Tag Archive for: National Archives

Tanks for the memories

The start and the end of two decades of Australia’s Abrams M1A1 tanks came together in a moment of policy symmetry. As Australia shipped 49 retired Abrams to Ukraine at the end of 2024, the National Archives released the 2004 cabinet decision to buy the tanks.

The 2004 choice by the Howard Government is the foundation for what will be, at least, a 40 year commitment to two generations of Abrams. The 2004 purchase of the M1A1 set the ground for the 2022 decision to buy evolved Abrams M1A2 tanks.

Choices of military kit shape the force for decades, as they also decide debates. The Abrams choices give the Australian Army the decisive high ground in a strategic argument that has fizzed and fussed for decades: does the island continent even need tanks?

For tank sceptics, the retired Australian Abrams are going to Ukraine to do what they’re designed to do: fight on the plains of Europe. The new front in the sceptics’ attack is the 2020 decision by the US Marines to scrap all tanks.

The critique is that tanks will be swarmed by drones and mugged by missiles; that the big beasts won’t figure on the future battlefields that Australia cares about; and that the focus should be strategy and force structure, not tactics and tanks. Doubts remain whether mechanisation will ‘cripple the army as a useful, deployable tool of government’.

Army push-back was passionately expressed by a former major-general, Mike Clifford, when he wrote in 2015 that the armour argument was ‘one of the most uninformed policy and capability debates’ in our defence history. Clifford dismissed the push-pull of heavy versus light and high-intensity versus low-intensity as ‘rot’. And tanks not fitting anywhere in our strategic guidance? ‘Again, rot!’

Clifford was closely involved with the Abrams decision in 2004. He summarised Army’s thinking in one sentence: ‘This wasn’t about heavy or light; it was about threat, survivability and risk.’

The 39 pages of army submission for the 9 March 2004 cabinet decision wasn’t about whether Australia needed tanks; the army had won that battle, which is only hinted at in one sentence: ‘All Western countries that operate tanks have been faced with the dual challenges of an increased threat in a more robust operating environment, and the need to upgrade their fleets to accommodate the demands of a more costly and digital battlefield.’

Rather, the recommendation before cabinet was about the best tank—the German Leopard, Swiss Panzer 87 WE, British Challenger 2 or US Abrams. The national security committee accepted the submission conclusion, deciding to pay $571.6 million for 59 Abrams M1A1s to replace Leopards.

The Abrams was judged as having ‘the best overall survivability, through-life support and Network Centric Warfare capability. The tank is in production and in use with the US Army and would be bought predominantly off-the-shelf.’ Army lore is that the figure of 59 Abrams was what was available on the shelf.

The cabinet was told the army ‘identified survivability as the highest priority for the tank replacement’ and this was about more than just the thickness of armour plate. To survive on the modern battlefield, the tank must have greater ability to:

—Avoid detection through signature management;

—Avoid being accurately targeted;

—Avoid being hit;

—Reduce the probability of penetration; and finally

—Mitigate the effects of penetration.

The submission stated Australia would not buy the US Army’s version, fitted with armour made of depleted uranium (DU). Cabinet was told that procuring the Abrams without DU would alter the protection level of the tank, but ‘US advice is that there is little difference in the level of protection between DU and non-DU armour. This is protected information.’

Having won the decisions of whether and what to buy, the submission stuck to the details of performance for price in measured bureaucratese.

The prose poetry about the Abrams tank in 2004 came from another place—writer Lee Child. He nominated the clatter of tank tracks as the signature sound of the 20th century, beating other sounds born in that century such as that of a jet, or helicopter or bombs falling on a city.

The squeal or clatter of tank tracks, Child wrote, is ‘a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive overwhelming advantage in power.’

Then Child turned to the ‘magnificent sight’ of the Abrams as the ‘ultimate unfair advantage’, writing: ‘The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it … Its main trick is to stand off so far that no battlefield shell or rocket or kinetic device can even reach it. It sits there and watches enemy rounds fall short in the dirt. Then it traverses its mighty gun and fires and a second later and a mile-and-a-half in the distance its assailant blows up and burns.’

In such prose, reaching towards the military version of poetry, we see army armour amore.

The 1996–1997 cabinet papers: John Howard, multilateralism and landmines

For political tragics, there’s not much than can surprise about John Howard. His consistency reaches towards the rigid. But here’s a statement to puzzle tragics: J.W. Howard—when in power—was a good, pragmatic multilateralist.

During nearly a dozen years as Australia’s second longest serving prime minister, he often embraced multilateral institutions and instruments.

The language was always about the national interest, yet that fed a quiet and effective commitment to broad international approaches and solutions.

But you’d never know it with the way Howard burnishes his legend now.

The scorn he expresses towards multilateralism and international institutions is one of the inconsistencies between today’s Liberal elder and the realities of what the working PM did. More than inconsistent, that scorn has damaged the modern Liberal Party (and Australian interests).

To the two great strands of Oz political opinion on the United Nations—Evatt Enthusiasm and Menzies Scepticism—Howard has introduced a third, UN Rejectionism. Rejectionism was bluntly expressed when Howard killed off a run for Australia’s election to the UN Security Council as a waste of time and money.

His memoir offers only one sentence in praise of the UN as an organisation that doesn’t carry an immediate qualifier.

In retirement, Howard’s mental tic about the UN has grown into a sore spot in the Liberal Party’s psyche. Howard’s UN Rejectionism is expressed by his ideological heirs in an Animal Farm chant: ‘Alliance great, bilateral good, multilateral bad.’

In power, leaders are creatures of compromise and consequences. In retirement, they brandish their tics and prejudices without having to worry about the policy penalties. The stories that leaders tell of the past, though, influence future followers.

One of Howard’s heroes, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates the problem. In retirement, Thatcher was far more hardline and vehement in attacking the European Union than she was when in office. That’s worked out well for the Tories and Britain, no?

In the US, the modern Republican version of what President Ronald Reagan stood for has less and less connection with the pragmatism that the Gipper mixed with his principles.

It used to be the left of politics that was guilty of believing the legends rather than knowing the history. The right has developed the same tendency.

My musings on Howard then and now were revved along by his masterful performance at the preview of the 1996 and 1997 cabinet papers, now released by the National Archives of Australia. While he’ll turn 80 in July, Howard remains a formidable political warrior, still with an instant and detailed command of the facts and the arguments. Like Winston Churchill, Howard expects history to be kind to him, because he’ll write that history.

One of the points Howard made at the archives event was that he always preferred the bilateral to the multilateral in international affairs. He saw that as one of his many differences with Labor’s Paul Keating, whom he replaced as PM at the 1996 election. ‘Keating was more of a multilateralist than I was. I believe in multilateral institutions when they work.’

That’s the well-worn Howard line: he presents as the pragmatic realist who prefers to work a bilateral deal rather than grapple with multilateral machinations. His equation, though, ignores the great difference between two countries doing a deal and many countries achieving a workable compromise. Multilateralism is harder because the payoffs are bigger.

Today’s Liberal-led government chanting for the (liberal) rules-based international order needs to know that beneath the grey, realist coat of Howard’s government were the rainbow hues of multilateral achievement.

As a big for instance, see the greatest international win of Howard’s leadership—Australia leading the UN intervention to save East Timor from the turmoil of its independence vote.

Another fascinating example in the archives is the argument the Howard government had with itself over landmines.

It’s not often in Canberra that Foreign Affairs beats Defence in a debate about a weapon. Especially when banning mines went against the interests of the great and powerful ally, the US.

Yet all this happened under Howard, who was always the uber defence minister. On taking office, he declared that every element of government faced cuts—except defence. As Howard recalled at the archives event, he’d instructed, ‘You can’t touch defence.’

In August 1997, Defence Minister Ian McLachlan told cabinet that Australia shouldn’t take part in the negotiations to ban anti-personnel landmines (APL) because it’d ‘produce a flawed treaty, the signature of which would damage our defence capability, without a compensating humanitarian gain’.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer won that initial round and Australia went to the negotiating table.

By November 1997, they were back in cabinet for the final round: should Australia sign the Ottawa treaty?

Foreign Affairs argued:

[T]here are strong humanitarian reasons to sign. There is also a community expectation that the Government’s strong support for an effective global ban on landmines will translate into signature. Foreign Affairs also notes that under current Australian policy, operational use of APL by the ADF [Australian Defence Force] is indefinitely suspended, the suspension being subject to review only in case of a substantial deterioration of Australia’s strategic circumstances, in which Australia’s security was under threat and the denial of an APL capability to the ADF would result in additional Australian casualties and damage to vital infrastructure.

Defence advised that ‘signature will deny the ADF a capability which it judges potentially useful and present challenges to the ADF in its responsibility for the military security of Australia and potential difficulties in cooperation with allies’.

So Defence didn’t want it. The US didn’t want it. Yet Australia signed.

John Howard—that pragmatic multilateralist—glimpsed the rainbow and came through for the rules-based international order.

The National Archives releases (part 3): France in the South Pacific

The annual release of hitherto secret cabinet papers now takes us back to the last great Oz outbreak of Francophobia—rage and fear about the French in the South Pacific.

The 1994 and 1995 cabinet records show the Keating Labor government grappling with France resuming underground nuclear explosions in the South Pacific.

In 1995, France ended a three-year testing moratorium. The previous 150 tests apparently weren’t enough. Having done a final round, Paris promised, it’d then commit to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Dreadful French process led to a positive outcome—allowing France to become, eventually, a positive rather than a negative in South Pacific regionalism.

The cabinet submission grappled with balancing the desirable CTBT end against dire boom-boom process, calling for Australia’s response to be ‘credible but proportionate’. The tests, DFAT intoned, should not dominate the bilateral relationship.

Walking that line, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans was blown up by a wonderful question from John Shovelan, an ABC journo. The Shov missile was this: ‘Are you saying that the French decision to go ahead, then, is not as bad as it could have been?’ The missile exploded when Evans began his reply with ‘Exactly’. As Evans recalled in his memoirs, that act of ‘utterly unwise objectivity’ unleashed a public/political storm about complacency and compliance. ‘All hell broke loose’, Gareth wrote.

Nuanced diplomacy is tough—especially when people are exploding nukes.

The archived history is a chance to point to ASPI’s new report on Oz–French relations, and to share two tales of Oz politicians grappling with the French.

Gough transforms wine

The Australian fear of what France was up to in the South Pacific in the 19th century was matched by the Francophobia frenzy over French atmospheric nuclear tests in the South Pacific from 1966 to 1974 (after which France started going boom underground).

The wrangle prompted an informal Oz boycott of all things French—no wine, no mustard. Australia’s postal union interrupted mail to and from France and its Pacific territories. This postal foreign policy was dismissed as ‘maverick action’ by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Gough’s best barb was that if the tests at Mururoa were so safe, then they ‘should be conducted in French islands closer to France, such as Corsica, Guadeloupe or Martinique’.

The boycott of French products produced one of the many Whitlam anecdotes—as always with Gough at centre stage, delivering imperious lines with sonorous irony. This is from journalist Geoffrey Barker, who travelled with The Age editor, Graham Perkin, to Kirribilli House for lunch with Whitlam. As the meal began, several bottles of French wine were presented to the PM.

‘Jesus, Gough’, protested Perkin, ‘you can’t drink French wine’. ‘Never fear, comrade’, replied Gough, ‘as it passes my lips it becomes Australian’.

Gareth: parlez vous Franglais?

In 1991, I flew into Noumea with Evans, who was making a tour of the South Pacific.

Things were looking up between France and Australia. The Matignon Agreements were three years old and New Caledonia was calm. The tragic assassination of Jean-Marie Tjibaou two years earlier had shocked all sides and the talk was of a peace process moving steadily away from the cycle of conflict. Evans spoke of a new era in relations, making a point of visiting Tjibaou’s grave.

New Caledonia’s governor marked the visit by announcing that the tariff on Australian cheeses would be scrapped. The French accepting Oz cheese: talk about normalisation!

The cream of Noumean society gathered for dinner in the grand ballroom of the governor’s mansion. Among the 400 guests there were plenty of Kanaks, but the majority were Caledoche or those on postings from metropolitan France. It wasn’t exactly a friendly audience.

Everyone had eaten and supped well (plenty of French cheese to finish) when Evans rose to speak. He launched into a story of first seeing Paris as a backpacking student in the 1960s. Then he attempted the joke.

He’d asked a Parisian the way to the station: la gare. The icy response was that the war was in Vietnam. Driving home his jest, Gareth explained that in his Franglais, he’d said la guerre, not la gare.

Granted this is not in the same league as Bob Hawke telling a room of Japanese executives that Australia would not play ‘funny buggers’ with them over trade issues, which was translated into Japanese as Australia not threatening to be ‘laughing homosexuals’. Even so, after several glasses of wine, the Gareth mocking his own language skills deserved a polite titter.

Non. None.

In that room of 400, there wasn’t a sound. Cold, hard silence. How dare this foreign minister from a country that had only just produced acceptable cheese make light of the glorious French language. The stillness in the room lasted until the small band of Australians escaped into the night.

Not often did Gareth’s department (or journalists) feel much sympathy for the driven and demanding foreign minister; the sigh, ‘Earth to Gareth’ was often heard around DFAT. Yet that moment of pain in Noumea lingered in the mind.

Thus it was that when France restarted nuclear tests, DFAT had an inspired idea—or hallucination—about Australia ramming home its anger.

To give France the maximum pain, Gareth should immediately fly to Paris and deliver Australia’s protest in an hour-long speech. All in French! Strangely, it never reached the minister …

The National Archives releases (part 2): the tantalising totem of 2% of GDP on defence

Come back with me to a wonderful time when the Cold War had been won and Australia was cashing in the peace dividend. Spend money on the military? Naaah! Squeeze ’em.

The release by the National Archives of the 1994 and 1995 cabinet records of the Keating Labor government is our annual compare and contrast moment. This is defence, so, as always, start with the money. The archives show that the ‘peace dividend’ moment in the mid-1990s was when Canberra really started to argue about what’s since become a totemic issue: whether Defence should get 2% of GDP.

Labor Defence Minister Robert Ray, preparing for the 1994–95 budget, sketched out the tight years Defence would face as it headed down towards that 2% figure.

Defence guidance was reduced in real terms by 0.75% or $71m in the 1993–94 Budget, compared with the funding provided in 1992–93. In addition, Defence guidance is to be reduced by a further 0.5% in each of the following three years … On current projections, these reductions will result in Defence outlays declining from 2.4% to 2.0% of GDP by 1996–97.

Cabinet’s 1994 budget decision embraced the Defence squeeze: a repeated cut of 0.5% over three financial years, and ‘zero per cent real growth after that’. Behold the dawn of what’s become a magic and maddening figure: 2% of the Oz economic pie. The argument seems to have gone on for decades—because it has! The fight still rages. Here’s ASPI’s Mark Thomson—we value him as our Mr 98% because he has to follow that other 2%—with recent musings on the status of the totem, in the 2017 budget (we’re now on track to reach 1.9% of GDP, though from below this time).

The trouble with a peace dividend is you can cash it in only once—just like that proverbial government dollar that is spent only once.

As the Labor government finalised the 1994 defence white paper, it confronted a set of conflicts between its strategic vision (diminishing US influence and rising Asian powers), the equipment shopping list, and the money squeeze.

The Keating government wanted to buy more defence with less money. Labor ran head-on into the law/lore laid down by the defence mandarin Arthur Tange (as oft cited by Paul Dibb): ‘Strategy without money is not strategy.’

In October 1994, Ray’s cabinet submission on the white paper, Defending Australia, flagged the need to start finding additional dollars quickly if the spend wasn’t to keep falling below 2% (an extra $320 million in 1996–97 and even more for 1997–98: $830 million).

Cabinet squibbed it, deciding that ‘defence funding [will] be sustained at approximately 2% of GDP to fulfil the objectives set out in Defending Australia’. That squib phrase ‘at approximately’ has launched a thousand arguments.

The Defence line, in Ray’s submission, was about both history and need:

Since the 1987 White Paper, defence spending as a share of Government outlays has fallen from 9% to 8%. In 1986–87, defence spending was 2.6% of GDP. In 1994–95 it is estimated at 2.1%. On present planning, defence spending in real terms will fall by 0.5% in each of the next two years and remain steady thereafter. On that basis, by 1996–97 defence spending in real terms will have fallen below 2% of GDP for the first time since the 1930s. The average annual level of defence spending over the past thirty years has been 2.4% of GDP.

The comment to cabinet from the prime minister’s department was masterly squib-speak. PM&C vaguely liked the 2% idea—but not yet, and with plenty of provisos. It agreed that a benchmark figure of ‘around 2% of GDP’ had ‘some merit as a sign of the Government’s commitment to Defence over the medium term’. But qualifications on such a commitment included specific defence needs, strategic and economic circumstances, and the rate of economic growth. And PM&C ‘does not consider that the argumentation in the white paper [is] sufficiently strong as to justify a commitment now to a return to real growth in the defence budget in the forward estimate period’.

No squibs from Treasury. It attacked. Treasury stated that it was

opposed to setting future defence funding at some arbitrary percentage of Australia’s GDP. Such a way of determining defence spending has no relation to our capacity for such spending or our need for such spending. Expenditure on defence outlays should be directly related to Australia’s defence capability requirements. The Defence white paper does not identify any particular deficiencies in current capabilities which warrant a real increase in spending at this time.

The 2% totem has been a tough task ever since.