At Senate estimates hearings on 24 March of this year, the independent Senator Malcolm Roberts bluntly asked Defence Department officials, ‘If the last sub will be delivered in the 2040s and the first delivery is estimated to be in 2032–33, won’t these subs be obsolete by the time they are ready for the water?’ (page 62 here). The officials answered, ‘No, they won’t be obsolete by the time they enter the water. We are also designing this submarine to … keep them superior throughout their service life.’ That answer was consistent with the one repeatedly delivered by ministers and officials since the Attack class was chosen in 2016, despite it being a conventional, not nuclear, design.

Roberts was expressing what many were thinking—and was remarkably prescient. On Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, discussing the events that led to the cancellation of the Attack class deal with France’s Naval Group, said that the first submarine would have been obsolete almost the minute it got in the water. And it was ‘the unanimous view of all the chiefs of our services and defence force, that this was a capability that was not going to meet our needs’.

Similarly, Defence officials had consistently denied suggestions at estimates that there were significant delays in the project by saying that the first Attack-class boat would be operational by 2034. Yet the prime minister said that ‘our view [was] that this project would be further delayed and that would not see a submarine in the water until the late 2030s and possibly as late as 2038’.

What are we to make of this? How confident should we be in any of Defence’s statements on other key capabilities? Will the Hunter-class frigate be a superior and survivable capability when (or if) it starts to enter service around 2033? Will the army’s $40 billion investment in armoured vehicles be worth it in the face of the cheap drones and missiles that are available to any state that wants them? Can the navy avoid a submarine capability gap during the (now even longer) transition to its future submarines?

Since we started by talking about submarines, we’ll look at the last of those questions. First, a word of warning. It’s important not to fall for the old street magician’s trick in which he steals your watch while diverting your attention somewhere else. Don’t fall for Defence’s line that it can keep the Collins-class submarines going until the SSNs arrive, because that’s an entirely separate issue from a capability gap. If you do, you’ve already lost your watch.

The 2009 white paper was the first defence strategic planning document to announce that Australia would acquire a fleet of 12 submarines. This requirement was driven by Australia’s changing strategic environment. Those submarines were meant to start entering service around 2025. We can argue about whether that was a realistic date, but the intent was to increase Australia’s submarine capability beyond six Collins-class boats.

Since 2009, no government has wavered from the intent to increase our submarine capability. Moreover, there is broad consensus that Australia’s strategic circumstances have become more perilous, reinforcing that requirement. Yet the timeline for delivery of that additional capability has moved from 2025 to 2034 and now to the late 2030s.

By definition, we’ll have a gap because we won’t have the capability that strategic assessments have repeatedly said we need. That gap already exists. The 2020 defence strategic update states that the Australian Defence Force is a largely defensive force that can’t deter attacks on Australia or ‘hold potential adversaries’ forces at risk from a greater distance’. Regardless of how many Collins we have, that gap will grow through the 2020s and into the 2030s as the wished-for future submarines are still not delivered.

But let’s play along with the magician and accept that preventing a gap is all about keeping the six Collins in working order to meet Defence’s requirement, which is to generate out of the fleet of six boats four that are available to the fleet commander of which two are deployable. Officials have indicated that the planned life-of-type extension will allow the Collins to continue to meet that requirement. But that’s mistaking carts for horses.

Two deployable boats are the requirement because that’s all that can possibly be generated out of a fleet of six, not because two is the magic number that will keep Australia safe. So simply saying that Defence can keep six boats in service says nothing about whether we will have the capability we need. Two boats, by the way, can’t sustain a presence in even one area at any distance from Australia; we’ll come back to that issue in a minute.

But will Defence even meet that requirement? First, there’s the issue of whether the Collins will be a relevant capability. Here’s another of those strange moments in cognitive dissonance. Defence has been telling Senate committees for years not only that the Attack class would be regionally superior, but that it would also keep the Collins class as a regionally superior capability until it was withdrawn from service (see page 49 here, for example). However, its view was also that there was no alternative to the Attack because it was the only conventional boat that could provide a regionally superior capability (page 19 here, for example). So if the Attack was going be obsolete by the 2030s, it’s hard to see how any conventional submarine could be regionally superior into the 2040s, let alone one that’s at least a generation older.

That’s before we look at the issue of whether a fleet of six ageing boats can sustain the number of sea days needed to produce the much large number of submariners Australia will need to transition to the future SSN fleet. I’ve referred in an earlier piece to the Canadians’ fleet of four ageing submarines that couldn’t achieve a single sea day in 2019, which makes the navy’s goal of generating 1,400–1,600 submariners by the mid-2030s—that is, before the first new boat arrives—look pretty ambitious.

So, whichever way we look at it, we will have a submarine capability gap; the only uncertainty is whether we will have less capability than we have now.

What can we do about it? The first step is to move beyond our unhealthy fetish with finding the perfect submarine, which has achieved nothing other than getting us even further away from having any new submarines than we were in 2009 when this unhappy journey started.

My colleague Michael Shoebridge has already drawn attention to what was perhaps one of the most illuminating exchanges at estimates in recent years. Liberal Senator and former general Jim Molan asked (page 24) Chief of Navy Mike Noonan whether ‘the only thing that a submarine can do that other things can’t do is perhaps have a significant and enduring presence?’ Noonan replied that the senator had put it well. But if the main effect that submarines can deliver that other platforms can’t is presence, a fleet of six submarines can’t do that well since it can’t even sustain one boat on station. In the estimates hearing, ADF Chief Angus Campbell then elaborated on the need to think of capability in terms of systems of systems rather than focusing on platforms.

It was an emperor’s new clothes kind of moment—a statement of the obvious but unsayable. Why, then, are we so obsessed with submarines?

The main challenge for Defence over the coming decades is not to deliver a fleet of SSNs. With enough time, money and help from our partners that will eventually happen. The main challenge will be ensuring that the focus on SSNs doesn’t suck all the oxygen out of the room. Defence needs to make sure it devotes even more effort, funding and, most importantly, imagination to rapidly acquiring other systems that can deliver the effects it requires, including those it seeks from submarines.

ASPI analysts have written often both about those kinds of systems and about more agile ways to acquire them, and I won’t repeat those ideas here. But when you have an addiction, the first step to beating it is to acknowledge it. We are addicted to submarines.

The repeated debate about tanks for the Australian Army has flared up once again. The Groundhog Day nature of this phenomenon would be amusing if there wasn’t so much at stake.

I won’t rehash the arguments other than to state upfront that I agree with virtually everything Andrew Davies and Thomas Lonergan wrote in their recent pieces on the capability calculus around tanks. But I will point out one rather large fact that their analyses didn’t emphasise to the degree I feel is necessary: we’re not just talking about $2 billion for new tanks. Rather, we’re talking about a $40 billion program to mechanise the army, as the table below sets out.

Defence’s armoured vehicle acquisition plans

Rather than arguing about whether the army should be replacing its current 59 Abrams tanks with 75 newer Abrams tanks, we need to be considering whether the mechanisation of the army is a $40 billion good idea that supports Australia’s defence strategy—or a $40 billion opportunity cost iceberg that will cripple the army as a useful, deployable tool of government.

Supporters of armour tend to argue for its tactical utility. A focus on the tactical shouldn’t be surprising; Albert Palazzo has written, ‘A policy of dependence [on powerful allies] also explains Australia’s dearth of experience at the strategic level of war and why its forces have sought excellence at the tactical level’.’

Jim Molan has suggested, for example, that having tanks would have made a difference to the outcome of particular engagements in Afghanistan. That may be true. But it’s also irrelevant. No number of tanks would have made any difference to the outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan because the key drivers of that conflict were not amenable to resolution through tanks.

It’s also irrelevant because, while the army did have tanks at the time, the government decided not to deploy them. The reason for that was that the ultimate purpose of its intervention in Afghanistan was to reinforce the alliance with the US. As in other US-led campaigns, the Australian government had conducted a careful cost–benefit analysis to gain maximum alliance return at the least possible cost in blood and treasure. Certainly, the special forces controversy suggests that it erred in its calculus by excessively relying on one ADF capability. But tanks instead of Special Air Service operators wouldn’t have changed the strategic outcome.

A more sophisticated version of this argument is one that says combined arms are essential to success in land combat. That’s the main driver behind Plan Beersheba, which has given all three of the army’s combat brigades the same structure. This means they all have (or will have) tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armoured cavalry, self-propelled howitzers and the associated enablers. While I seem to recall suggestions from the army at the time when Beersheba was announced that it wouldn’t come with any additional net cost, the requirement to provide all brigades with those capabilities is of course a major reason for the $40 billion.

This argument is similar to the previous one, but actually orders of magnitude bigger. Essentially it says that if you want an army with any combat utility at all, it needs to fit a particular model adopted by a club of militaries that Australia likes to compare itself with—and the minimum cost of entry to that club is $40 billion so that you can reliably field a combined arms battlegroup.

There are days when having a tank or two (or a combined arms battlegroup) on your side would make a difference. But the same can equally be said about pretty much any other military capability; when you need an air defence missile, like when an anti-ship cruise missile is coming at you at Mach 3, you really need an air defence missile.

That’s the problem with the ‘debate’ about tanks and armour—the complete absence of a strategic context or even operational concepts (though, interestingly, Molan, one of the most forthright advocates of tanks, has long called for a national security strategy). In their absence, I can make the case for any military capability, up to and including aircraft carriers and tactical nuclear weapons. Their absence also makes it impossible to prioritise, whether between armoured vehicles and air defence missiles or any other capability, because you can make the case that anything is useful.

For the past 75 years, Australia has had the luxury of not facing immediate existential threats, so it hasn’t needed to prioritise. When the main task facing the ADF was to provide contributions to US-led taskforces, carefully tailored down-payments to the alliance that minimised the cost in blood and treasure while maximising goodwill, the main force structure determinant was the ability to provide the government with a broad range of viable ‘options’. Since it was accepted by all that the contribution would be small, we could prioritise quality over quantity, particularly qualities that minimised casualties.

The absence of clear and present threats also led to the emphasis on a ‘balanced force’ with a very broad range of capabilities. I won’t repeat the criticisms of a balanced force construct (or criticisms of the criticisms), other than to say that it’s shorthand for, ‘We can’t come up with a prioritisation framework that is persuasive to all stakeholders, so everybody gets a bit of what they want.’

The absence of threat also meant that Defence practised capability-based rather than threat-based force structure planning. In short, this meant Defence could state what it would like to be able to do (which generally looked a lot like what it had been doing for the previous decades), rather than define what it had to do to defeat actual threats. Now that we’re in an era where Defence’s strategic planning documents have identified a threat, should we still be generating balanced, capability-based options involving $40 billion of armour that doesn’t have much utility in the face of that threat?

Advocates of tanks and armour tend to advocate a balanced force, arguing that there will be contingencies in which the government might seeks military response options involving them. But what are they? The mere ability to imagine a scenario where tanks and armour would be useful isn’t enough to justify the resources. I can think of scenarios where armour would be tactically useful, like a battle of Marawi, when the local government seeks assistance from us in the form of heavy land forces. But how strategically useful would that be to Australia, particularly when we can provide other contributions, as we did at Marawi? We can only hope that future Australian governments will not be foolish enough to commit Australian ground forces to yet another unwinnable counterinsurgency; after all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for a different outcome.

We shouldn’t be structuring the army for pointless wars of choice, yet it’s hard to see the relative value of a mechanised battlegroup in an unavoidable war involving an attack on Australia or a close neighbour by a major power. Just as Davies did, one thing I learned from participating in Defence’s force structuring processes is that efforts to justify heavy land forces in Australia’s very near region were always based on what Davies terms ‘Goldilocks’ scenarios—that is, ones that involve a capable enough enemy to require something more than protected vehicles like the Bushmaster but not so capable they have anti-access capabilities; that are small enough to be dealt with by whatever we could fit on the landing helicopter docks (which isn’t much); that are close enough that the F-35A could provide air cover (which is very close); and that are magically free of the logistics effort that would quickly exhaust Australia’s non-existent sealift capability. And even then, the outcome is at best a tactical victory.

But, as they say, it’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. In the end, I fall into a middle position (also known as an intellectual cop-out that probably reveals I imbibed too much of the balanced, capability-based options paradigm in my time in Defence): some armour, but not an army completely built around it. I’m open to tanks and even some self-propelled howitzers, though building them here is an example of defence industry policy gone off the rails. The infantry fighting vehicle is the biggest sinner in the opportunity-cost stakes, not tanks. I’d cancel it, double the number of Boxers we’re already getting for an additional $5 billion (since it is an infantry fighting vehicle anyway, according to other armies that are acquiring it) and put the $15+ billion savings into long-range lethality, preferably forms that can be easily deployed and relocated, and attritable autonomous systems.

But just as urgently, I’d be exploring combined arms concepts that are more relevant to our current threats and geography than those that aim to seize and hold small patches of ground at great cost for little strategic gain.

‘When nations go to war, the nation with better technology will win,’ India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said in 2019, and perhaps taking that cue, the country’s defence planners are embarking on their next-generation modernisation program in a quest to be future-ready.

The transforming geopolitical landscape is driving preparations the world over for future wars that will be waged less with the bullet than with cyber technology, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, quantum computing, augmented and virtual reality, robotics, big-data analytics, unmanned drones, small-satellite constellations for 5G and 6G telecommunications, information acquisition, 3D printing, nanomaterials and human augmentation devices.

Multi-domain, or cross-domain, operations will comprise ‘centaur’ teams, where human will bind with machines to optimise the performance of both. These human–machine teams will harness AI for military applications that will transform decision-making on the battlefield.

The Indian Armed Forces’ demand for just such a ‘connected’ soldier may be met by a public–private partnership under the government’s defence public sector undertakings (DPSU) program between Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Hyderabad’s Grene Robotics, a niche private-sector player in AI and robotics, which are jointly developing an advanced man-portable surface-to-air missile.

A key to its effectiveness is an ‘autonomous MANPAD data link’ which allows commanders to give real-time firing orders to a soldier in a forward area using augmented reality and virtual reality robotics, says Grene Robotics director Gopi Krishna Reddy.

Abhishek Verma, partner and lead for aerospace and defence infrastructure at KPMG India, believes that while the private sector is being marshalled for indigenous defence production, DPSUs anchored by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) will be instrumental in developing cutting-edge technologies for the Indian Armed Forces through its 52 laboratories.

India has long been a leading arms importer and has increased its purchases since the clashes on the border with China erupted last year.

There’s now a push to balance this overreliance on overseas technologies by investing in technologies developed at home. To make the armed forces future-ready, the Indian government has removed budgetary constraints for capability development and other requirements. The Ministry of Defence has also opened up the defence sector to private enterprise, both Indian and global, by raising the foreign direct investment limit from 49% to 74%.

Top-level research and development is underway to equip India with indigenous future warfare technologies, and much of that vital work has been carried out by private-sector companies, which have sunk considerable capital into defence manufacturing.

Facing hostility from both China and Pakistan, India is feeling pressured to prepare for a two-front war. The military hierarchy is putting increasing emphasis on digital technologies to underpin network-centric warfare and on disruptive technologies.

Officials from India’s Integrated Defence Staff say it’s imperative to strengthen R&D while bridging technology and capability gaps with local equipment that can replace imports. The organisation integrates policy, doctrine, warfighting and procurement.

The use of AI is largely driven by DRDO’s Centre for AI and Robotics (CAIR), whose mission is to develop security solutions and a range of C4I2SR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, information, surveillance and reconnaissance) systems.

The Indian Army is focusing on bettering its C4I2SR capabilities while being mindful of the need for interoperability among the three services. As future operations will necessarily be joint, interoperability is a major objective of the newly created Department of Military Affairs that will form theatre commands.

BEL and CAIR are developing an artillery combat, command and control system, while BEL, the Electronics Corporation of India and the Tata Group’s CMC are setting up a tactical command, control, communications and information system for field formations and ground-based electronic warfare projects.

The MoD recently ordered from BEL four-channel multi-mode and multi-band shipborne radio equipment, known as a software-defined radio tactical system, developed in partnership with DRDO’s Defence Electronics Applications Laboratory. The system supports the simultaneous operation of all very high and ultra-high frequency and lower band channels.

Other programs nearing development are the Swathi mobile artillery-locating phased array radar, the naval airfield integrated security system, BEL’s battlefield surveillance system for high-altitude operations and the DRDO-designed USHUS-2 integrated submarine sonar system.

There’s also the DRDO-designed Rohini 3D central acquisition radar for use with India’s Akash surface-to-air missile that is capable of tracking 150 targets, the Maareech homing system for India’s Varunastra heavy-weight torpedo, the Monopulse secondary surveillance radar, and DRDO’s ship-to-shore communication system. The Mahindra Defence Systems and Telephonics Corporation joint venture manufactures the RDR series of airborne weather radars.

It’s a major effort to prepare the nation for an increasingly uncertain strategic environment.

Occasionally Australian strategic defence policy has moments of enlightenment when it breaks free from the evasions, platitudes and niceties of normal diplomatic discourse.

Such a moment occurred last week when Prime Minister Scott Morrison released the defence strategic update and force structure plan. Prompted mainly by China’s increasingly coercive international behaviour, the revised defence policy proposes a notably more rigorous framework to protect Australian interests and to assist global responses to Beijing’s rising brutality.

It is, as others have noted, a pivotal moment in modern Australian military history. The new policy marks an unambiguous return to the defence-of-Australia policy articulated by Paul Dibb in the 1986 defence review. It declares Australia’s intention to acquire major new offensive military capabilities and to use them to put the forces and infrastructure of potential adversaries ‘at risk from a greater distance and therefore influence their calculus of costs involved in threatening Australia’s interests’. That is an essential element of a sustainable defence policy.

Particularly impressive is the clear alignment and logical consistency between the revised strategic appreciation and the planned 10-year, $270-billion investment program, which includes long-range (possibly hypersonic) missiles, to improve the lethality of the Australian Defence Force.

Too often in the past, bold strategy assessments haven’t been matched by appropriate spending and acquisition decisions. No longer: this force structure plan, which includes ‘offensive’ cyberspace capabilities, and a boosted Jindalee over-the-horizon radar, will concentrate minds in Beijing and reassure allies.

The new policy recognises and responds to the rapid deterioration in Australia’s strategic environment in recent years. It abandons the dated assumption of 10-year strategic warning time ahead of any major conflict and it calls out China’s so-called grey-zone activities. Australia has now declared its willingness to confront and to deter Chinese militarisation of the South China Sea, its corrupt interference in Australian life, its disinformation campaigns and its economic coercion. Morrison deserves praise for his courageous stand.

Australia’s defence policy has emerged from what has been a crisis in strategic policy: the old, familiar strategic paradigm was no longer adequately addressing problems emerging from China’s expansionism and its contempt for the global order. As Thomas S. Kuhn argued in his magisterial 1961 The structure of scientific revolutions, this sort of crisis ‘loosens the rules of normal puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge’.

Of course, the new policy has evolved from earlier defence white papers and updates. But it just as clearly represents a new (or rediscovered) way of looking at the strategic order and finding policy and acquisition solutions that offer new ways of addressing China’s authoritarian arrogance. Again, as Kuhn notes, a crisis need not prompt puzzle-solvers to renounce an inadequate paradigm but to ‘devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications’ that enable problems to be handled more adroitly. That seems to be what the new defence policy has done.

But the new policy does raise serious questions. Dibb has already noted that Australia’s new submarines and frigates will not be delivered until the 2030s while the strategic threat is current and real. Can we risk the wait, or do we need to consider some interim capability solutions?

We can take some comfort that the much-maligned Collins-class submarines are only half-way through their lifecycles and will be equipped with more lethal armaments, but what will be the largest expansion of Australia’s navy since World War II is still a distant goal.

No less worrying is the possibility that Beijing might risk a military provocation or threaten coercive new economic actions to test Canberra’s resolve. Do we really have the courage to go to the brink with a huge and increasingly aggressive nuclear power in order to demonstrate that we are serious about defending our interests? And given our economic ties to China, what sacrifices would we be prepared to endure?

With the chaos engulfing Donald Trump’s administration, Australia can have at best qualified confidence in support from its US ally, especially if Trump is re-elected in November. We have to hope that China will conclude that any offensive action against Australia would cost far more than it would be worth.

Then there’s the heavy stress on the Australian defence industry in the new policy documents. Sadly, the Defence Department is littered with the remnants of high-minded and elegantly phrased defence industry policy statements that have vanished into the limbo of broken and forgotten dreams. The gap between aspiration and achievement in defence industry policy is indeed vast.

Finally, there’s the eternal money–politics problem: $575 billion over a decade is a huge financial commitment to defence. It might loom even larger as future Australian governments grapple with the debt mountain that will remain after the Covid-19 crises passes.

Will the commitment to defence funding remain solid when Canberra confronts huge post-Covid deficits? Or will future governments be tempted to take the easier path of cutting defence to pay for more popular domestic welfare programs?

Given the gravity of Australia’s strategic crisis, it would be tragic and foolhardy if a future government were to retreat from the new policy stance unless China’s behaviour unexpectedly moderated. We have the brave new paradigm; now we need the national courage and purpose to embrace and to employ it if needed.

While current concerns about Australian strategic policy are many, the underlying theme behind much of the disquiet is that we aren’t sufficiently prepared for the demands of major war in our own region, even before doubts about the extent of US assistance are taken into account. Australia doesn’t have the residual memory of Cold War organisation that the US and NATO now fall back on, and Australia’s Defence Department has been struggling in recent years to develop a concept for mobilisation.

The roots of some of the problems go fairly deep. For example, supplies of certain munitions ran low even for the relatively small coalition campaign in Syria. Our defence industry is not structured to deal with disruptions to supplies. Our noncompliance with our obligation to the International Energy Agency to hold 90 days’ worth of fuel consumption in country remains a strategic embarrassment. And our merchant marine includes few oil tankers and freighters that could be used for wartime resupply.

Still, there are good reasons to think that Australia should place more emphasis on preparations for major war than it has in the past: ‘competition’ is at least as much political, economic and diplomatic as it is military; the Australian Defence Force is already geared towards limited war, the outcomes of which will, however, continue to rest on US resolve; and developments in Moscow, Beijing and Washington since 2014 have all given greater credence to worst-case scenarios.

But we don’t have the luxury of time—if there was a time to declare strategic warning, it was in 2009, rather than 2019. Bringing forward the frigate and submarine replacement programs by a few years wouldn’t make a significant difference to the ADF of the 2020s, so what we’re left with in terms of new platforms are the off-the-shelf purchases already planned for the air force—F-35s, MQ-4C and MQ-9 drones, and MC-55A electronic warfare support aircraft—and the navy’s new offshore patrol vessels (OPVs). But even within the broad outlines of the force structure laid out in the 2016 defence white paper, Australia could make significant improvements focused on the possibility of major war during the 2020s.

In particular, the government should consider making Australia’s air combat capability more resilient by acquiring additional KC-30A tanker aircraft; increasing munitions stocks and resupply capability; integrating Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile on the F-35; reviewing the number of pilots, base support personnel and battle-damage repair capabilities required to maintain continuous high tempos of operation, including dispersed from civilian airfields; and improving fuel stock and resupply infrastructure at air bases across the north of the continent.

We should also strengthen the ability to protect the sea lanes across the Pacific and Indian oceans that we would depend on for the war effort against long-range submarine operations by acquiring additional P-8A Poseidons and fitting towed arrays to the Anzac-class frigates. We need to ensure the availability of sonobuoys for periods of large-scale extended use. If they’re equipped with towed arrays and a rudimentary self-defence capability, such as RAM or Phalanx systems, the new OPVs should also be able to make a meaningful contribution to antisubmarine operations in areas of limited air threat. If the OPVs were able to support lilypad operations of the MH-60R, additional antisubmarine helicopters may also be worthy of consideration.

Defence should consider accelerating the acquisition of land-based anti-ship cruise missiles, additional short-range air defence systems, and the foreshadowed medium-range air defence capability. It should also consider using those capabilities to establish a permanent army garrison on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which lie close to areas that major Chinese naval forces now regularly transit through but would be very difficult to reinforce, let alone retake from mainland Australia.

In addition, Defence should consider:

• acquiring new long-range anti-ship missiles for the navy’s Hobart-class destroyers and Anzac-class frigates
• increasing its investment in the development of autonomous and unmanned air and naval capabilities that have the potential to complement existing major platforms within a time frame of five to 10 years.
• further improving intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and battle management systems for long-range targeting in our neighbourhood, while beginning to harden (or provide redundancy for) critical nodes at risk from submarine-launched land-attack cruise missiles
• exploring the acquisition of the B-21 Raider bomber, which is the only viable solution to drop ordnance in mass at a range that would enable Australia to suppress a possible Chinese base in the Southwest Pacific
• rebuilding the territorial organisation of the reserves not just to deal with natural disasters but also to provide the logistic support that will be needed for mobilisation and dispersed operations from the continent and to support civil defence at times of fuel rationing or widespread cyber outages
• strengthening the ability to repair battle-damaged aircraft and naval vessels in Australia with limited need for resupply from the US, for ADF as well as coalition forces.

All of this would not come cheaply. The odd billion may be saved from curtailing future armoured vehicles for the army, and perhaps it’s time to re-role existing units rather than expand the army for additional air and coastal defence capabilities (we won’t lose a conflict with China for lack of infantry). But strengthening Australia’s defences requires additional money that will take us to defence expenditure of 2.5% of GDP and beyond. If the government isn’t willing to spend more money than it intended to in 2016, it will have to make the case that the world hasn’t become a more dangerous place since then.

Investment of this kind won’t enable an Australia that’s abandoned by all friends and allies to make a last stand against an uncontested China, and the outcome of a major war would continue to rest on US conventional and nuclear forces. However, it would help us to stay in the fight for longer, make our immediate neighbourhood a less attractive theatre for Chinese operations, and increase our value and effectiveness as a base for US long-range air and naval operations that could bring the war to an end. Hence, it might make China just a little more cautious of initiating a limited or a major war during the 2020s that would also involve Australia. Surely, that’s not such a bad thing to have an ADF for.