suggestions now that we should adopt a strategy that focuses on denying China the ability to project force against the Australian homeland—an antipodean version of China’s own anti-access/ area-denial (A2/AD) concept, or perhaps Singapore’s ‘poison prawn’, but we should be wary of adopting a strategy based on being an indigestible wombat, along the lines of a resurrected ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine.

Such a strategy sends a message to our friends and neighbours to our near north that we regard them as little more than roadkill or speed bumps in the path of a hostile great power heading south. It also runs the risk of developing a force that provides the government with few options in the other contingencies discussed above. And, perhaps most dangerously, it runs the risk of developing a narrow, geographically constrained military strategy that doesn’t support our active, outwardly focused, national strategy. And it would fail to take the opportunity provided by the growing capabilities of partners like Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. That would be a monumental strategic own goal.

A more positive leap would be to break out of the endless loop of seeking the holy grail of enduring strategic cooperation with Indonesia through small, incremental steps. Instead, why not propose bolder measures that serve our mutual strategic goals? For example, we could start a serious partnership on shipbuilding, given Indonesia’s own intent and organisations. Or we could propose joint leadership of a peacekeeping mission that draws on contributions from our region. This would not only demonstrate our shared commitment to international institutions and solutions, but the lived experience of working together for an extended period would build the relationships and familiarity that are essential for interoperability in times of crisis—and confirm that we’ve much more to gain through deep cooperation than we have to fear.

Getting real about Australia’s security

The attack on Pearl Harbor is generally seen, by both Americans and Australians, as the most momentous event of December 1941. However, another event occurred three days later that is of much greater significance because of its echoes with the current strategic situation. On 10 December 1941, the strategic assumption that Australia’s defence could be provided by a ‘great and powerful friend’ was proven groundless. It had, in fact, been an unrealistic assumption, not only since the start of the European war in 1939, but for decades before.

The event was the effortless sinking of an inadequate British fleet of two battleships, known as Force Z, by Japanese airpower off Malaya’s coast. That disaster is relevant today because, like then, we are putting our trust in a ‘great and powerful friend’, the US. This is despite strong doubts about America’s intent or willingness to send forces to its allies’ defence, and widespread acknowledgement that the US military no longer has the capability to meet its worldwide commitments—as the Royal Navy was found incapable of doing in 1941. Despite that reality, the US is still seen as the ‘centre pole’ of Australia’s defence, as the Royal Navy was in 1941, relieving Australia of the need to think forensically about its own strategy.

Prior to World War I, Britain had maintained the ‘two-power standard’, requiring a navy larger than the next two powers combined. This is similar to the US post-1945 strategy of having the capability to win two big wars and one small war simultaneously. The British abandoned their two-power standard when they signed the Washington Treaty in 1922, limiting the size and number of warships among the great powers. The US two-and-a-half-war strategy has been quietly shelved, and is no longer underpinned by adequate military strength.

In the interwar years, Britain reduced its naval expenditure, stretching the Royal Navy thin in another war when it might be called upon to fight opponents in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Far East simultaneously. After eight years under President Barack Obama, seven years of sequestration and 15 years of Middle East conflict, US defence expenditure is frighteningly low.

Australia’s strategic planners knew Japan would be the next threat. Yet as Japan’s power and intentions became clearer, Australians clung to the Singapore base strategy and the promised deployment of a British fleet to the region. Assurances were given by Royal Navy officials in the Imperial Conferences of the 1930s, and Singapore’s fortifications were strengthened.

The viability of this strategy was steadily undermined throughout the 1930s as Britain faced a resurgent Germany and Italy. Priority had to be given to the Channel and the North Sea, as well as the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Australia’s defence would inevitably be a lower priority for British decision-makers. At no stage were sufficient naval resources available to deploy strong fleets to all theatres. The US is now in a very similar position.

The fate of the two British battleships sunk off Malaya is relevant to Australia in 2018 because of its lessons about strategic expectations and strategic delusions, and the shock that can result when delusions are punctured by reality.

For generations Australia has minimised defence spending because the US was so powerful it didn’t matter what we spent. We are only now starting to dedicate resources close to a sufficient level to provide for our defence needs. Yet we remain far too vulnerable to a shock similar to that experienced in 1941. Our government is running the biggest peacetime rearmament program in our history, spending $200 billion over the next decade. The replacement of many of the key capabilities on which strategy totally depends—warships, submarines, armoured vehicles—is unfortunately over a very long period, yet that shouldn’t detract from the kudos due.

But is our strategy today any more sophisticated than our disastrous 1941 delusions? In light of concern about US intentions, and knowledge of US capability relative to what it calls ‘four nations and an ideology’ (Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and Islamic extremism), do we still hope to see the US cavalry come charging over the hill to save us? The cavalry might be a bit busy.

Australia now needs to match its rearmament program with a brutally realistic national security strategy, not one based on hope and delusion as we did in December 1941. Realism tests the coherence between policy, national strategy, concepts for national resilience, security and defence, and the steps needed in preparing a nation for war. This time around, let’s not depend on the luck involved in successful battles in the Coral Sea and at Midway. Before anything else, even ships, planes, tanks or personnel, Australian needs realistic strategy. And strategy does not cost.

The echoes of the past are getting louder. We must listen to them, and learn from them.

Australia needs a clear national security strategy

Bob Moyse’s recent piece for The Strategist raises a number of issues that are vital for the future of Australia’s security. He argues that debates about force structure have, until recently, largely been focused at the tactical level.

This has resulted, he argues, in ‘an incoherent force structure’ that has been ‘winning battles and losing wars’, and a mismatch between the capabilities of the different branches of the defence force. In his view, there hasn’t been enough coordination between the services—each advocates a force structure fitting its tactical needs, but without thought for the way it will fight a war in conjunction with the other services.

His article implies that my support for the Department of Defence’s Project LAND 400 is the exact kind of problem he describes: a focus on tactical matters that neglects higher levels of warfare. But this is a serious mischaracterisation. My last Strategist article criticised the ‘lack of integration in our approaches to the tactical and strategic levels of defence’ and called for exactly the opposite of what Moyse criticises me for, a harmonisation of strategy and tactics.

Focusing on tactics with no regard for strategy generates obvious problems, and I have often pointed those out. But it’s critically important to keep tactical considerations in mind when thinking about operations and strategy. Moyse has overstated the differences between our positions—we both want to see more coordination between the different levels of warfare in Australian defence planning.

Where we may differ is in our views of the best way forward for Australian defence planning. Moyse looks to Defence’s first principles review as a means of getting away from force-structure planning derived from the tactical considerations of a single service. This, he hopes, will encourage more consideration of operational and strategic factors in future force-structure planning.

My own view for some time has been that Australia needs to move towards a holistic security strategy directed much more specifically by government. That must start with an acknowledgement of the principal threats to Australia in a changing strategic environment. As Crispin Rovere said in relation to the 2016 defence white paper:

It is beyond question that the American-led global order has been unambiguously good for Australia and the world. The US has been a more restrained, universalist, and inclusive hegemon than any historical comparator. It is no accident the American era coincides with unprecedented advancements in every metric of human progress. But we must be honest with ourselves. China’s determination to expel the US from Asia is absolute, and the ‘established rules-based order’ is coming to an end.

The problem now is that US capability no longer matches what its allies have always assumed, and so US allies now need to seriously step up. The question Australia needs to answer is: do we persist with a strategy that hopes the US will come to our aid when we know that US intent and capability are being called into question, or do we proceed to a real level of independent capability while remaining within the alliance?

Linked to the evolving threat would be an examination of the strategic, operational and tactical requirements of the ADF in relation to the most probable future challenges it faces. The analysis must go beyond purely military concerns to include social and economic factors that could affect Australia’s ability to fight a future war. That can only be done by government. The idea is that Australia needs to work towards a truly integrated defence strategy that is future-focused and based on a realistic assessment of the security challenges we face.

At present, the fundamental problems are that Australia doesn’t have a comprehensive national security strategy despite a relatively good level of defence spending, and there’s only limited consensus on the main security challenges we will face in the years to come. That uncertainty affects all aspects of the force-structure debate and is a major impediment to getting the right security and defence strategies in place. It means that we’re not working from a consistent set of assumptions about how to fight, where to fight, who can fight, or how long we can fight for. As a result, we have no agreement about what to buy in order to win a fight. This has been a deficiency in every defence white paper since 1976, where tactics and procurement have never been linked to an overarching strategy.

I have some sympathy with Moyse’s view that we’ve been ‘winning battles and losing wars’, but let’s remember that Australia hasn’t been in many ‘battles’ above the very lowest tactical level since Vietnam. Moyse may be able to substantiate the claim that the West as a whole has won more battles than wars, but this is of limited relevance to Australia, which has never been responsible for leading wars itself. So he’s wrong to say that ‘an incoherent force structure’ and a mismatch between the capabilities of the different branches of the ADF has had anything to do with ‘losing wars’.

Australia and the larger coalition forces that we’ve been part of haven’t been successful in winning wars because we (meaning both Australia and its partners) haven’t had a strategy to invest a sufficient number of tactical forces for a sufficient time to give us a chance of ‘winning’. But that is a much bigger issue.

Australia must double defence spending to address worsening strategic outlook

Given that our relative wealth and strategic position in the region are diminishing, the aptly named ‘Asian century’ brings with it a challenge: Australia needs to get real, seriously real, on defence spending, especially in the maritime domain.

Governments say that the defence and security of Australians and Australia are their highest priorities. Conversely, disinterest and lack of knowledge lull the public into thinking that we’re now actually spending as much as we need to. People are focused on things that affect them every day, such as jobs, health, education, welfare and housing. Those things cost real money. That’s what determines votes, and therefore who governs.

However, unless we make a step change now, defence and national security threats will begin to affect Australians’ daily lives, with ruinous results. Tax cuts and budget frugality sound great, but the consequences of spending too little are dire.

The 2017 foreign policy white paper has a diagram of GDP forecasts to 2030 for Australia and key regional countries. It shows that we’ll be much weaker in economic power relative to our neighbours. The paper notes that the defence capability edge we have enjoyed will shrink significantly. The government’s response, the paper says, will include delivering a more capable, agile and potent ADF, with a particular focus on modernising our maritime capabilities.

The key word here is ‘modernising’. Yes, we’re doing that, but from a low base. Despite excellent people and platforms, the Royal Australian Navy is just too small, too limited and too dependent on the United States to fight and win a major battle at a distance.

Under current procurement plans, Australia can provide a degree of independent maritime defence near our coasts, but there’s little ability to deter adversaries at a distance across the Indo-Pacific, impose our will on them or cause them strategic stress within their own territory. Uncertainty about future US intentions remains, but even so, depending so completely on another nation is hardly sensible, as we have learned before.

I wrote earlier in the year that a clever Australia needs a larger, more potent navy. I also wrote that spending 2% of GDP on defence each year won’t cut it. The stark reality is that our worsening strategic situation means we probably need to be spending around double that, or $60–70 billion a year.

Because of the maritime nature of our region, the bulk of that increase needs to go towards enhancing the size, persistence and lethality of the navy, including providing a maritime air capability via the air force. That will require a significant boost in personnel numbers, and people are expensive.

We also need to establish some strategic depth and influence in the region, showing strength through intent. As has been alluded to recently, we should build and operate a naval base on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, as we once did, and on other islands in the Pacific, to assist those countries economically and also to send a clear message.

Voices in the RAN’s senior leadership are talking of concentrating on our north and the islands of the Pacific. That’s very sensible, but I am deducing this is code for ceasing our longer-range coalition activities, especially in the northwest Indian Ocean and the Middle East, because we just can’t do both. However, as a nation surrounded by sea and economically dependent on distant maritime trade and a globalised laws-based system, we probably should.

To be strategically consequential at sea, we need to have the ability to project power via capable surface and subsurface action groups. With the RAN’s current force structure, we can probably support two surface action groups, for a short period. But given our extensive maritime geography, a compelling case can be made for maintaining at least five. An action group consists of around five surface platforms, plus submarines and a support ship. Each group must be capable of air, surface and subsurface dominance, taking the fight to an adversary, or deterring that nation from action in the first place.

The uncomfortable fact is that we need a much larger navy. As we move towards 2030 and beyond, 12 combat ships, 12 submarines, 12 offshore patrol vessels and no air capability at distance just doesn’t cut it. In essence, this gives us less capability, relative to others in the region, than we had back in the 1970s. For a start, we need more ships of every class that’s scheduled to be built.

As a first sign of intent, the government should stop the planned decommissioning and sale of the last two upgraded Adelaide-class guided missile frigates, the Melbourne and the Newcastle. I estimate that these ships have about a third of their hull and engineering life left. They are excellent multirole platforms, equipped with advanced missiles, tactical data links and modern systems. They are force multipliers. At a time when Chinese intentions in the Indo-Pacific are obvious, these excellent ships offer much into the future, just a few years after we spent a considerable amount of money upgrading them.

My guess is that we’re selling them because we can’t crew them and can’t afford to run them. The budget doesn’t allow it. It would seem that strategic need wasn’t factored into the decision to sell these ships. This shows that the navy and the Department of Defence just don’t have enough people or money.

The navy is too small, in both people and capability, with a structure based on a budget that’s also too small. Linking defence spending to a percentage of GDP isn’t the answer. Despite the modernising programs and money currently allocated to building new ships, we need a navy and a defence budget that are based on strategic need.

Waning US power must shape Australia’s defence strategy

Almost a year ago, Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith wrote an important ASPI paper in which they acknowledged, for the first time, that China’s growing power and ambition constitutes a major shift in Australia’s strategic circumstances, and requires us to rethink key elements of our defence policy.

Now Dibb has returned to the issue, in a recent talk in which he takes that analysis a big step further by acknowledging, again for the first time, that China’s rise is only half the story.

The other half is about America. Dibb and Brabin-Smith’s paper last year barely mentioned America, but Dibb’s latest speech places the growing uncertainties about US intentions and resolve at the heart of the analysis. Dibb recognises that America is no longer the ally we’ve hoped and expected it to be, and that our defence policy needs to take account of this too.

It is a critical point. As I wrote in response to the paper last year, China’s rise would not require us to change our defence policy much, as long as we were sure that America was willing and able to respond to China effectively. It’s our doubts about that which really require us to think again about what we can and should do to look after ourselves.

That is especially important because over the past 25 years Australia has quietly abandoned the commitment to self-reliance which was the central pillar of our defence policy in the 1970s and 1980s. One can understand why. On the one hand, Australia’s relative strategic weight in Asia has fallen fast over the last few decades, and our technological edge in air and sea capabilities has eroded. Self-reliance has therefore become harder and harder.

On the other hand, America appeared, at least for a time, unchallengeable, powerful and unshakable in its resolve to preserve the US-led order and uphold its alliances. Self-reliance looked less and less necessary, so we slid back into depending on America for our defence. Arguably that dependence is even deeper now than it was at the height of the old ‘forward defence’ era of the 1950s and 1960s.

That makes our current predicament all the more challenging. To really understand today’s defence and strategic challenges, we have to jettison a lot of the assumptions and axioms which have framed our defence policy debates for a generation now, and this is where I think Dibb’s analysis still falls a little short. At many points it still presupposes that America will be there for us, despite the clear acknowledgment elsewhere that we can no longer take this for granted.

The tension is perhaps clearest where Dibb says that he ‘is not one of those who believe that America is about to pull out of Asia’, because that seems to be precisely the risk that he is addressing. So what’s going on here? Perhaps Dibb means that he doesn’t think America will suddenly decide that it no longer wants to be the leading power in Asia. In that case, he’d be quiet right: Americans like being the region’s leading power, and they would not step back from that lightly.

But as China’s power grows—and Dibb does now seem to accept the reality that China’s power has grown and the probability that it will keep growing—the cost to America of resisting China’s ambitions grows too. Whereas once it seemed that America could remain the dominant power in Asia without breaking into a sweat, today it’s clear that resisting China is going to be both expensive and dangerous.

So now the question is whether the US wants to remain the leading regional power enough to pay the costs and accept the risks involved in confronting and containing China. I have argued that the answer is quite likely to be ‘no’, and the case made in Dibb’s speech plainly suggests that he now agrees with that.

If this is right, then the implications for Australia’s strategic and defence policy are even bigger than Dibb portrays. For example, he says that it’s vital that we continue to have access to highly advanced US military equipment. But we cannot afford to overlook the possibility that we will lose some of that access if America’s strategic engagement in Asia falters, so we need to consider how we can cope with that if it happens.

More broadly, we have to recognise and accept the challenge of negotiating our place in the new Asia without US support. Dibb says that the ANZUS alliance provides ‘the best and most realistic chance’ to shape the long-term regional order. But we cannot assume that our ANZUS partner will be there to help us. Indeed, it’s hard to see that America is doing anything constructive to shape Asia’s regional order to help us define our place in it, and, for reasons that Dibb explains, no reason to expect that will happen anytime soon.

Finally, we cannot assume that even if America stays engaged in Asia, it will do so in a way that serves Australia’s interests. Dibb observes quite rightly that we have to think about how we’d respond if Washington asked us to join a war with China over an issue like Taiwan. The question is hardly hypothetical: Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on 4 October about China shows how sharply the relationship has deteriorated in the past few months.

It’s far from clear that America has any idea of how it can remain as a key power in Asia on terms which avoid escalating rivalry with China, and nor is it clear that Washington has any plan for how to prevail in such rivalry—and that’s a problem for us. Australia would be unwise to follow the US into a confrontation with China which Washington had no idea how to win. But the more we depend on America, the harder it would be to say no if that call came.

So Dibb is right. We do need a radical rethink of our defence policy, but it needs to be even more radical than he suggests. I have a book coming out next year which will explore in some detail what that might look like.

Australia faces unprecedented set of security challenges

There’s broad agreement among defence thinkers and academics that the international security environment is on the cusp of significant change. Dominating the commentary are analyses of the consequences of a risen China, a resurgent Russia and a recalcitrant North Korea, plus the challenge of a renegade United States.

For the Australian military professional, such stories provide context but lack specificity. They’re also limited to one level of war—the strategic—when dramatic changes are also occurring at the operational and tactical levels. In an era of widespread and rapid revision, the debate on the future of war must be broadened thematically yet narrowed geographically if the Australian Defence Force is to meet its obligations to the Australian government and hence the people. This brief article highlights the key challenges the ADF faces in each of the three levels of war.

Strategic

China has risen. That’s no longer a question for consideration. What needs to be answered is how Australia will manage its relationship with a great power that holds a different world view: a view that could place greater demands on Australia, even to the point of challenging our sovereignty.

Australia has traditionally safeguarded its place in the world by aligning with a friendly great power that holds similar values. Unfortunately, the US is looking increasingly incapable of continuing in that role, certainly not in the medium to long term. Australian security thinkers can’t delay in seeking alternative security policies that safeguard national sovereignty and prevent the country from sliding into the status of client of a more powerful overlord.

The rebalance of power in the Asia–Pacific is only one of the two strategic security challenges Australia must confront, however. Inconveniently, it’s the simpler of the two. Climate change is the much greater danger because it threatens to destabilise many fragile states across Australia’s neighbourhood, and, in doing so, exacerbate the conditions for instability, conflict and mass migration as many countries exceed their land carrying capacities and collapse from the strain of harsher environmental conditions.

Australia won’t escape unscathed, but because of its wealth, educated and technologically adept workforce, and access to resources it can, with good planning, fare relatively well. Other nations won’t be so lucky, and Australia will need to secure itself in the midst of a much more dangerous and violent world. The key is to enhance domestic resilience and increase the ADF’s capacity to promote stability throughout the region.

Operational

The key operational challenge facing contemporary military leaders is finding a way to cross the contemporary no man’s land that the development of long-range precision strike has created. States equipped with effective anti-access and area denial (A2AD) systems can establish killing zones that reach out thousands of kilometres from their national borders.

In World War I, crossing a fire-swept zone of just hundreds of metres proved certain death for many of the soldiers on all sides. Today, the killing zone is far wider and can be covered by far fewer weapons. As these technologies proliferate, even modest countries will be able to implement potent A2AD systems.

An effective A2AD system could potentially be a security boon that would raise the cost of crossing Australia’s maritime approaches to a level that any adversary wouldn’t want to bear. Australian territory, already reasonably secure, would be made even more so. However, Australia is a trading nation, and securing Australian overseas interests has always required the projection of military force abroad.

As A2AD weapons become more widespread and increase in capability, Australia’s ability to project force may become increasingly constrained. If Australia is to remain a maritime power with an expeditionary tradition, it must address the penetration of this lethal space and acquire the capabilities required to do so.

Tactical

In war, victory is realised when the enemy submits to your will. In the past, that has almost always necessitated closing with the enemy and winning the near fight. There will always be a need for soldiers to come face to face with their opponent and convince them that they are defeated. However, to win today’s near fight, one must first win the distant encounter, because the lethality of contemporary weapons systems ensures that few Australian soldiers, armed, equipped and trained for today, will survive tomorrow’s battlefields.

The character of the distant fight has also changed. When once friendly artillery or aircraft would deliver high explosives onto enemy positions and infrastructure, today’s distant fighting includes warfare in the cognitive domain. The ADF must master cyber, information and social media operations as they may prove the key to influencing people (the enemy’s military and civilian population) in the distant fight.

These requirements come with consequences for the organisation of the ADF. For example, in the future army the role of the gunner or a not-yet-defined cognitive warrior may move to the fore, replacing the light infantryman as the dominant arm. Tactics will need to evolve, with a higher premium placed on neutralising the enemy’s capabilities for select periods at particular points rather than on their complete destruction. The navy and air force will have similar pressures to reshape their mindset and adjust their priorities.

Australia has always defined its security in the company of a great protector. The sources of the main threats have also always been at some distance, although Japan came close in World War II. However, Australian security can’t rely on distance to isolate it from the threat of climate change, nor can a great partner provide open-ended protection in a rapidly shifting power balance.

Australia may, for the first time, have to confront the reality of preserving its sovereignty largely with its own resources. The ADF will also have to find the means to overcome significant impediments to how it currently perceives and prepares for the operational level of war, while also adjusting its tactical approach. New and different capabilities will be needed. Rarely does the character of war change so widely so quickly across all its levels.

Hopefully, Australian defence planners can rise to the challenge.