Tag Archive for: bushfires

The Australian Defence Force’s domestic role (part 2): Time for dedicated disaster response units?

In the first part of this series, I noted that Australia’s Department of Defence spends a relatively small percentage of its budget on national support tasks (less than 0.2%), but around 40% of its capabilities by budget have some utility in disaster relief and border protection.

Few people would argue that Defence shouldn’t bring these capabilities to bear in emergencies, particularly when they fill a gap that other agencies or the civilian sector can’t fill. But if climate change means we’ll see more frequent and severe bushfires at home, more frequent and intense cyclones hitting both Australia and our Pacific neighbours, increased irregular movements of people, and increased poaching of dwindling fish stocks, should addressing those problems become one of Defence’s primary roles? And if so, should Defence continue to do it with a force structure developed primarily for warfighting?

There are a few factors to consider.

First, Defence is the only government agency that is funded to fight wars and, by having that capability, help deter them. The government’s increased investment in defence is based on the realisation that changing power relativities between the United States and China mean that the Australian Defence Force needs to enhance its warfighting capabilities. In contrast, other agencies can already deploy some of the capabilities that Defence uses in national support tasks, but they can’t sink an enemy ship. You can buy a lot of firefighting trucks for the price of one F-35A fighter jet, but no number of fire trucks can deter or defeat an enemy fleet or air force. So, without an increase in the total budget, moving the budgetary split between capabilities of no use in disaster relief and border protection, and those with some from 60/40 to 50/50 would mean less warfighting capability.

In addition, there’s almost always an overhead to using military personnel and equipment to perform civilian tasks. That’s an overhead we’re willing to pay in an emergency (like evacuating civilians or bulldozing a fire break as a bushfire approaches), but we may not want to pay it for everyday business. That’s why Defence has been moving away from it in some areas. For example, Defence is outsourcing the routine hydrographic tasks it used to perform for the civilian world to civilian contractors. It will now conduct only difficult and potentially dangerous military hydrographic tasks with military ships and personnel.

The concept of dual use is seductive, but it can be a siren song. Things designed for a specific purpose are generally more cost-effective than things designed for a broad range of roles, particularly if those roles are difficult and dangerous. That’s why 12 new offshore patrol vessels intended for constabulary missions are costing $3.7 billion, while its nine future frigates designed to detect and destroy submarines, missiles and other warships are costing around $35 billion. Using $3 billion frigates to do things that $300 million OPVs can do is a poor use of resources.

There are also second- and third-order effects: if you don’t exercise high-end skills, you degrade or lose them. Frigates doing constabulary tasks aren’t practising anti-submarine warfare. And it works the other way. If the air force is going to use its C-130J transport planes for firebombing, it needs to exercise and keep those skills current, so the time and money devoted to that task would be more than just actual firefighting operations. Again, this eats into the time and effort available to prepare for warfighting.

Even if you’ve got something in the inventory already, it may not make sense to use it, other than in exceptional cases. Take, for example, the army’s MRH-90 utility helicopters that have done a lot of flying in the bushfire emergency. The operating cost of an MRH-90 works out at around $30,000 per hour (not including the ADF personnel involved in operating or maintaining it). A twin-engine civilian helicopter of the kind used by rural fire services costs around $2,000 or 3,000 per hour. Most military aircraft are not designed for around-the-clock operations. Civilian aircraft are designed to fly all day, every day. MRH-90s currently average a little over 200 flying hours per year; civilian aircraft can achieve that in a month.

Granted, it would be possible to increase the MRH-90s’ flying hours, but that would come at a cost beyond greater sustainment spending. The $30,000 per hour cost doesn’t include depreciation. The fleet of 47 aircraft cost around $3.7 billion and will likely have a service life of 30 years. But if that service life gets reduced by one-third, say, due to heavy use in disaster response, it could make more sense to buy a fleet of off-the-shelf civilian helicopters, which could fulfil that role for much less than one-third of the cost of the MRH-90s or their replacement.

National defence has consistently ranked very low in Australians’ list of concerns. In contrast, concern about the environment has consistently risen, and that trend looks set to continue. More Australians have been impacted by natural disasters than by foreign military threats. They, and their political representatives, may not find abstract discussions about value for money compelling when, in their eyes at least, there is billions of dollars’ worth of capability sitting and doing nothing in time of crisis.

It is in the nation’s best interests for Defence to be proactive here and do some serious thinking about where it is best placed to contribute. Rather than getting incrementally drawn in to doing more in frontline disaster response that wears down its military assets and its preparedness for warfighting, it could be that Defence should focus on tasks that no other agency can do in logistics or in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, for example. But if it is to do more on the frontline of disaster response, the best long-term approach could be to establish units dedicated to that role using off-the-shelf, low-cost civilian equipment.

The dangers of denialism

‘You’re in denial.’ It’s a phrase no one wants to hear used about themselves as it suggests an unwillingness to confront or even recognise some unpleasant reality or other. The consequences for individuals are generally discomfiting rather than dangerous. Unfortunately, denialism is becoming a prominent part of public policy and international relations and the potential impact could be catastrophic.

The most obvious and potentially disastrous impact of denialism revolves around climate change. Despite an overwhelming, incontrovertible scientific consensus about the drivers and likely impact of climate change, many people remain in furious denial about its very existence.

Some climate denialists are possibly just poorly informed or incapable of understanding the underlying science. I confess I still don’t have the firmest grip on some of the technicalities myself, but I’m more than happy to take the word of those who do, and who are recognised as experts by their peers. What possible basis could I have for disagreeing? This is, after all, the very essence of an intellectual division of labour of which I am an enthusiastic part.

Of more concern are the denialists who do understand scientific evidence but choose to undermine or discount it because they benefit from doing so. The tobacco and coal lobbies have been notorious examples of this approach, but they are far from alone. Their actions may be reprehensible, but they are at least understandable.

Most worrying, though, are denialists who are in positions of power, but who really don’t seem to have any real grasp of the issues, or who rely on their own ‘alternative facts’ to justify implausible and inappropriate policies. Unfortunately, the most powerful man in the world is one such person.

Donald Trump is not simply famous for his support of the fossil fuel industry and his attacks on Obama-era environmental protections; many of his supporters are in denial about the man himself. Given Trump’s appeal to poorly educated voters who feel aggrieved and condescended to by what they see as self-serving elites, perhaps they can be forgiven for thinking their hero represents their interests and has a handle on complex domestic and foreign policy issues.

Members of the Republican Party have no such excuse, however. Anyone who has been taking even a passing interest in American politics ought to know that Trump is one of the most unqualified, astoundingly ill-informed and morally bankrupt leaders in American history. And yet the GOP—with the noteworthy exception of Mitt Romney—denies this because its members think that Trump will win them the next election.

It is hard to deny they may well be right about that, at least. The dangerous consequences of denialism in the case of many American voters, vested interests and powerful political operators, however, is that another four years of Trump may make meaningful collective action on climate change impossible, undermine the so-called rules-based international order, destabilise American alliances around the world and generally make the world more ungovernable. Not to mention doing possibly permanent damage to democracy in the US itself.

It is not just Americans who are in denial, however. As one of America’s closest allies, Australia, especially its security establishment, is also in denial about Trump’s impact on the international system. The great hope was that he would be thrown out at the next election and normal service would be resumed. That looks an increasingly unlikely prospect that has to be faced, as does the unpalatable reality that Trump’s America is an increasingly unreliable partner.

Many Australian strategic experts remain convinced that the US will not abandon us and that it remains the bedrock of the old order in which China was contained. That’s another belief that may collide with reality.

In the meantime, though, the defence establishment insists that the best way to respond to Australia’s unique strategic circumstances is by buying evermore trouble-plagued planes and submarines. The level of denial about the cost and effectiveness of such high-profile acquisitions is setting a new benchmark for wilful ignorance and obfuscation.

The real danger of the strategic community’s ruling orthodoxy about the basis of national security is that it entirely misses the very tangible threat that has taken the lives and consumed the properties of Australians over the course of this summer.

No doubt the strategic hardheads in the Canberra bubble will deny that bushfires have anything to do with ‘real’ security issues. But if people dying as a result of an identifiable, well-understood threat that isn’t going to go away isn’t a security issue, it’s hard to know what is.

Admitting that we might have a new sort of threat to our collective security would be a step in the right direction. It might even help with the cognitive dissonance, high levels of anxiety and chronic insecurity that people, particularly young ones, feel as a consequence of unmitigated climate change.

Yet we have to face the prospect that it may not be possible to address the existential security challenge that a rapidly changing natural environment presents. We certainly can’t respond effectively without a radical rethinking of our strategic priorities.

We need to collectively recognise that the nature of threats to our security in Australia has changed. It’s time to stop denying it.

The Australian Defence Force’s domestic role (part 1): How much does it do?

The Australian Defence Force has performed valuable services in the 2019–20 bushfire emergency. More than 5,000 personnel have been involved in a wide range of tasks, both on the front line and in logistics and other supporting roles. There have been many accounts of the ADF bringing not just capability, but reassurance to communities threatened and impacted by bushfires.

With the growing consensus that such disasters will be the new normal, there will be much discussion and analysis, both in public and behind closed doors, about what the Department of Defence’s role should be in responding to them. Any discussion about roles will require discussion about funding. As the old saying goes, a dollar can only be spent once, so increasing the ADF’s capability to undertake domestic tasks will require either a reduction in other areas or additional funding—unless Defence can achieve the nirvana of developing dual-use capabilities that can perform both high-end warfighting and low-end support tasks equally well without additional cost. That has always been and will remain an elusive goal.

As those discussions ramp up, it’s helpful to consider what portion of Defence’s budget—and consequently its effort and capability—is already devoted to what it calls ‘national support tasks’.

It’s no secret that Defence doesn’t acquire capabilities dedicated to activities such as disaster relief; they’re not a ‘force structure determinant’, to use Defence’s term. But department has high-level strategic cover from the government for things like disaster response. Under the first of its three strategic defence objectives—‘A secure, resilient Australia, with secure northern approaches and proximate sea lines of communications’—the 2016 white paper states: ‘Our interest in a secure, resilient Australia also means an Australia resilient to unexpected shocks, whether natural or man-made, and strong enough to recover quickly when the unexpected happens.’ While the recent focus has been on the bushfire crisis (which was both natural and man-made), Defence has a long record of responding to other kinds of natural disasters at home and abroad.

Defence also acquires and sustains capabilities that are used by other agencies for tasks other than warfighting. For example, it provides patrol boats to the multi-agency Maritime Border Command to address civil maritime security threats. It also conducts services on behalf of the nation that are not entirely military. The Australian Hydrographic Office, a part of the department, is responsible for providing Australia’s national charting service, for example.

So it’s not quite correct to say that Defence solely prepares for war and only supports tasks other than warfighting on a ‘come as you are’ basis. But, generally, when it performs disaster response it is using capabilities acquired for other purposes.

Defence’s spending on actual operations performing ‘national support tasks’ in Australia is a very small part of its budget. The defence budget is divided into two main parts called outcomes. The bigger outcome by far is organisations that develop and sustain military capabilities. A much smaller part of the budget—roughly 2%—goes to the other outcome, which is using those capabilities on operations.

A small piece of that smaller part is for the Defence contribution to national support tasks in Australia. Over the past five years, the contribution has been under 0.2% of the total budget, highlighted in table 1 (although it will likely be bigger this year due to the bushfire emergency).* This includes contributions to border protection under Operation Resolute and support to major events such as the Commonwealth Games and ASEAN summits.

But Defence has a lot of potential capability it can supply if called on. Defence’s reporting doesn’t say how much of the much bigger outcome—namely, its organisations that develop and sustain capability, which include the three services—can be used for national support tasks. But we can get a rough idea by looking at the top 30 acquisition projects and top 30 sustainment products reported in the portfolio budget statements and annual report. The top 30s don’t include everything, but they cover the bulk of Defence’s capability spend.

Over the past six years, Defence has spent $59.2 billion between the top 30 acquisition projects ($34.3 billion) and top 30 sustainment products ($24.9 billion).

To drill down further, I’ve divided the projects and products into three categories (see here for the spreadsheets with all the detail):

  •  Category 1: Direct utility to national support tasks; frequent demonstrated use
  •  Category 2: Potential utility to national support tasks; some demonstrated use
  •  Category 3: Very limited or no utility to national support tasks; limited or no demonstrated use.

Category 3 is the biggest at a little over 60%, which isn’t surprising since it contains high-end, and therefore expensive, warfighting capabilities such as fighter planes, frigates, destroyers and submarines that are hard to put to use in national support tasks (noting that at times frigates have performed border protection—more on that later).

But category 1 at 17.4% is still a substantial $10.3 billion. That includes the kinds of capabilities we have seen hard at work during the recent crisis—trucks, utility helicopters and amphibious ships, as well as C-130J, C-27 and C-17 transport aircraft that can rapidly move supplies. It also includes capabilities like patrol and hydrographic vessels.

If we add to that category 2’s $13 billion, we get to $23.3 billion, or 40% of the total, having some utility. Category 2 includes capabilities that could be used in some circumstances, but it’s a long way from what they were originally acquired for, or serious overkill (like the use of P-8A maritime patrol aircraft with their sophisticated anti-submarine sensors and weapons to catch illegal fisherman and monitor bushfires).

I took a reasonably broad approach to the sorting, assuming that national support tasks included activities such as border protection. If we set a more narrowly focused task such as disaster response, categories 1 and 2 would be smaller and the 60/40 split would be more like 70/30.

Admittedly, it’s a subjective approach. Everyone would do it somewhat differently, but I suspect the results would likely be broadly similar.

These numbers do not include the cost of Defence’s people. Many national support tasks such as disaster response require lots of boots on the ground and are people intensive. The wage bill of an army engineer regiment, for example, hasn’t been factored in because there’s no public data on it.

With Defence spending only 0.2% of its annual budget actually performing national support tasks, that $23.3 billion appears to represent a lot of latent capability that could do more. Is it reasonable, then, for the public to expect, and the government to direct, that that $23.3 billion in capability be used more frequently in addressing emergencies like natural disasters? And is it reasonable to move the 60/40 force structure split closer towards 50/50 or beyond? I’ll look at that in the next part of this series.

 

* The defence portfolio additional estimates statements tabled on 13 February 2020 state that the Department of Defence received $87.9 million in additional government funding for Operation Bushfire Assist.

Defence minister’s strategic reassessment must take fires and floods into account

A long time ago—back in September 2019—Defence Minister Linda Reynolds announced that the government was reviewing Australia’s defence strategy and capabilities. This was because the 2016 defence white paper underestimated the speed at which major trends would change. ‘Indeed’, she went on to say, ‘the world itself has changed more quickly than we assessed in 2016 and so too [have] the consequential challenges. These challenges operate simultaneously in a dynamic, and quite unpredictable mix.’

Reynolds set out the drivers of the white paper analysis: the US–China relationship, challenges to the rules-based global order, terrorism, state fragility, military modernisation, and ‘the emergence of new, and complex, non-geographic threats in the space and cyber domains’. Reassuringly, she noted, the white paper’s analysis of those trends still held.

Well, that was then. Since September, Australia has experienced large natural disasters—bushfires and now floods. Some of our neighbours have also been affected—parts of Indonesia suffered major flooding in December and January.

We also have what looks to be a global pandemic in the form of the novel coronavirus that originated in China. However the outbreak develops, it won’t be the last global or regional health issue that disrupts trade, travel and societies and stretches the standing capacity of health departments and immigration and border agencies, as well as port and airport operators. Australian military bases and people have already been involved, and it’s likely there’s more to come.

In light of these events, and through the minister’s review, the government is giving the defence organisation an opportunity to be more imaginative about its roles and structures to meet emerging national and regional challenges.

Australia’s bushfires have been of such scale and intensity that they have destroyed regional towns, forced events like the evacuation of 4,000 people from the beaches of Mallacoota in Victoria, and cloaked Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and parts of regional Australia in thick smoke for days at a time over a period of months now.

The work of volunteer and full-time firefighters has been extraordinary. Yet the scale of the recovery effort and the work required to support the firefighters and evacuate traumatised Australians led Prime Minister Scott Morrison not just to deploy the Australian Defence Force’s ships, planes and helicopters, but also to take the step of making a compulsory call-out of some 3,000 reservists. And they have done valued work that has had a visible and very positive effect for many Australians.

The 2019–20 fire season is probably a nasty foretaste of the kind of crises that a drier and hotter Australia will face in this decade and into the future. And the floods in Java and now here at home show it’s not just fires and it won’t just be Australia responding to large-scale disasters in the region. Some countries in the region will probably both want and expect help from partners like Australia, and will help Australia in turn as we experience our own crises—as Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, France, Canada and the US did during our bushfire crisis.

Still, Reynolds was right: all the things she set out in September as driving the government’s defence strategy and capability plans remain relevant, and the rise of Chinese power and US–China strategic competition remain central. There’s no stepping away from building the ADF’s warfighting capabilities given such a fraught regional security environment.

However, the ADF’s core warfighting roles have been added to in important ways by recent events and crises. And the impacts go beyond Australia itself, because these events demonstrate broad trends and rolling issues that must be factored into the government’s and Defence’s thinking.

Whatever Defence’s internal plans might say about core and non-core missions, when the prime minister is managing a national crisis or looking for what Australia can do to assist friends and partners in times of crisis, getting Defence involved is an attractive option. That’s because it’s an organisation that has well-trained men and women and capable systems and equipment that can be sent places at short notice and make a tangible, positive difference. They can also work in ways that support other forces or civilian organisations like firefighting authorities and state or foreign governments.

All of this should add up to a deeper, more probing review and rethink of government and defence plans than seems to have been in mind back in September.

At the time, that review might been thought of as a way of adjusting the $200 billion investment program to shift timings and budgets around to make it all fit more smoothly, add minor new items and deal with the fact that the ADF is just too small to operate the force envisaged in the white paper. The review could also have quietly reset the ‘strategic defence objectives’ to recognise the government’s prioritisation of the Pacific and perhaps have even raised a similar priority to begin a new Southeast Asian ‘step up’. It would have been a great ‘good housekeeping’ opportunity.

Now, though, if the role of Defence in disaster mitigation and response is thought of from first principles, as it should be, more will need to change than would have been likely even a year ago. Morrison’s actions, his National Press Club speech and the proposed royal commission all indicate this is what he wants.

The prime minister and Indonesian President Joko Widodo clearly see our two nations working together to reduce the risk of worsening natural disasters in our region as a key part of our future relationship. That’s why they announced an Indonesia–Australia partnership in disaster risk management yesterday during Jokowi’s state visit.

The scale, frequency and intensity of future natural disasters will probably make it impracticable to rely on the longstanding approach of using the ADF and its warfighting equipment flexibly and at short notice.

Recognising that involves changing how Defence trains and equips its people, notably the reserves, and it means planning for big assets like ships and aircraft to be dual-use for both conflict and disaster response and recovery tasks. Some bespoke firefighting, rescue and recovery systems will also be needed, and careful thought will need to be given to what will be most useful and avoid duplicating the capabilities of existing emergency agencies.

On top of this domestic role, if Defence’s contribution to disasters in Southeast Asia and the Pacific is to be effective, change will need to come to how Defence is organised. It might make other parts of government unhappy, but creating a defence organisation with real capability to respond to rolling domestic and international disasters will require new money. Trying to do it on the cheap by magically absorbing the costs of disaster response into the existing defence budget won’t work.

A challenge for Defence is whether it can respond creatively to the changing requirements and manage multiple demands simultaneously. A larger disaster-response capability will not just meet a key need here at home, but will also be a very welcome element in Australia’s closer strategic relationships in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Done well, the new role would reinforce Australia’s strategic interests and our growing military power. Done poorly, it would risk being cast as a distraction for the ADF at a critical time in the Indo-Pacific.

It’s time for bipartisan action on climate change

Australians are sweltering through a record-setting heatwave. Bushfires that are unprecedented in scale and scope have been burning around the country, some for weeks now, choking capital cities in smoke and destroying property, livelihoods and ecosystems. The multi-year drought—the driest in history for much of the country—shows no signs of abating.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we are unprepared for the hazards climate change is amplifying.

It’s time to begin building a bipartisan Australian response to climate change. The stakes are too high to continue the divisive politics on this fundamental threat to our national wellbeing. Achieving a political consensus may seem impossible after the polarising political rhetoric during bushfires earlier this year and during the federal election campaign, when the two major parties actively campaigned on their climate policy differences. At the time, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten described it as a choice between ‘night and day, black and white’. No doubt Prime Minister Scott Morrison agreed.

The difference between Labor and the Coalition has focused primarily on how deeply and rapidly to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in support of the Paris Agreement’s global goal to limit warming to well below 2°C. That issue is likely to remain contentious. But their views are much more closely aligned with respect to the agreement’s second global goal: strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.

Labor is outspoken in its commitment to climate change adaptation. At its national conference it resolved to take ‘strong action on climate change to mitigate the risks and impacts of climate change on Australian society and the economy’, and during the campaign it outlined several measures to build climate resilience.

Similarly, the Morrison government late last year launched new funding arrangements that allow states to reinvest savings from federal disaster recovery funding into measures to reduce vulnerability to future disasters. In April, the government produced a national framework for disaster risk reduction which notes the changing climate’s contribution to ‘more frequent and intense’ natural hazards and the ‘growing potential for some natural hazards to occur at unimagined scales, in unprecedented combinations and in unexpected locations’.

More recently, Labor joined the Coalition in supporting passage of the $5 billion Future Drought Fund and the $3.9 billion Emergency Response Fund, both of which will provide very significant funding to build community resilience to floods, droughts and other climate-related hazards. And in October, Agriculture Minister Bridget McKenzie chaired a meeting with the state and territory agriculture ministers at which they agreed on a bipartisan program of collaboration to help the agriculture sector adapt to climate change.

Some parliamentarians are already attempting to formalise bipartisan work on climate change. Several Liberal MPs, for example, have recently joined a crossbench-led climate action committee.

Experience in other countries suggests that this can be a useful step in building broader support, including measures to rebalance funding from disaster response to disaster risk reduction; establishment of a national public communications campaign to build resilience; and passage of legislation that facilitates investment by the public and private sectors to reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate hazards. It can also help connect key groups, such as the Australian Red Cross and the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster and Community Resilience.

Much good work is underway at the state, territory and local levels, in the private sector, in civil society, at Australian universities and scientific research institutions, and in many federal government departments to build Australia’s resilience to climate and disaster risk. A bipartisan political consensus would help to create connections and synergies between these groups, as core elements of a more coherent national resilience strategy and action plan.

We have an opportunity in Australia to begin bridging the political and ideological gap on climate change. Ultimately, strengthening the resilience of Australian communities won’t solve the problem if global temperatures continue to rise, but it’s an important and achievable step in the right direction.

Fighting fires is not the Australian Defence Force’s job

If this year’s bushfire season is anything like the new normal, then Australia certainly needs to think about adopting a new normal for the way it fights bushfires. I agree with Peter Layton’s recent Strategist piece in that regard. But I strongly disagree that the new approach should be centred on the Department of Defence.

Layton’s thesis is that because Defence’s core business is defending Australia against external threats and 99% of the emissions that cause global warming are generated overseas, Defence’s core business should now include firefighting. It’s an odd thesis.

By extension, since threats such as biohazards, illicit drugs and illegal immigrants also come from overseas, Defence should also make some of the functions of the Department of Agriculture, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Border Force its core business too. So the argument seems to be a stretch, unless we want Defence to become a mega-mega-department.

But let’s agree that we do need a new, national approach. Is Defence the best agency to lead it? (Though it’s not clear if Layton’s view is that Defence would be the lead agency or just another contributor in addition to the states’ rural fire services, national parks services, and so on.) There are two reasons to doubt it, both of which involve the concept of opportunity costs. First, Defence already has a core role that no other agency can perform, which is to develop and, if necessary, apply exquisite military capabilities to deter and defeat the nation’s adversaries.

Whenever Defence is called upon to deploy these capabilities, and the personnel who are trained to use them, to roles that other agencies or the private sector can do, it comes at a cost to readiness and training. Calling out the army to help clean up after occasional cyclones is one thing. But when you have a frigate regularly sitting off Christmas Island to pick up boat people, it is not exercising its anti-submarine or anti-air-warfare capabilities and they degrade; the nation isn’t getting value for money for the billion-dollar asset and its people.

So Defence would need new people and equipment dedicated solely to firefighting. Layton suggests 5,000 additional people in the army plus a lot of new air force aircraft. This gets us to the second problem. Every person and asset in the Australian Defence Force comes with a huge overhead. Defence just can’t provide people as cost effectively as other agencies can.

Every ADF member has a range of core skills in addition to their professional specialisation that take time and money to develop and maintain. An army bushfire fighter would also need to first and foremost be a soldier and probably an engineer, for example.

How Defence could provide aircraft more cost effectively than other agencies or the private sector is mystifying. Moreover, Defence’s capability development schedules are in a different time zone to the rest of the world’s. Layton was perhaps being ironic when he suggested that if Defence started now it could provide the people and resources by 2032 when the first future submarine is handed over to Defence—but any state agency or private company worth its salt would have boots and trucks on the ground and planes in the air long before then if they got the money.

But Layton is right in that there is a case to be made for a new, nationally coordinated approach to firefighting. However, the problem isn’t primarily that the lead firefighting agencies currently belong to the states rather than the Commonwealth. The states’ rural fire services are already well coordinated. There’s the National Aerial Firefighting Centre that coordinates the procurement and sharing of firefighting aircraft across states and territories, for example.

The problem is that the burden of bushfire fighting currently falls on those who have the least capacity to carry it, and that situation is going to get worse.

State rural fire services are essentially built on community organisations—the local bushfire brigades, which are made up of unpaid volunteers. Virtually everybody on a fireground in New South Wales, for example—putting water on a running fire, raking a firebreak to light up a backburn, or blacking out smouldering cow poo—is an unpaid volunteer.

But the demographics of rural fire brigades mirror the demographics of rural Australia—ageing and declining in number. That situation is likely to get much worse, because the changing climate that is driving larger and more destructive bushfires is also putting the ‘business model’ of much of rural Australia at risk. For example, without water for farms and agribusinesses, for environmental flows to support tourism and recreation and, most fundamental of all, for human consumption in rural towns and villages, rural populations will continue to dwindle.

The current model might work if rural fire brigades are just dealing with small, local fires in their communities. But if bushfires are a national problem—and with smoke blanketing the state and national capitals we finally seem to be realising they are—how is it fair to expect a self-employed plumber from Armidale or a farmer from outside Ballarat to give up weeks of their time and income to fight fires across their state or indeed interstate? Particularly when doctors, lawyers and parliamentarians from Sydney and Melbourne don’t?

We need to have a long, hard think about how we develop a more robust, national firefighting capability. It may well be that we need an agency with a strategic reserve of professional bushfire fighters and aircraft that can be deployed anywhere in the country when needed to support local efforts. There’s also the option of some form of national service.

If the government thinks that this is a higher priority for public funding than developing military capabilities to defend Australia against armed threats in an age of strategic uncertainty, so be it. But we should not default to an assumption that Defence is the best agency to deliver the necessary firefighting capabilities, particularly when we already have organisations in this country with vast experience and expertise in firefighting.

Bringing the defence force into Australia’s climate-change fight

It’s time to structure the Australian Defence Force for this long, hot century. That doesn’t mean making it better suited to engaging in offshore climate-change-related activities, as the 2016 defence white paper discusses. Instead, it’s about considering changes to the ADF to better address domestic climate-change-related events.

While that work may seem to be included in the traditional role of providing military aid to the civil power, the unique nature of global warming calls for a defence strategy rethink. The strategic review Defence has just embarked on is a good place to start this process.

Defence’s core business is defending against external threats. Global warming is 99% an externally generated threat (less Australia’s 1% ‘enemy within’ contribution). Half the world’s carbon emissions are from three countries: China (29%), the United States (16%) and India (7%). These three great powers didn’t intentionally set out to weaponise greenhouse-gas emissions. They strove for ever-larger national power; global warming is just a by-product. Australia is simply collateral damage in the three countries’ quests for greatness.

In quantitative terms, today’s Australia is about 1.1°C hotter than it was last century. The temperature is rising by about 0.2°C every five years. Considered in current defence planning terms, in 2032 when the navy’s first new submarine is set to begin sea trials, Australia will be about 1.6°C hotter. When the 12th and final boat sets sail in 2052, Australia will be about 2.8°C warmer. If countries stick to the Paris Agreement, the temperature should then plateau at around 3.2°C hotter sometime later.

The rate of change may vary. It could happen quicker if tipping points are reached. Conversely, sudden action may arrest the rise, making for a lower temperature plateau. But when it plateaus, the temperature will remain elevated for some hundreds of years. It won’t be as cool as it has been this summer for a very long time.

In human terms, Australia is facing a never-ending external threat. Current ad hoc solutions seem inappropriate. Moreover, there’s a clear need for an Australian sovereign approach that doesn’t depend on others. An example of the dangers of short-term ad hocery is becoming evident in our reliance on contracting American firefighting aircraft. With major fires now happening year-round both here and in North America, Australia risks being without firefighting aircraft in times of dire need.

The nature of this external threat further shapes the strategy. A sensible defence strategy might be a risk-management one that tries to limit the damage global warming causes to an acceptable amount. Governments can then fund defence as necessary to meet what they consider acceptable damage.

If the threat’s nature and duration are defined, a strategy is evident and funding levels are set, the next step is to secure the means. The ADF would need to be expanded, properly equipped and trained for the role and then maintained into the indefinite future.

In September it was reported that ADF chief Angus Campbell said responding to recent flood and cyclone disasters took about 1,000 to 3,000 defence personnel. The ongoing bushfires are similarly involving hundreds of ADF personnel. Since the ambition is to limit damage—rather than clean up after an event—an additional 3,000 personnel might be prudent.

This would probably be mainly an army-led development, given the many extant land-force abilities that appear useful. However, the personnel involved would require specialist skills and a training system would need to be established. And with events now happening almost continuously across Australia, additional personnel would be needed to allow staff rotation. So the army would need about an extra 5,000 personnel.

The air force could also expand to provide a sovereign aerial firefighting capability. Today some 160 contracted civilian aircraft are involved in fighting bushfires, many hired from offshore companies. The National Aerial Firefighting Centre manages that equipment with funding from state, territory and federal governments. As an indicator of the scope of the requirement, Victoria considers that it alone needs a surge capacity of 150 aircraft. Given the real worries about future availability of firefighting aircraft, individual states are now acquiring their own. New South Wales is buying a Boeing 737 firefighting-modified airliner to operate from Richmond air force base.

Firefighting aircraft is clearly an area for a national response not individual state penny-packeting. A national fleet would gain large economies of scale in terms of cost, staffing and training systems. The very long-term requirement means it’s most cost-effective to fund an enduring and expandable national capability. The air force appears the logical organisation.

Defence could also contribute in other areas, including aerial surveillance using small and large drones, air-traffic management in fire zones, and geospatial service provision, as the EU’s Copernicus space-based system has done.

If this build-up started now, it could be in place by the first submarine sea trial in 2032, when Australia has reached +1.6°C and conditions are about 50% worse than today. By 2052, conditions might be almost three times as bad. Defence’s professional force could then supplement the large numbers of volunteer ‘citizen-soldiers’ already deployed on the front lines. The year 2032 might seem distant, but remember this is a forever war.

It may seem unusual to call for the ADF to play an important role in limiting global warming damage, but countering external threats is Defence’s core business. Australia’s current approach developed from methods used last century for periodic natural disasters. The global warming threat is very different in scale, intensity, frequency, nationwide coverage and duration. It’s time for Defence to join the fight.