Tag Archive for: General

The threat spectrum

Planet A

US President Joe Biden has moved to ban Russian oil imports with bipartisan congressional support. The White House is also trying to coordinate a wider oil embargo with European allies. Only 3% of Russia’s oil exports are sent to the US, but more than 50% go to European markets.

Until this point, the Russian oil sector was partially exempted from multilateral sanctions targeting Russia’s financial system, such as the country’s exclusion from the SWIFT financial transaction system and sanctions on the Russian central bank. The Russian government relies heavily on oil exports, which contribute around 25% of total government revenue.

Restricting oil imports may drive further inflation in the US, which was already alarmingly high at 7.9% in the year to February. To ease supply shortages, the US will likely continue its rapprochement with oil-rich Venezuela. The EU has expressed a desire to reduce its dependence on Russian energy exports, but the issue remains divisive in Europe, which is unlikely to announce an outright ban anytime soon.

Democracy watch

Myanmar’s ruling military council has revoked the citizenship of eight members of the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, and three prominent pro-democracy advocates. The eight NUG cabinet members have also been charged with high treason, which carries the death penalty. The announcement was justified by the government on the basis that the individuals harmed the ‘national interest’.

The NUG considers itself to be the legitimate Myanmar government and was created by elected officials of the Aung San Suu Kyi government, which lost power following a military coup in February last year. Most NUG leaders are now hiding in border regions with armed rebel groups and the military junta has continued its use of scorched-earth tactics to deter domestic opposition.

These actions against former officials of the last democratically elected government severely undermine struggles to restore legitimate elections in Myanmar.

Information operations

The International Paralympic Committee is still waiting for an explanation from China Central Television justifying the Chinese broadcaster’s decision to censor IPC President Andrew Parson’s remarks denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Paralympics.

While Parson didn’t explicitly address Russia’s attack, the meaning behind his ‘message of peace’ was evident in the context of the IPC’s recent ban on Russian and Belarussian Paralympians. Clearly referencing Russian militarism, Parson emphasised that last December’s ‘Olympic truce’ must be ‘respected and observed, not violated’. However, China Central Television’s broadcast obscured Parson’s sentiments by failing to fully translate his comments, muffling the audio of his voice and eliminating Weibo comments unflattering to China’s ‘forever’ friend, Russia.

As global condemnation of Russia’s invasion grows, the West is noting how far China is willing to employ its censorship apparatus to support Russia. These observations may offer insight into the actual strength of the Russo-Chinese ‘no limits’ partnership.

Follow the money

Superyachts and other assets owned by Russian oligarchs are being seized by countries sanctioning Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Others are sailing for friendlier waters like those of the Maldives.

These measures come as Western allies attempt to put pressure on prominent and high-profile figures in Russia. Russian oligarchs are ultra-rich businessmen with links to the Kremlin. While their overall political influence has decreased since Putin’s rise to power, they have maintained a close relationship with the president and helped him remain in power.

The sudden onslaught of sanctions has sparked a mass shift of assets around the world, as oligarchs try to evade sanction jurisdictions, leading in turn to even tighter sanctions on these individuals. A few oligarchs have spoken out, calling for peace and an end to the war, possibly motivated by the hope that Western governments will unfreeze their assets. However, most seem insistent that they are in no position to put a stop to the fighting.

Terror byte

Australia has listed the entire Palestinian group Hamas as a terrorist organisation after the US, EU and UK made similar decisions. For the past two decades, only members of Hamas’s paramilitary wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, were officially designated as terrorists.

This upgrading of Hamas’s status helps Australia align with coordinated allied responses to the group. Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007 after expelling the government of Mahmoud Abbas to the West Bank. But local tensions between Israel and Hamas have remained, and Hamas was behind large-scale rocket attacks on Israel last year. Hamas’s capacity to survive the subsequent retaliation from Israel serves as another potential reason behind Australia’s decision.

The change of designation by Australia removes any distinction between the political and military wings of Hamas, allowing the government to target Hamas’s planning, finances and operations more broadly and effectively.

Tongan disaster highlights lack of coordination in regional response

US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell observed on 11 January that the Pacific islands might be the part of the world ‘most likely to see certain kinds of a strategic surprise—basing or certain kinds of agreements or arrangements’. He went on to say that the US has ‘a very short amount of time, working with partners like Australia, like New Zealand, like Japan, like France, who have an interest in the Pacific, to step up our game’.

Campbell’s comments highlight that partner states are increasingly looking to cooperate in response to heightened geopolitical interest in the ‘crowded and complex’ South Pacific. But security cooperation in the region is best described as a patchwork, rather than a coherent architecture, which can lead to challenges of targeting and overcrowding , but also may allow for agility and creativity.

The nature of security cooperation has been tested by two recent crises: the riots in Solomon Islands in November 2021 and the volcanic eruption and tsunami in Tonga earlier this month. Both have underscored several features of regional security cooperation.

The first feature is that there’s no regional institution for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, nor has the Pacific Islands Forum played a prominent role in coordination. New Zealand was the first to respond to the Tongan disaster under the FRANZ Arrangement, while the Australian-led deployment to Solomon Islands has occurred under the auspices of the 2017 Australia – Solomon Islands security treaty, rather than under the Pacific Islands Forum’s 2000 Biketawa Declaration.

This reflects the second feature: the often unspoken ‘rule of thirds’ between the major partners: that Australia should lead crisis responses in Melanesia, New Zealand in Polynesia, and the US in Micronesia.

Australia led the response in Solomon Islands by deploying police and defence personnel. New Zealand and Fiji supported the Australian response with peacekeepers, and Papua New Guinea deployed separately under a bilateral agreement.

New Zealand was first to send a P-3 Orion surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft and has since sent three naval vessels and a C-130 Hercules with supplies to Tonga. Australia’s contribution includes two P-8A Poseidons, a C-17A Globemaster and a C-130, as well as HMAS Adelaide, one of the Royal Australian Air Force’s two landing helicopter dock ships. This reflects a third feature: while New Zealand and Australia are considered the primary security providers in the South Pacific, New Zealand can’t match Australia on military capability to mount substantive crisis responses.

However, a Covid-19 outbreak on the Adelaide en route to Tonga signal a fourth feature, the ‘wild card’ of the pandemic. Overall, the nature of partner assistance is evolving to be less hands-on. Border closures have necessitated contactless aid delivery and highlighted the importance of a locally led disaster response. This dynamic was already evident in the response to Cyclone Harold in Vanuatu in 2020.

The Tongan response also reflects a fifth feature: overcrowding. This is most clearly demonstrated by the range of actors and responses, which, in a non-pandemic context, would raise questions about the host country’s absorptive capacity. For instance Japan has sent two C-130s and a vessel to assist, the UK sent supplies on Australia’s LHD, and Fijian engineers are ready to be embedded with the Australian Defence Force. France has deployed two patrol boats with emergency aid. The US has deployed USS Sampson to assist with damage assessment and supplies and has offered support through its closest relationship with Tonga, the Nevada National Guard. While Australia is coordinating its response with New Zealand and France under FRANZ, it’s unclear whether Fiji, Japan, the UK and the US are de facto coordinated under the arrangement. This brings us back to the first feature: the absence of overarching regional coordination.

A sixth feature of cooperation is how ‘traditional’ partners such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the US will respond to China’s increasing involvement.

In December last year, Solomon Islands accepted a Chinese offer to send police personnel and equipment after the Solomon Islands government declared an ‘urgent need to strengthen Royal Solomon Islands Police Force capability and capacity to respond to future unrest’. Given that Australia led (with support from New Zealand and Pacific island states) a substantial capacity-building program for the RSIPF during and after the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, it’s unclear how Chinese police officers will build upon that work.

China has sent assistance and reportedly offered to help rebuild parts of Tonga destroyed by the tsunami. Tonga accepted a loan from China for reconstruction costs after riots in 2006 destroyed much of Nuku’alofa, which has generated substantial commentary in Australia and the US about the geopolitical consequences.

What role Australia (particularly through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific), the US, Japan and the UK (which have all signalled their interest in greater infrastructure investment in the region) will play in financing the longer-term reconstruction effort in Tonga will be a test of their commitment to the region and of their intent to deepen cooperation.

This raises the final, and most important, feature of security cooperation: the question of how well the agency of Pacific island states and peoples is recognised and respected by partners. While much of the language used by partners during the Solomon Islands and Tongan crises has recognised that affected states and peoples must drive the nature and delivery of the response, there are questions about the ‘accountability gap’ in the provision of security assistance generally.

The question of who is accountable to whom in the provision of security assistance is important when the interests of partner states, Pacific island governments and Pacific peoples are not necessarily aligned.

For the moment, there’s agreement about the need for urgent disaster response in Tonga. But, as Campbell’s comments signal, once the reconstruction phase gets underway, geopolitical concerns will again rise to the fore and it remains to be seen whether partners will cooperate or crowd the region.

Implementing Australia’s nuclear submarine program

On 16 September 2021, the Australian government announced that it would acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability with support from the UK and the US as the first measure of business under the AUKUS technology-sharing partnership. At the same time, it announced that it had established a taskforce that would devote 18 months to determining the ‘optimal pathway’ to establishing this new capability.

The taskforce has its work cut out for it, and the signing of an initial nuclear information sharing agreement only two months after AUKUS was announced suggests things are moving fast. Nevertheless, this new enterprise will be a massive undertaking and probably the largest and most complex endeavour Australia has embarked upon. The challenges, costs and risks will be enormous. It’s likely to be at least two decades and tens of billions of dollars in sunk costs before Australia has a useful nuclear-powered military capability.

Many commentators have suggested that the work of the taskforce is primarily about making a recommendation on the choice of submarine—either the US Virginia class or the UK Astute class. That’s misleading on two counts. First, the most important decision isn’t so much about the submarine, but about the strategic partner most able to work with us on our new SSN capability. Second, Australia will need to make many choices—about the strategic partner, about the submarine design, about the build strategy, about the schedule, and more. Those choices will involve hard prioritisation decisions about what’s most important. Is it capability, schedule, Australian industry content or something else?

A new ASPI report, released today, examines the decision space available to the government.

The most important decision is the choice of our primary strategic partner. While both the US and the UK will need to provide us with assistance regardless of which submarine design we choose, there’s no point picking a boat if its parent nation doesn’t have the capacity to assist us with all of the fundamental inputs to capability needed to deliver military effects, or its industrial base doesn’t have the capacity to deliver. While we shouldn’t pre-empt the work of the taskforce, initial analysis suggests that the US has more capacity to assist us.

Even once we choose a partner, we still have some difficult choices about the submarine design. Do we prioritise schedule and build our partner’s current design, with the result that we’re left with an orphaned and outdated fleet? Do we wait to get into step with our partner’s next class, exacerbating the risk of a capability gap? Or do we start with the current design and transition later to the partner’s future design, with the result that we have multiple classes of boat in our small fleet?

Another area of choice is the amount of modification we do to the design. While some modifications will be necessary due to Australia’s regulatory and safety regimes—unless we recognise our partner’s regulatory approaches as fit for purpose and accommodate ours to theirs—others will be discretionary. Every effort must be made to limit the changes, whether they’re motivated by capability or Australian industry content, as every change drives cost and schedule risk regardless of how well intentioned it is.

A fundamental choice is the build strategy. The government has stated that the SSNs will be built in Adelaide; however, it hasn’t committed to a continuous build. A continuous-build approach (one driven by a schedule designed to replace the first boat after around 30 years with no break in production) is appealing to Australian industry and current and future workers but would face many challenges—boats would be delivered on an inefficient three- or even four-year drumbeat, driving up cost and increasing the capability gap. Alternatively, an ‘economic’ approach that focused on the most efficient possible approach would deliver capability faster but require massive annual spending and produce the prospect of a ‘valley of death’ at the end of production. Either approach replicates a nuclear-submarine production capability in Australia as our own sovereign cottage-industry version of what the UK and the US already have.

Underpinning all of those choices is the issue of schedule. We’re facing the looming spectre of a submarine capability gap as the Collins-class fleet ages out. The government’s stated schedule, delivering at least the first boat by the late 2030s, is feasible, if optimistic, if we build all the boats in Australia. But that may be too late to avoid a capability gap.

An alternative that could accelerate delivery would be to open up the aperture of what ‘built in Adelaide’ should look like. One approach we consider in our report is to build the initial boats overseas to accelerate delivery but also to train Australian workers on a mature production line to avoid a ‘cold start’ to local production.

But there are also options that approach this enterprise as the embodiment of our AUKUS and alliance partnerships rather than as a large, but traditional, construction project. This could involve a ‘JSF’ (Joint Strike Fighter) approach of feeding components into a joint submarine enterprise that Australia enters with our primary enterprise partner. Such a joint enterprise would span more than just construction and enable Australia to be a ‘first line’ sustainment hub for our AUKUS partners’ submarines as well as for our own. When we consider that just the maintenance of Australia’s SSNs will be likely to require more workforce than the Attack-class build and Collins-class full-cycle dockings combined, there are ways to deliver submarines faster, sustain sovereign capability, contribute to our partnerships and still create jobs that don’t involve assembling submarines here.

And this can’t be stated clearly or often enough: successful transition isn’t about delivering just boats but all of the elements of the capability. So, the choice of boat and build approaches aren’t just matters of capability or industry but must be informed by broader inputs to capability. Perhaps the most important of those is the challenge of how the navy ramps up its uniformed workforce; solving that problem is just as crucial as delivering boats on time. Again, AUKUS has much to offer here.

Finally, we’ve provided an estimate of the cost of the enterprise. Such an exercise is inherently hazardous at this stage of the process, with so many assumptions still open and untested. The government has been open in stating that the SSN program will cost more than the Attack-class program, which would have cost around $56–57 billion in current-day constant dollars.

We agree: at an absolute minimum, an eight-boat SSN program will cost around $70 billion in constant dollars (or $116 billion in out-turned dollars, which account for inflation).

However, it’s highly likely that it will cost substantially more once the cost drivers are more clearly understood. Those include both the US and UK moving to bigger submarine designs, our choice of build strategy, and the broader support system and infrastructure needed to operate nuclear submarines. To channel Donald Rumsfeld, there are things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know; both will drive up the estimate.

Biden’s summit can put the brakes on democratic backsliding

When global leaders gather virtually on 9 and 10 December for US President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy, they ought to be asking themselves a simple question: What can we do to help democracy’s bravest advocates, like the protesters who are risking their lives in Sudan?

For months, hundreds of thousands of people have flooded Sudan’s streets, demanding an accountable government and the end of military rule, even though Sudanese security forces have met them with bullets. Dozens of protesters have died.

Their courage is not unique. From Belarus to Bolivia, and even in the United Kingdom and the United States, civil-society leaders and organisations are heading bold movements to resist structural oppression, authoritarianism and injustice.

Sadly, their work could not be more urgent. Threats to civil-society leaders and democratic institutions are increasing around the world. Nationalism, inequality and political polarisation are on the rise worldwide, and pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings and increasingly advanced surveillance technology have empowered authoritarian regimes.

In Colombia, 65 environmental activists were killed in 2020. The Nigerian government’s ban on domestic use of Twitter, imposed in June, remains in force. And in August, the Ugandan government suspended the operations of 54 human-rights organisations.

These crackdowns, in democracies and authoritarian states alike, have lasting consequences. By restricting civil liberties—including freedom of the press, assembly and expression—and attacking the organisations that defend them, states are leaving our rights and institutions defenceless against future attacks.

This is why our civil-society grantees and partners are sounding the alarm bells. Organisations across causes and countries are being targeted by similar strategies, including accusations of ‘foreign interference’ whenever they work with established international organisations and philanthropic institutions like the ones we lead.

These attacks must not continue. They threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of thousands of civil-society organisers and activists around the world, but also democracy itself. As authoritarian regimes go about disempowering these essential groups and disrupting their vital work, their cynical representatives call democracy ‘idealistic’ and ‘naive’.

We fundamentally reject this view. We embrace the power of democracy precisely because it requires constant maintenance, protection and participation. The peace and stability it fosters are won by an inclusive social contract, not an iron fist.

In that spirit, Biden’s Summit for Democracy aims to support democratic renewal, civic participation and multilateral collaboration. The gathering presents an important opportunity for leaders to recommit to the fundamental rights of assembly, association, expression and information at home, and to promote these rights abroad through strategic diplomacy.

But verbal commitments only go so far. As states engage in virtual conversation this week, they must be prepared to move beyond rhetoric and affirm the importance of these rights by matching words with deeds in the fight for civic space.

In the human-rights domain, this means advancing international and national protections for free speech and free assembly, thereby ensuring every individual’s right to voice dissent in the face of authoritarianism. In many states, ensuring freedom of expression will require repealing sedition laws and adopting moratoriums on internet shutdowns. Governments should also block the export and transfer of surveillance equipment to repressive regimes.

Most urgently, global leaders must substantially increase investments in the civil-society organisations that provide a critical check on state power. And they must commit tangible resources to human-rights defenders, local journalists, social services and community centres.

This requires not only supporting these organisations in times of crisis, when they are already scrambling to serve their communities, but also investing in their long-term growth—which is an investment in sustaining an active citizenry prepared to confront future emergencies. For example, democratic leaders should scale up wraparound protection mechanisms that provide at-risk activists with legal, medical, psychosocial, digital-security and relocation support services—particularly those schemes operating near where regional and national attacks on civil society are taking place. This is one of the surest ways states can support those risking their lives to defend democracy.

Lastly, leaders must unite around the common democratic cause and collaborate closely in multisector, multilateral partnerships. Across government, the philanthropic sector, the private sector and civil society, we have an opportunity to build on the dialogue at the summit and use our unique strengths to expand civic space. After all, the best protector of civic space is more civic space—populated by engaged, connected citizens who have the resources, protections and power to advocate for their own rights and livelihoods.

Engaged citizenship can be transformative. In Moldova and Malaysia, for example, civil-society organisations helped to overturn repressive ‘state of emergency’ laws this year, preventing the dangerous erosion of democratic institutions. And millions of people marched in Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, forming probably the largest mass movement in US history.

Regardless of the origin of the struggle or the distance it travels, when people come together peacefully to defend their fundamental human rights, they make tremendous progress towards dignity, equity and justice for all. From Khartoum to Kuala Lumpur, let us protect and advance that progress in word and deed, and ensure that it holds strong for the next generation.

Strengthening intelligence collaboration in Australia: lessons from the UK and the US

At the time of the review of Australia’s intelligence agencies in 2017, extremism, state and non-state actors, climate change and technological change were all parts of the operating environment, along with rising competition between states. Covid-19 was in our future. The digital world was providing a challenge to intelligence communities through the pace of technological change and the volumes of data available outside the classified world.

In 2021, this data and tech explosion is accelerating, and its challenge remains.

But the digital challenge to intelligence agencies varies from mission to mission. Some missions, such as counterterrorism, have a broad global footprint and common data-collection and analytical challenges despite the disparate human terrain and the historical and geographical dynamics that shape the counterterrorism environment differently in the Middle East, across the Indo-Pacific, and in Europe, North America and Australia.

It’s clear now, though, that for Australia’s intelligence community, success or failure in the broad China mission will be the primary performance test for successive governments over the next five and 10 years. Even if the recent AUKUS partnership is focused on defence, not intelligence, it reinforces this judgement about where national priorities have moved to since 2017 because of the shifts by China under Xi Jinping.

The combined challenges of the China mission arise out of the nature of the Chinese state, its domestic controls and its technological development. In some ways, China’s burgeoning digitisation creates multiple digital vulnerabilities, including from its patchwork of party-state organisations and provincial and central government initiatives and systems, with all the system and human frailties and vulnerabilities that create seams for intelligence exploitation and access.

Some vulnerabilities also flow from Xi reasserting the centrality of Chinese Communist Party and peak leader control, which includes the aggregation of national data for central government use. The CCP’s attempts to strengthen control of itself (and its 90 million plus members) and of the Chinese corporate and social worlds through technology bring all the digital vulnerabilities being experienced in other parts of the world, potentially to a greater degree.

Add to that the bifurcation of high-tech and digital systems between China, its ‘technology customer base’ in major parts of the Indo-Pacific and Africa and the alternative technology bases of the G7, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and AUKUS economies.

As we explain in our new ASPI report, some good news comes from the fact that the UK and US intelligence communities largely share this urgency and priority, while retaining other pressures and priorities in each case (Russia and ‘the globe’, respectively).

Against all of this, the outbreak of Covid-19 has increased the speed and intensity of change and has broken or at least reshaped some approaches that once seemed settled and unquestionable. This brings with it opportunity.

Many nations—and their populations—have lost faith in simple market forces and assurances from corporate providers about the resilience and redundancies built into commercial arrangements, bringing about a new focus on resilience and sovereignty. Along with the effect of a coercive China, this is likely to cause an even more significant global economic and security dispersion away from the previous era of simple globalisation. That’s a shift to how data and information will move in the world.

In many societies, including our own, users are becoming more security and privacy conscious; however, a significant portion of the growing ‘open source’ data that users are creating is readily available, although harvesting and processing it within the ethical and legal framework of a democracy requires great effort. Even if someone is trying to minimise their digital footprint, it’s increasingly difficult to function in society without leaving a trail of potentially discoverable data—a digital snail trail.

Given all this, it seems clear that incremental change to how things are done now isn’t the path to success.

So, what’s to be done?

Our British and American partners show us that an urgent mission focus creates the conditions for success in a way that top-down structural reforms or budget efficiency measures just don’t.

The China mission is that ‘burning platform’ for change and success for Australian agencies, particularly those with a foreign intelligence focus such as the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the assessment element of the Office of National Intelligence. But the China mission must include the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the area of foreign interference and counterespionage. It’s a team sport in the mission focus, technology, tradecraft and data senses.

Arguably, this grouping of agencies is the ‘minilateral’ within the larger intelligence community that must combine most closely and urgently on the China mission. This reverses the ‘all one community’ concept of the broadened national intelligence community that was proposed in 2017. It also requires some unpicking of the ‘return of the portfolio’ in the intelligence community—which has manifested itself in the rise of the Department of Home Affairs as a director of its portfolio agencies, and to a lesser extent in the defence organisation with the emergence of a new chief of defence intelligence and the defence intelligence enterprise. That’ll involve hard yards in the bureaucratic realms of Canberra.

The distinct attributes of the China mission require a distinctive approach as the high-technology decoupling between China, Australia, the US and other powerful democracies deepens. Decoupling, at least in the high-tech sector, is an ‘unthinkable’ that just keeps happening.

Lessons from dealing with denied areas during the Cold War era are relevant. However, the scale of data on mainland China available from non-intelligence means, such as commercial satellite imagery, combined with the continuing strengths of human intelligence and the inherent vulnerabilities in China’s multilayered, complex digital systems working through the equally complex, unstable institutional party-state structures, provides the seeds for mission success.

Our US and UK partners also show us that unexpected crises such as Covid-19 can make unthinkable changes necessary and achievable: UK agencies’ successes in developing applications and tools on the unclassified ‘low side’ over the past 18 months are an example.

Another lesson is the powerful capability lift and more rapid problem solving that can come from deeply engaged, trusted corporate partners who bring skills, concepts and technologies—which won’t happen in our intelligence community unless traditional procurement models are challenged and changed.

In the UK environment, each agency still has its own requirements for bespoke technical capabilities for its particular remit and operating environment. However, standardised design principles and identifying which components of technology are reusable have helped to drive efficiency and cost savings and make agencies’ capabilities interoperable.

And running faster acquisition is possible without completely reinventing federal government procurement—as proven by ONI’s Delivering Innovation through Procurement award in 2020. UK and US approaches for more urgent and more imaginative capability development, such as the UK’s Cyber Accelerator and National Security Strategic Investment Fund, and the US’s In-Q-Tel and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (the US intelligence community’s equivalent to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), all seem worth either partnering with or modelling.

Tradecraft in intelligence collection and analysis must now change to exploit open data sources, and not just have open-source centres running in parallel to traditional classified tradecraft and collection activities. And analysis must move away from more traditional inductive analysis.

Artificial intelligence and machine-learning approaches, along with techniques such as data visualisation and data fusion to empower analysts, require novel technical specialists. Those people will stay only if the agency and government leaders and decision-makers are open to at times confronting, uncomfortable advice and have enough confidence to trust the advice of what, on occasions, can be staff in relatively junior or obscure roles. Recruiting and retaining such specialists will depend on them seeing the impact of their work. Trusted corporate partners—big and small—are part of winning this war for talent.

More collaborative and agile strategic intelligence involves finding new ways to bring classified data together with open-source bulk data. While this has been at the heart of the US intelligence community’s pursuit of reform, its experience shows that this is a long and challenging process. In the Australian context, this must first overcome the national intelligence community’s strong tribal cultures, which are so often resistant to change, along with the natural pride of intelligence professionals steeped in existing tradecraft. This is the ‘industrial relations’ aspect of change for intelligence.

The prioritisation of open sources doesn’t mean an end to specialist covert data collection. Rather, it creates an enhanced opportunity for combining secret and open-source data to develop new insights.

Lastly, we see here and in our two big partners that leadership matters. The two key leadership challenges for Australia’s intelligence community are to recognise the priority and distinct nature of the China mission, and to understand that individual agency (and intelligence community) success requires behaviours to shift to delivering insights from more common technology platforms and the exploitation of shared data, albeit leavened by agency-specific applications and (limited) bespoke data.

Future intelligence successes will be the rewards for intelligence communities that have the best datasets; can leverage the combined value of both secret and open sources; exploit those datasets, collection capabilities and analytical processes fastest; understand the distinct nature of key missions; and are open to the adoption of unfamiliar technologies and approaches from the world outside intelligence before such approaches proliferate to the level of obviousness.

This is an extraordinarily rich if difficult time to be in the intelligence community, whether in Australia or in our key allies and partners.

US intelligence assessments could be underestimating security risks from climate change

US security agencies have released their first comprehensive public-facing intelligence assessments on the impacts of climate change on US national security—three months after the due date set out in President Joe Biden’s January executive order on climate and security, but just in time for COP26 in Glasgow.

The release of these documents is a reminder that the US is attempting to reorganise its national security mission around the climate crisis. It also highlights that Australia urgently needs a national and regional assessment of its own economic and strategic risks in a heating climate as a necessary first step in building a credible national roadmap for emission reductions and resilience after COP.

The most comprehensive of these assessments, the national intelligence estimate (NIE) on climate change and national security attempts to aggregate the collective wisdom of all US national security agencies. It assumes that the COP process will fail to contain temperature rises and that the continued wrangling to reach political agreement on emissions will exacerbate geopolitical tensions.

It goes on to say that this is because the world’s top fossil-fuel-producing nations, which include Australia, Russia and Saudi Arabia, will resist transition, fearing the short-term economic and strategic costs more than they fear the near- and long-term damage of climate change.

This key judgement should give Australia pause. The US intelligence community has essentially pointed out that Canberra is at odds with Washington and its NATO partners on this central national and global security priority—which is probably not a sustainable position. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, announced last week without an intelligible roadmap, is unlikely to change this assessment.

However, is the NIE assessment right about the success of fossil-fuel producers in stymying the energy transition? The transition could happen more quickly than anticipated. The momentum of global financial markets on renewables has gathered real pace over the past year. This includes a major COP agenda item, the UN-backed Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which was launched in April and now has over US$100 trillion in assets under management.

This also means that a lot more data and analysis on climate risk is entering the financial system. The real pricing in of climate risk into the US market, as recommended by October’s US Treasury Financial Stability Oversight Council report, is beginning in earnest.

The fate of the ambitious infrastructure package currently in front of the US Congress is also relevant here. If it’s passed with some of the climate provisions in place, that will also accelerate the mobilisation of capital towards the energy transition and climate resilience.

How much power will fossil-fuel producers still have to stand against the increasing flows of capital into clean energy? Not much if demand and investment fade out and national revenues suffer precipitous declines. At the same time, the EU and US will want fossil-fuel producers and big emitters to make deep cuts in their domestic emissions and will probably use big levers like emissions tariffs to pressure them do so. As an example, the EU and US have just done a sideline deal at the G20 to restrict market access to dirty steel, a move primarily aimed at China.

Some quick thinking needs to be done about how to handle the geopolitical pushes and pulls of this energy interregnum.

Steep declines in national revenues could make fossil-fuel producers turn to agricultural sources of income that accelerate deforestation and therefore emissions—palm oil in Indonesia, or more cattle in the Amazon.

And does anyone want to live next door to a Russia that has lost a third of its national revenue? Or thought about the impact that tanking major economies could have on global economic stability?

Other underestimations in the NIE judgements are especially relevant to Australia’s climate and security context.

Both the NIE and Department of Defense assessments may be underplaying the effects of climate in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia.

The NIE names 11 ‘countries of concern’, including Afghanistan, South Sudan and Columbia, that the US intelligence community believes are the most vulnerable to warming temperatures on land and sea, extreme weather and sea-level rises.

Further, it points to central Africa and the Pacific islands as regional arcs of vulnerability, more prone to political instability and unable, because of poverty and poor governance, to adapt, and suggests that countries there are most likely to succumb first to climate-induced state failure.

There’s no doubt that these nations are highly vulnerable. But evidence suggests that Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular will be more affected by a dangerous constellation of climate hazards.

Indonesia has a unique exposure to El Niño and La Niña climate patterns that means it will experience more severe and extreme weather events, more population exposure to sea-level rises than anywhere in the world and higher sea temperatures that will decimate the fisheries from which its people get half of their protein.

And Indonesia’s responsiveness to cascading, compounding climate events will be limited by high levels of inequality, high population density and  fragile governance, particularly in poor and underdeveloped parts of the country. By 2030, the archipelago will be home to 300 million people.

The global stakes for Indonesia’s success or failure on climate change are high. It is Asia’s third largest economy. And Indonesia will be the sixth biggest emitter by 2030, according to the NIE climate report, which means it will crash the global carbon budget if it’s unable to change course.

One more important underestimation in the NIE’s conclusions is the assessment that, while the US and developed countries might experience some pain and costly adjustments, they’ll be able to adapt to warming of 2°C and beyond.

It even argues that states in higher latitudes such as Russia, Canada and the Scandinavian countries might actually benefit from climate change because warmer temperatures will allow more agriculture. But as the past 12 months have shown in northern Europe, warming doesn’t mean stable weather, not to mention the accelerating loss of pollinators, which could cancel out any agricultural gains.

All this also seems to assume that developed countries are not already contending with multiple interrelated systemic crises, that the global economy will keep growing, that pandemic disease won’t return, that potential climate-induced catastrophes won’t affect global food systems, that people movements can be managed without enflaming authoritarian movements in democracies, and that global information systems aren’t flooded with disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Some of the most ineffective responses to Covid-19, wildfires, storms and floods over the past two years have been in developed nations with the most economic capacity. The problem has been political failure and institutional weakness. The next round of climate change national security assessments will need to figure out how to engage with these risks in rich nations.

In the meantime, Australia, itself highly exposed to climate risk and situated in a similarly vulnerable region of nearly 700 million people, has yet to even commence its own climate and security risk assessment. That’s a policy failure that urgently needs to be addressed.

Exposing the Chinese government’s oppression of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs

In China’s distant northwest city of Ürümqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Political and Legal Affairs Commission sends ‘micro clues’ to neighbourhood committees and the police when someone does something irregular. That might be having an unexpected visitor at home, driving a car that belongs to someone else, receiving an overseas phone call, or using a file-sharing app.

The committee is a powerful organ of the Chinese Communist Party that oversees the ‘political and legal affairs system’, which includes the police, the procuratorate or Prosecutor General’s Office which controls the investigation and prosecution systems, the courts, the justice department and other security organs.

Elsewhere in China, the committee is typically a coordinating body without operational capabilities, but in Xinjiang it has prompted millions of investigations at the grassroots level. Between July 2016 and June 2017, it flagged 1,869,310 Uyghurs and other citizens in Xinjiang for using the Zapya file-sharing app.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has dubbed the political and legal affairs system the party’s ‘knife handle’ and insists that it must be firmly in the hands of the CCP and the masses.

How this vast system of coercive state control works is examined in a new project from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, The architecture of repression: unpacking Xinjiang’s governance.

Analysing thousands of pages of leaked police files, ASPI researchers have gained rare insights into the methods used by the CCP to oppress Uyghurs and other indigenous communities in Xinjiang.

The project includes an interactive organisational chart, profiling over 170 offices that have participated in Xinjiang’s governance in the past seven years. Within the chart, guided tours can take the viewer through five key sets of Xinjiang’s repressive policies: mass internment, forced labour, mass at-home surveillance, coercive birth control and ubiquitous propaganda.

An 82-page research report draws on previously unpublished material from thousands of Chinese-language sources, including police records and budget documents obtained by scraping Chinese government websites.

Since mass Uyghur internment was first reported in 2017, a rich body of literature has documented the ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang. However, there is little knowledge of the government processes or actual perpetrators of these now well-known atrocities, and only a small number of entities or individuals have been identified for their involvement.

This project exposes these activities, and those responsible, to further public scrutiny.

Amid international debates about whether recent events in Xinjiang constitute genocide, and while Chinese officials are actively scrubbing relevant evidence and seeking to silence those who speak out, it is important to carry out a timely and detailed investigation into Xinjiang’s governance now.

The report highlights, as an example, the treatment of Anayit Abliz, then 18, who was caught using a file-sharing app in 2017. He was interned in a re-education camp and eventually ‘sentenced’ by his neighbourhood committee, a nominally service-oriented voluntary organisation responsible for local party control, to three years in prison.

While he was detained, officials from the committee visited his family members six times in a single week, scrutinising their behaviour and observing whether they were emotionally stable.

Our report is the first English-language report to analyse Xinjiang’s ‘Trinity’ mechanism, which grants the neighbourhood committees extraordinary powers to police the movements and emotions of residents, subjecting many to ‘management and control’ orders akin to house arrest.

The crackdown against the Uyghurs has a striking resemblance to Mao-era mass political campaigns.

Even though Xi had declared such campaigns to be costly and burdensome, the party-state is using them in Xinjiang, and elsewhere. In addition to mass internment and coercive labour assignments, Xinjiang residents are compelled to participate in acts of political theatre, such as show trials, public denunciation sessions, loyalty pledges, sermon-like ‘propaganda lectures’ and chants for Xi’s good health.

They are mobilised to attack shadowy enemies hiding among them, the so-called ‘three evil forces’ and ‘two-faced people’.

The report highlights the whole-of government and whole-of society approach to Xinjiang’s crackdown, naming an astounding number of offices and officials involved in its repressive policies. They include obscure agencies such as the Forestry Bureau, which looked after Kashgar City’s re-education camps’ accounts for a year.

Three Xinjiang county party secretaries are profiled, including Yao Ning, who was a visiting fellow at Harvard University and now sits atop a chain of command overseeing nine newly built or expanded detention facilities in southern Xinjiang. Erken Tuniyaz, who was appointed Xinjiang’s new acting governor on 30 September, also spent time at Harvard as a visiting fellow.

Highly destructive mass political campaigns are not artefacts of a bygone era. Rather, they are occurring at a time when Chinese society is more closely connected with the world than ever. Consequently, through long and complicated supply chains, liberal democracies have found themselves consuming (often unknowingly) the outputs of China’s mass political campaigns, such as products made with forced labour. Pursued along racial and religious lines, Xinjiang’s campaign against the Uyghurs has also led to accusations of genocide.

Since the spring of 2017, it has been widely accepted that between several hundred thousand and a million Uyghurs and other indigenous people in Xinjiang have been rounded up and interned in what Chinese authorities call  ‘vocational education and training centres’. Yet these re-education camps are only the most visible components of a vast architecture of repression in the region.

Australia needs to build total defence in the face of national crises

In Australia, the prevailing view of mobilisation is that it is an activity associated with going to war. In the event of an armed conflict, the nation mobilises to support the Australian Defence Force. Against recent events, including the 2019–20 bushfires and Covid-19 pandemic, the ADF has mobilised to support the nation. As the range of potential hazards now encompasses high-end warfighting, grey-zone conflict, terrorism and organised crime, as well as domestic and offshore natural disasters, no single institution can sufficiently respond on its own.

Mobilisation should be redefined as occurring in response to all such events, drawing on all required and available elements from across the breadth of Australian society. But it must not be seen as just the response to a crisis; it should also include preparing for and, where possible, preventing such events, as well as supporting subsequent recovery efforts.

This raises the question of whether Australian citizens and institutions are psychologically, physically and materially equipped for this role. Have we been fostering the kind of national resilience that enables us to feel ready, to know how to respond, to be able to survive and to rapidly recover? The answer is, in all likelihood, no.

The concept of national resilience seems to be gaining traction as we try to manage massive natural disasters and a global pandemic, and as we recognise that threats to our security often sit below the threshold of war. But do we, as a nation, understand what it really means to mobilise and that we must be prepared to do so for more than conventional war?

Australia’s efforts to evolve its institutions and people towards this spectrum of challenges has tended to be piecemeal and narrow. Other nations have long been fostering a resilient citizenry as a self-evident defence imperative and a constituent part of their ‘total defence’ constructs. The idea that the strongest defence of a nation is when every aspect of society stays united for the protection of the country is commonplace in many nations, such as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Singapore. Yet, in Australia, there’s a tendency to default to the conventional course of preserving separate defence and civilian spheres in mobilisation planning, even as recent events have demonstrated the importance of a national approach to emergencies.

We need to proactively and strategically establish a new national security narrative built around resilience embedded within a whole-of-nation construct such as total defence. Initiatives that align with the total defence paradigm are underway. The government’s 2020 cybersecurity strategy called for a whole-of-nation response to the increasing cyberattacks on Australia, and the Defence Department is developing its new concept of ‘strategic mobilisation’, which aims to generate additional capability and capacity beyond the current scope and scale.

What’s missing, however, is a more comprehensive and purposeful national mobilisation strategy that accounts for the links between the military, civil, digital, economic, social and psychological domains. These domains should no longer be treated as separate and need to be understood as key elements in an overarching national resilience framework.

A national mobilisation strategy should acknowledge that, like resilience, mobilisation covers preparation, prevention, response and recovery. It needs to identify who will oversee and coordinate mobilisation at a national level within a federated model, and it must foster a positive national narrative while also recognising community, state and territory considerations. New types and levels of interaction between the federal government, the states and territories, local communities and industry are required, as is effective coordination, messaging and understanding in the assignment of roles and responsibilities. There must be a greater sense of shared purpose between civil society, government, Defence and industry when planning for and delivering mobilisation efforts.

Without a strategic narrative on national resilience, and a coordinated national approach, we will not have the social infrastructure or the mutual obligation to mobilise in the national interest, to bring people together, and to create communities and institutions that can respond. We need to recognise, with urgency, that Australia must develop its own total defence construct, engaging across military, civil, digital, economic, social and psychological dimensions and working across all societal levels—individual, community, regional, state and national.

AUKUS adds ambiguity to the Australia–New Zealand alliance

The Australian government often describes Australia and New Zealand as ‘natural allies’. But Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of the AUKUS security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom on 16 September—which he described as ‘a forever partnership for a new time between the oldest and most trusted of friends’—raises questions about the changing dynamics of Australia’s natural alliance.

Morrison called AUKUS ‘the single greatest initiative … since the ANZUS alliance itself’ for achieving the ‘stability and security of our region’. It is perhaps no coincidence that the announcement was made only weeks after the 70th anniversary of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty. On that occasion, Morrison said ANZUS was ‘the foundation stone of Australia’s national security and a key pillar for peace and stability in our Indo-Pacific region’.

But AUKUS doesn’t include New Zealand, which remains a treaty ally of Australia under ANZUS (the US having rescinded its security guarantee to New Zealand in 1986 after a dispute about nuclear vessels visiting New Zealand).

The new trilateral agreement will deepen defence and security integration between Australia, the US and the UK, strategically aligning Australia even more closely with the US. This will have consequences for Australia’s relationship with its only other formal treaty ally, New Zealand.

Much attention has focused on the fact that nuclear-powered vessels are banned from New Zealand waters. And Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that any nuclear-powered submarines Australia acquires under AUKUS will not be allowed into New Zealand’s territorial waters. When discussing the partnership, the head of Australia’s Defence Department, Greg Moriarty, said that Canberra is ‘conscious of and respectful towards New Zealand’s approach to nuclear-armed vessels’. Even so, for Australia’s natural ally not to permit the submarines, which (if or when they eventuate) will form a major part of Australia’s defence capability, into its territorial waters may create later tensions.

Ardern has clarified that, while New Zealand wasn’t invited to join the partnership, she wouldn’t have expected to be asked. Notably, she was the first world leader Morrison informed before the announcement, although not before the decision. The lack of communication has generated frustration in New Zealand, with opposition leader Judith Collins expressing her disappointment that New Zealand wasn’t involved in the discussions.

Ardern has taken a more neutral approach, making clear that New Zealand ‘welcomes the increased engagement of the UK and US in the region’ and reiterating that ‘our collective objective needs to be the delivery of peace and stability and the preservation of the international rules based system’. She also insisted that AUKUS ‘in no way changes our security and intelligence ties’ with Australia, the US and the UK.

But AUKUS does underscore two emerging dynamics in the trans-Tasman alliance. The first is that, after several decades trying to articulate its role in Asia and the Pacific, Australia has made explicit its identification with the ‘Anglosphere’. In contrast, while an ‘original’ Anglosphere member, New Zealand now presents itself as ‘first and foremost a nation of the Pacific’ that ‘views foreign policy developments through the lens of what is in the best interest of the region’.

This divergence reflects a growing degree of ambiguity between the two allies about whether they’re part of the Pacific islands region. Although Canberra likely hopes that Wellington will help smooth over concerns about AUKUS with Pacific island nations, it’s unclear how long New Zealand will be willing to act as Australia’s ‘good cop’ in the region.

The second issue is that the defence alliance between Australia and New Zealand, considered the closest in our region, is already changing in practical ways. New Zealand already struggles to maintain interoperability with Australia’s defence capabilities. AUKUS, which seeks to deepen interoperability across many areas of defence and security technology, including artificial intelligence, cyber, quantum, underwater systems and long-range strike capabilities, may widen the gap with New Zealand even further.

Wellington may also find that Canberra’s expectations of what burdens its junior alliance partner will share, in a material as well as a soft-power sense, may actually increase if New Zealand is to demonstrate its contribution to the alliance. As concerns about China’s rise and influence in the Indo-Pacific rise and Washington prioritises renewing and strengthening its alliances, the demands that AUKUS places on Australia could also shrink the bureaucratic bandwidth that Canberra can grant to Wellington.

These dynamics raise questions about the future of the Australia–New Zealand alliance, including the sustainability of New Zealand’s perceived free-riding on Australian defence spending and the two states’ roles in their immediate region, the Pacific islands. The allies have overcome major shocks before—such as the collapse of ANZUS between the US and New Zealand—but as strategic competition gains pace in the Indo-Pacific the presumed naturalness of their alliance is likely to be tested.

Australian sovereignty requires new thinking on investment and trade

While Covid-19 continues to provide moments of awakening, it’s yet to become the catalyst for the paradigm shift expected by many in the back half of 2020. Perhaps this will change with the realisation that we’re going to be living with ‘long Covid’—not the medical condition, but the pandemic—for some time.

Even with the national rollout accelerating, vaccines alone are unlikely to let Australians return to pre-Covid life. We can’t rely on the temporary workarounds and solutions applied to date, such as hotel quarantine in major population centres and deal-making to obtain diverse stocks of vaccines, that have been driven by limited domestic production. Living with Covid will require governments to make larger economic investment and structural change to build resilience.

Our new ASPI report, New beginnings: rethinking business and trade in an era of strategic clarity and rolling disruption, launched today, considers the relationship between our business and trade positioning in the context of the impacts of Covid, natural disasters and the actions of coercive trading partners.

As a starting point, the report looks at the ‘four Cs’—Covid, China and climate change—against a backdrop of rapid technological evolution. It identifies significant opportunities in low-carbon and renewable energy, biotechnology for human and agritech applications, quantum technologies, sustainable rare-earth mining, processing and manufacture, and deepened military–industrial co-production with allies and partners.

Until recently, continuous economic growth and the absence of an existential threat perpetuated an almost unchecked belief in the power of market forces, globalisation and the ‘long peace’ following World War II. These conditions led us to believe Australia was the lucky country. For decades we’ve relied heavily on that luck, underappreciating the risks and assumptions behind globalisation and enthusiastically pursuing short- and medium-term foreign investment and trade opportunities.

But our faith that economics had nothing to do with national security was proven ill-founded.

This has left Australia overexposed to risk in the structure of our economy and our trade. But our interconnected and interdependent globalised world is only part of the story.

The report provides an overview of some of the issues that contributed to where Australia is today, and suggests a range of opportunities to rethink how we do business and trade to enhance resilience and safeguard our sovereignty.

While corporations are factoring in the need to better understand and mitigate supply-chain risks from both environmental and state-directed disruption, it’s a mixed story. There’s still a clear sense of confusion—and nostalgia—when it comes to our China policy. It seems likely that large numbers of Australian companies and chunks of our university sector would rush back to deepening their China market partnerships and exposure given the chance.

At the same time, other, more trusted, economic partners with which Australia has functioning free-trade agreements (Japan, the US and South Korea, to name just three) or with which we’re negotiating (such as the UK, India and the EU) are avenues for market expansion for Australian businesses, which we treated as low priorities at the time of the now-ended China boom. And those other partners are positives for our national security as well as for our prosperity.

These new directions for Australia will build our future wellbeing, prosperity and security and enhance our position as a leader and trusted partner in our near region. But a longer term view is needed to achieve a broader mix of defence, mining, agriculture, technology, higher education and tourism measures to minimise our economic fragility and enhance national sustainability.

Modern nation-building starts with rethinking business and trade to mitigate the risks of coercive trade, optimise national resilience and take advantage of national strengths and trusted partners. Our current well-worn policies, procedures and mindsets were designed for a different, less challenging and slower paced era.

We need to think differently, commit to the big ideas of entrepreneurs and invest in innovative opportunities.

Pursuing these opportunities requires us to position economics alongside security, sovereignty and resilience through a more holistic nation-building agenda that invests in what we’re good at and what we need, values what we have and builds the future we want.