Australia’s special forces have been in the news due to allegations ranging from poor culture to potential war crimes, including arbitrary executions. These allegations have led to a number of Defence-initiated reviews and investigations.

Much of the commentary has focused on individuals. And it’s a little dispiriting that Brendan Nelson, the director of the Australian War Memorial, wants to see the inquiries wrapped up as soon as possible, rather than insisting that we do whatever is necessary to reveal what actually happened. But Nelson did usefully invite us to examine not just the special forces but our national leadership: ‘If anyone bears responsibility, let it be the political class, including me, who sent them and the military leadership tasked with adherence to the truths by which they live.’

So let’s elevate our focus to look at the decisions of our political and military leaders who sent the special forces to Afghanistan and kept them there, and what they could learn.

Generally, Australia applies military force as a measure of last resort to achieve national goals. Use of force is part of a strategy. Strategy can be broken down into the classic triumvirate of ends, ways, and means: we want to achieve a goal, we plan how we are going to achieve it, and we apply resources to implement the plan. When those three align, the strategy can succeed. When they don’t, we have a situation like Vietnam and potentially now Afghanistan.

After more than 16 years of involvement and $8.3 billion spent, we’re entitled to ask, What exactly was Australia’s strategy in Afghanistan? And were special forces used appropriately? And what is the way forward?

The ends seem to have been a combination of supporting the alliance with the United States (Prime Minister John Howard invoked ANZUS in the wake of the 9/11 attacks) and defeating terrorism.

Over time, our ways have meandered along with the broader coalition’s, from directly overthrowing the Taliban, to nation-building, then explicitly not nation-building, along with swings between counterterrorism (kill the Taliban) to counterinsurgency (win over the people).

Despite the wavering about ways, throughout Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan the means have involved the special forces. But with such an unfocused strategy, how do we assess progress? And importantly, how do troops on the ground see progress and, consequently, meaning in their contribution? If the allegations are proved, it wouldn’t be the first time that kill counts became for some the measure of success, in the absence of any other way to assess it.

But if the ways and means have become the ends in themselves (we are there in order to be there), there’s no inherent necessity to send special forces. And certainly no need to send special forces on continual rotations. Without pre-empting the outcomes of reviews and inquiries, it does seem that one of the factors at work may well have been the constant rotations that individual special forces members were put through—with some going through five, six or more deployments.

Repeated rotations were combined with the Special Air Service Regiment being increasingly used for direct action—conducting raids to kill and capture enemies—rather than their traditional covert surveillance role. It’s perhaps not surprising that, for a small number, killing became the new normal. Throughout military history, small-unit culture has trumped institutional or national culture. So, again, it’s not surprising if some elements of the special forces—under the influence of charismatic leaders who were particularly good at killing and had obtained status from successful and repeated deployments—behaved badly.

And even for those special forces soldiers who continued to act appropriately (by all accounts the vast majority, including those who raised concerns about the behaviour of some of their colleagues), such frequent rotations impose a high personal cost, potentially on their mental health and on their families. As my colleague Brendan Nicholson has noted, it can be easier for governments to deploy the special forces rather than conventional units, particularly because it’s in the nature of special forces to always say they can do the job. But deploying the special forces is not without personal and institutional costs.

So what are the lessons for our political and military leaders? The main one is that the government should always articulate a clear strategy for military action, including in Afghanistan, outlining the ends, ways and means. And if the ultimate end of that strategy is to secure the support of our great and powerful ally when we need it, so be it. Australians and our servicemen and -women deserve that statement because it helps give meaning to their contributions.

An additional reason may well be to reduce the ability of terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base for launching international attacks (although that’s a strange primary reason, given that terrorists who want to launch such attacks have numerous other sanctuaries they could use).

If these rationales are the goals of the strategy, there’s no inherent need for the means to always be special forces deployed on continual rotations doing direct-action operations. Why dissipate one of Australia’s most potent military capabilities on something that’s not the very highest priority, or that could be done by a broader set of units across the wider army? Why not share the burden more equitably?

But if it does indeed have to be special forces, then some hard thinking about force structure is required. If anything, the continual use of special forces in Afghanistan has exposed the fundamental incoherence between our thinking and doing. We essentially structure our forces for the worst case (the defence of Australia) and invest heavily in ships, submarines and aircraft. But on actual operations the government largely deploys the army, and its special forces in particular, to far-off places in causes that are not directly related to the defence of Australia. Special forces fall into that category of high-value, low-density capabilities—they are powerful, but we don’t have many of them. That usually means they should be employed sparingly, with an eye to not dissipating their capability by overuse.

So, if long-term, sustained high-operational-tempo deployments are what the government actually wants its special forces to do, it probably needs to direct Defence to structure appropriately. Whether that means establishing more special forces beyond the two regiments—which could be challenging with a small army in a small population—or deciding that with appropriate enhancements in training and equipment the army’s infantry, among the world’s best trained and equipped, can take over some of the roles that the special forces are conducting, is for the experts to answer.

If Defence cannot develop the appropriate force structure, its leaders should have the courage to tell government that cycling some of our most talented and motivated people through an endless series of deployments, with no clear goal beyond continuing to do them, cannot be sustained.

It’s clear that that policy exacts a cost that is borne disproportionately.

The most important point to make about the government’s proposed Home Affairs portfolio is that these new arrangements can be made to work. They will not harm our counterterrorism performance and could improve Australia’s underwhelming efforts to protect against foreign interference and strengthen the security of critical infrastructure. But in announcing last Tuesday what Prime Minister Turnbull called ‘the most significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements—and their oversight—in more than forty years’, it’s surprising that so little groundwork had been done to justify the need for change or to say how it was going to be done.

The Home Affairs announcement was linked to the government’s release of the unclassified version of the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review. By contrast, this is a meticulously argued report based on extensive consultations and containing detailed recommendations and implementation strategies that will significantly reshape the Australian intelligence community. The prime minister said that the government would accept some of the review’s key proposals and that a ‘task force’ in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet could consider other recommendations ‘in detail.’ Changing tack, Mr Turnbull then said, ‘In these difficult times, repeated reviews and task forces are not enough. We need to take more decisive action.’ With that the Home Office was announced, with promises that detailed implementation arrangements would be worked out in the second half of this year and ‘its roll-out to be complete by 30 June next year’. There is indeed more than one way to skin a policy cat.

The fallow period of implementation planning creates a policy mammoth moving slowly across the tundra of Australian politics. Will the beast still be alive in June 2018? Government should move quickly to shape the policy debate by issuing a discussion paper that sets out, as clearly as possible, the strategic reasons for making these big changes and addresses some of the questions that have arisen in the last few days. For example, how will ASIO and the AFP ‘retain their current statutory independence, which is such a vital aspect of the Australian system’, as the PM said, while the Home Affairs portfolio ‘oversee[s] policy and strategic planning and the coordination of the operational response to the threats we face’ at the same time? [My emphasis.]

More clarity is needed around the handling of ministerial warrants and authorisations for ASIO and AFP activities. The PM said that the Attorney-General ‘will retain his current role in the issue of warrants and ministerial authorisations’. But he also said that the government will ‘review the role of the Attorney-General in the role in ASIO’s operations in the work to design and establish the new portfolio to ensure continued and efficient oversight’. When pressed about whether ASIO and AFP warrants and authorisations would require the signature of one or two ministers, the Attorney-General seemed to suggest that both he and the Home Affairs minister would authorise actions, saying that for certain types of ASIS and ASD actions ‘there are two hands, as it were, on the mechanism to ensure that a warrant or an authorisation has the oversight and scrutiny of two ministers and not one’. So, the Attorney-General will be either the sole approver of warrants, or one of two ministers. But on the third hand, the Attorney-General may not have any oversight role after yet another review. Clear?

The recommendations in the intelligence review are certainly clear and well thought through. The current Office of National Assessments undergoes a subtle but important name change to the Office of National Intelligence—the significance being that the ONI will take on a stronger leadership role of the intelligence community, not simply be the drafter of community-wide national assessment reports. The agency’s director-general position will be elevated to the level of a departmental secretary and will be more analogous to the US Director of National Intelligence in function. The DG-ONI will become a centrally important figure in discussions at the National Security Committee of Cabinet. The ONI is recommended to have a 50% increase in analytical staff, addressing a systemic weakness in the intelligence community, which can often be one-person deep in terms of real expertise on specific countries and issues.

The government has accepted the review’s recommendation to make the Australian Signals Directorate a statutory authority within the Defence portfolio. This continues ASD’s journey to becoming something more like the UK’s GCHQ, which is separate from but works closely with defence. This is the end of a turf battle in which Defence lost a major crown jewel. How did that happen, chaps?

There’s a lot more to the L’Estrange–Merchant review, including sensible measures to strengthen the ministerial warrants system over certain types of intelligence operations and to boost the role of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which has done sterling work in the last few years and is one of best committee appointments for aspiring backbenchers. It’s a pity the government didn’t clearly commit to implementing all of it, instead of cherrypicking some recommendations and passing the rest to a PM&C ‘task force’ to consider. Why do reviews like this if the final product is then opened to public service predation? It’s not as if the government didn’t have the chance to react to drafts as the study developed.

The Australian parliament is investigating a new way to surrender its prerogatives, along with an abdication of basic democratic principles, in favour of the military chiefs and bureaucrats on Russell Hill.

On 14 June 2017, the chair of the Defence Sub-Committee of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Senator Linda Reynolds, announced that she would lead an inquiry into the possibility of a bipartisan Australian defence agreement. Such an agreement would bind the major parties to a joint ticket on planning and funding for multibillion-dollar projects such as the future frigate and submarine fleets.

Senator Reynolds says (PDF) that an inquiry is needed to look for ways to ensure stability of defence planning because ‘the nature of Australia’s three-year electoral cycle has demonstrated that this stability cannot be assumed, or guaranteed’.

According to Senator Reynolds, the aim in pursuing bipartisanship is to ensure the ‘efficiency and effectiveness on the part of both Defence and Defence Industry’. She says the main vehicle for achieving this will be ‘stability in strategic guidance’ and that this characteristic ‘generates’ efficiency.

The political class itself is a barrier to stable planning. Recent white papers show that as governments change, each seeks to leave its mark on long-term policy. That can be disruptive as political slogans jump from ‘national security’ to ‘Australia in the Asian century’, and now to ‘innovative defence industries’. Leaders of the ADF, or at least many in senior ranks, seek relief from this burdensome reality. They rightly say that defending Australia is a long-term job and as such it requires committed long-term planning and funding. The ADF wants to be ready (financed and equipped) to meet any challenge and to combat Australia’s enemies unburdened by the potential for a change in government priorities every third year.

With a bipartisan agreement, the argument goes, Russell Hill would be able to get on with the job of defending Australia without having to worry about politicisation, voters changing their minds, or the media-driven circus that flourishes on Capital Hill.

Bipartisanship is, as the senator puts it, something of a holy grail for the ADF. If only the gallant knights could, as Sir Galahad of Arthurian legend, find the cup of the last supper and sip from it. Unknown forms of healing and beneficence would surely arise from that act. But the assumed restorative powers of the ‘holy grail’ of bipartisanship are almost certainly more in the realm of myth than reality, more legend than logic.

There’s little evidence that disagreement between the two political parties (the Coalition and the Labor Party) is the main cause of disruptions to major defence strategies, force structure planning and funding. The last major examples were possibly in the 1970s as Australia transitioned through the Whitlam Labor government, but even the drawdown of forces from Vietnam began before he took office.

As previous contributors to The Strategist have observed—for example, in May and November 2015 and February 2016—Defence itself has been one of the main obstacles to effective and efficient force procurement. Reviews such as the Kinnaird, Mortimer and Coles reviews, as well as yearly major projects reports produced by the ANAO, suggest that those management issues are historic and systematic. In 2009, Patrick Walters reported on the Rudd government’s decision to cancel the Howard-era Super Seasprite helicopter procurement. But it’s likely even a Coalition government would have axed it given the epic weaknesses in Defence’s handling of the project. It had been criticised sharply and publicly as early as 2002 by the Coalition’s defence minister, Robert Hill.

Defence admitted its own internal management flaws in its 2015 First Principles Review (PDF), acknowledging that capability development was hampered by its inefficient organisational structures as well as complicated, slow and impracticable work processes. A recent audit by the ANAO suggests that, in the 18 months since, the department has made ‘limited progress’ on addressing those areas.

None of these reports suggests that a lack of bipartisanship was to blame for procurement and availability problems. Instead, when things go wrong they often appear to be failures of government, rather than the result of changes of government between one party and the other.

Meanwhile, the political and ethical dangers of the proposed new convention on bipartisanship are abundant and troubling.

The claim for bipartisanship as a defence against changing choices is simply illogical. Governments and military forces need to be able to adapt rapidly to geopolitical, technological and economic changes, not chain themselves to funding and capability decisions made years before. The Coalition’s 2016 Defence White Paper provided for a timely shift in policies, funding and priorities. That would never have been possible if the Liberal–National Coalition had locked itself into bipartisanship on the 2009 ALP Defence White Paper’s funding and priorities.

In addition, there’s no conceivable mechanism for bipartisanship that would insert the Opposition into the deliberative processes of Cabinet decision-making on major defence equipment. Senator Reynolds’ proposal can therefore only be about asking the Opposition to rubber-stamp decisions on which it has had almost zero critical input.

More importantly, the quest for bipartisanship, if implemented, would further erode the low levels of scrutiny of national security policy by Australian voters and deny citizens public contestability of how governments invest billions of taxpayer dollars in local defence skills and jobs. Less partisan debate in the parliament would also mean less media coverage.

If adopted, this proposal would also send a dangerous message to future governments—that they can continue to harbour prerogatives of secrecy and backroom deals on national security that owe more to the 1920s than to the emerging demand of citizens for a more transparent and participatory democracy in the 2020s.

What will the government next declare to be so important that it be left to the professional politicians and bureaucrats in a way that will deny voters the chance for any meaningful repudiation? Any opposition party, regardless of its political complexion, should reject this proposal as profoundly undemocratic.

This week is the 73rd anniversary of perhaps the most complex joint and integrated military operation in history. Operation Overlord, the 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe, involved the largest amphibious armada ever seen, and brought together a daunting sea, land and air military force at one place at one time, all without computers and mass data storage, digital communications, or even PowerPoint.

I sometimes wonder if we could do it again with only slide rules and typewriters. How did they mount a 1,200 plane airborne assault, a 5,000 ship amphibious landing, and put 120,000 soldiers on the beaches in one day?

I believe it was less about technology and platforms, and more about attitudes, behaviours, and organisational agility. While we commemorate the combat losses incurred, let’s also remember their example of joint and integrated effort, and identify the lessons.

The 2016 Defence White Paper said there’ll be ‘more emphasis placed on the joint force—bringing together different land, air, sea, intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber and space capabilities so the ADF can apply more force more rapidly and more effectively.’ It’s important that we drive and reinforce this change.

When government advocates for ‘a joint and integrated ADF’ we want more than a networked and integrated tri-service force. We want an ADF that is a joint actor, meshed with the government sector, industrial sector and civil society sector to produce an integrated national effect.

When we talk of using ‘all elements of national power to resolve national challenges’, we want Defence to be a well-integrated and joint resource and an integral part of an international ecosystem of appropriate capabilities, operating in a connected, effective and efficient manner.

The modern world is widely networked, deeply integrated, and highly agile and technology is disrupting industries from media and banking to hotels and taxis. Clearly Defence, and government more broadly, are not immune.

I don’t underestimate the challenge this rapid change represents. Aboard HMAS Arunta in the Strait of Hormuz, I spoke with crew members about planned upgrades to their IT hardware. They were excited by the benefits the upgrades would bring but it can take years from the initial upgrade proposal to when the last system is installed in the final frigate. This is an age in IT terms and, like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, you are potentially starting the process again as soon as you finish.

Our democracy is founded on supporting and maintaining a rules-based global order which comes with obligations. Support to nations under pressure or in distress, and intervention to defend that global order, or to counter global threats, is needed from time to time. Such support and intervention needs to be graduated, scalable, agile, and sophisticated, and at times nuanced. It requires a Defence contribution that is properly joint and well-integrated.

As part of a community of like-minded nations, we share alliances, treaties, and relationships ranging from the formal ANZUS alliance, the core of Australia’s security and defence arrangements, to an enhanced opportunity partner arrangement with NATO. Our security and prosperity depends on a stable Indo-Pacific region and a global order, in which power is not misused and tensions can be managed through negotiations based on international law.

Being able to respond effectively to regional security challenges and opportunities relies on cooperation with allies and partners.  As ASPI’s Executive Director Peter Jennings highlighted, integrating the three services is the start but the ‘definitive edge will come from Australia’s ability to exploit joint, allied and regional abilities to integrate.’

Today’s challenges and threats are increasingly complex, ranging from the variants of the terrorist threat and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to the effects of climate change and cyber attacks.

Any tendency to complacency born of a belief that our increasing economic interdependence acts as a guarantor of security is a false belief. We need to invest the same commitment and ambition in our security cooperation as we have in economic cooperation.

And we need to make new efforts to uphold and reinforce the rules-based order that has enabled us to get to where we are today. An effective way for us to defend against rules being bent or selectively applied is to strengthen regional cooperative mechanisms.

Through increasing engagement with our regional partners and allies, whether by bilateral and multi-lateral exercises, or embedded staff, or student exchanges, or shared operational activity, the ADF develops its ability to work more closely with its regional counterparts.   This draws us together and binds us in the collective self-interest of stability and security.

Our interoperability with the US and the coalition enabled us to respond to the threat posed by Daesh in 2014. Within three weeks, our Air Task Group began operations, the result of a Defence decision over a decade ago to ensure we could ‘plug in’ to coalition missions with the RAAF sending personnel on exchanges and exercises with other nations and training the way it would fight.

In the Coalition Air and Space Operations Centre, the nerve centre of the air campaign in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, I saw Australian personnel sitting side-by-side with allied counterparts to deliver air support to the Iraqi Security Forces.

The US Alliance remains the core of Australia’s security and defence arrangements and at the AUSMIN talks this week we committed to continue to strengthen the relationship, including through our continuing joint military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and force posture initiatives in northern Australia. Australia has more than 600 ADF personnel, scientists and engineers in the US and an Australian major-general is deputy commander of the US Army in the Pacific.

Secretary Mattis is a strong supporter of the alliance and continued US engagement in the Indo-Pacific, which he reaffirmed at the Shangri-La Dialogue and in Sydney saying the US commitment to was based on ‘strategic interests and on shared values of free people, free markets, and a strong and vibrant economic partnership.’ Australia and the US underlined our shared, commitment to strong regional organisations, especially the East Asia Summit, APEC, and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus.

The government is committed to working with industry to ensure we’re able to develop and maximise the skills and knowledge we have in Australia to deliver the capability we need to achieve a truly joint and integrated ADF, a force that is integrated by design, not stitched together afterwards.

Innovation focused on continual improvement and collaboration among science, industry and defence has ensured our forces are among the best equipped in the world. This required Defence to work closely with industry in innovative ways, as we are doing for programs such as Plan Jericho.

A significant improvement of the RAAF’s new P8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft over the Orions, is that the information gathered can be fed out in real time to other ADF assets on the sea, land and in the air. Not only is that a leap forward in capability terms, it’s a completely new proposition in that it’s entirely networked.   Every part of the ADF needs to be ready to capitalise on that.

HQ Joint Operations Command is an excellent example of the maturing approach to operations.

But there’s much more to do to create a truly joint and integrated ADF. We need to continue to drive engagement with our regional partners and allies and with industry and government agencies. We need to drive technological change and organisational change.

The First Principles Review addressed the need for a unified Defence organisation, including a joint force more consistently linked to its strategy. In the past, the organisation has not been appropriately structured and it’s been insufficiently unified in the way it conducts business. Reforms have been too narrowly targeted to effect the necessary mindset change.

Both the government and senior leaders in Defence recognised that the organisation at the time was not best organised to meet these challenges. So far 63 of 75 of the review’s recommendations have been implemented.

To deliver the capable and sustainable joint forces we require, Defence must be more integrated with clear accountabilities and streamlined decision-making. That’s why we created the integrated ADF Headquarters to set the foundations for joint forces with the highest levels of military capability and technological sophistication.

Integration will require ongoing cultural change. Attitudes, behaviours, and organisational agility are key to ensuring we can create a truly joint and integrated ADF. We live in a world in which economic power, and all that flows from it in terms of strategic capability and global stability, is shifting. A strong network of defence relationships, internally and externally, is fundamental to our national security.

To maintain a regionally superior Defence Force capable of meeting challenges and seizing opportunities over the next few decades, our military must be structured appropriately and be able to operate as a truly joint and integrated force. Not just as three services cooperating, but a genuinely joint organisation that can integrate with domestic agencies and industry, and our international partners and allies.

As demonstrated on D-Day, joint and integrated capability is more than the quantity and quality of platforms and equipment. It’s about attitudes, behaviours, connections, and confidence.

The foreign fighters of the Islamic State terror group, or Daesh, must be eliminated in Iraq and Syria to stop them coming home to carry out attacks in Australia and the region, says Defence Minister Marise Payne.

Senator Payne told The Strategist that ADF personnel were well aware of why they were in the Middle East. ‘They know we are supporting the international coalition in the self defence of Iraq to ensure that the sort of acts perpetrated by Daesh and its acolytes and the metastasised versions of Daesh around the world will not, as far as we are humanly able to prevent, come to our shores or to our region.’

Senator Payne said she’d recently discussed progress in the operation and its objectives with coalition and regional nations.

‘It’s a serious focus for us and for our neighbour nations, particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and The Philippines from whence foreign fighters came and to where they may return.’

‘The ideal outcome, the preferred outcome, is that they are not in a position to be able to return from the Middle East as Mosul is liberated and as progress is made in places like Raqqa in Syria. If they’re able to leave and intend to head in this direction, then we’ll continue to work very hard with our counterparts to address those concerns.’

Asked if that meant killing terrorist fighters who went to Iraq from Australia and the region, Senator Payne replied: ‘Yes. We would rather that they were eliminated as part of the process of the self-defence of Iraq and the operations being undertaken in Syria.’

Australian and New Zealand army instructors in the Taji military complex, northwest of Baghdad, have trained 22,000 Iraqi personnel including 3500 police. The military training for the police is intended to help them hold and protect areas recaptured from the terror group.

Australia’s Special Operations Task Group is supporting Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service in its assault on Mosul and the RAAF’s Air Task Group is providing crucial air support.

The Iraqi forces now fighting their way into the toughest parts of Iraq’s second largest city daily demonstrated that they were willing to fight and to die to defeat IS, Senator Payne said.

In seven months of heavy fighting, Eastern Mosul has been cleared and the Iraqis are now retaking the city’s Old Quarter in the West. This is the densest urban terrain with narrow streets which are constantly booby trapped with improvised bombs, and are too tight for armoured vehicles.

‘There’s been very significant progress in those seven months but it continues to be an extraordinarily difficult fighting environment,’ Senator Payne said.

Daesh fighters use individual civilians, families and sometimes larger groups as human shields.

The RAAF puts a massive effort into mission planning to avoid civilian casualties in such heavily built up areas. ‘And after each operation we review every weapon strike to ensure they are consistent with their pre-strike approvals. Rules of engagement are absolutely designed to minimise the dangers to civilians and to comply with our obligations under international law.’

‘All of that said, this is a fight, a fight for the self-defence of Iraq and to combat the spread of a pretty toxic form of terrorism throughout the world,’ Senator Payne said.

‘Nobody wants to see civilian casualties. Fortunately to date, we have been able to indicate that Australians have not been involved in those to the best of our knowledge or capacity to determine. But none of us can walk away from the complexity of the environment, the difficulty of the fight and the fact we are dealing with a toxic enemy.’ Australian special forces calling in air strikes was essential to the Iraqi advance, Senator Payne said. The Australians were proud of the soldiers they were turning out, she said. When Iraq and Australia played a soccer world cup preliminary match in Australia, Australian and Iraqi soldiers played their own game at Taji. The Australians did not begrudge the Iraqis a 5-1 win.

At a recent counter-Islamic State meeting in Copenhagen, Iraq’s Defence Minister, Arfan al-Hayali, spoke of life in those parts of the city that had returned to normal. In parts of Mosul police were back directing traffic, Senator Payne told The Strategist.

In March boarding parties from the Australian frigate, HMAS Arunta, seized 800 kgs of hashish hidden in a cargo of coffee aboard a dhow. This month they seized 250 kg of heroin from another vessel. Such interceptions have a significant impact on the supply of money to the terrorists to finance operations.

American commanders told Senator Payne that the RAN crews brought great skill to these intercepts and they ensured each step was fully documented so that further action, including prosecutions, could follow.

While anti-IS forces were closing in on Raqqa, Australian air operations were being carried out in other parts of Syria. ‘Any change to that would have to come in a request to Australia and we would examine that on its merits,’ Senator Payne said.

With RAAF strike jets, air to air refuelling tankers and the Wedgetail command and control aircraft all operating over Syria, Senator Payne was asked if she was concerned about the safety of Australian crews after the US missile strikes on a Syrian air base.

Senator Payne said the Americans had warned the Australians in advance that the strikes were to take place. ‘When that happens we review force protection measures and we adjust those as required. Force protection is very much at the forefront of our minds.’

So far there has been no request for Australian troops to help train friendly forces in Syria, Senator Payne said. If such a request was made, it would be considered on its merits. ‘But at this stage we are fully focused on supporting the Iraqi security forces.’