Tag Archive for: North of 26° south

Northern Territory’s digital infrastructure plans face big challenges

The Northern Territory government has set ambitious plans for economic and social prosperity. Its catchily named ‘Terabit Territory’ initiative, which aims to position the NT to become a leader in telecommunications across Southeast Asia, is just one example. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, increased economic competition, a changing climate and strategic uncertainty, we need ambitious initiatives. But will our national policy settings encourage success?

As ASPI’s John Coyne argued last year, Australian policymakers ‘have struggled to develop a cohesive northern Australia strategy’ and ‘development of a scalable industry base in northern Australia has been left more to chance than strategy.’

A major hindrance is Australia’s longstanding fixation on investing in rail and road infrastructure. The Australian government’s $110 billion investment in transport projects reflects this obsession and represents a missed opportunity.

Nation-building is about more than constructing highways and railways to connect our major cities. The long-term economic, social and environmental benefits of projects need to be assessed and multiple challenges must be solved along the way.

The territory’s data centre initiative is the type of nation-building project needed to drive Australia’s post-Covid recovery. Now is the time for thinking big. However, our national policy settings will have to be adjusted to enable big thinking and innovative approaches.

A telecommunications project focused on Southeast Asia represents very big thinking.

The initiative’s central feature is a data centre that brings together Darwin-based infrastructure, clean power and fibre-optic links to deliver high-speed, low-latency digital networks. Importantly, the system will connect Darwin and Port Hedland to Kupang, Dili, Singapore and the west coast of the United States. Using a patchwork of existing and new investment, the territory will create critical capability that will help Australia navigate the new era of major-power competition spanning security, technology, economics and politics. The project will also contribute to strengthening Australia’s technology ties with Southeast Asia.

From a technical and logistical perspective, building a data centre ecosystem is doable. The territory’s expression of interest for proponents to develop and operate data centres in Darwin closed in September 2020. Land is available, and it can be supplied with up to 1,000 megawatts of solar and gas power, or more if needed. It will be essential to select technology that can accommodate the full range of cloud providers. Narrowing the scope would be the technology equivalent of putting all of the territory’s eggs in one basket.

There’s also no shortage of investors, ranging from the traditional telecommunications providers to managed funds. While managers of established data centres will need to keep a close eye on their operating costs as the Covid crisis eases, the continued generation of data is expected to boost global data centre investment by around 6%.

Putting aside the risk of ‘build it and they will come’ thinking, the challenges to realising the territory’s vision are significant. The goal isn’t merely to establish Darwin as a data hub; the project aims to make the territory a strategic player in the region and elevate data to the status of a key strategic resource. Subsea cable connectivity, the enabler for a new era of hyperscale services, would also emphasise Darwin’s closeness with (not simply proximity to) Southeast Asia and would lessen its isolation within Australia. This would position Darwin as the enhanced digital pathway between Australia and Southeast Asia.

How a data centre ecosystem with links to multiple countries sits with the Australian government’s focus on addressing the risks to data sovereignty, data centre ownership and the supply chain is yet to be understood. Under the NT government’s initiative, data from several countries would be stored and managed under potentially quite different legislative frameworks. Add in the likelihood of classified data from foreign governments finding its way into a Southeast Asia data centre and the challenges soon multiply.

Australia’s concerns about data sovereignty have centred on the requirement in China’s 2017 national security law for Chinese businesses to provide access to their systems and data to Chinese intelligence agencies. However, the 2018 US CLOUD Act also facilitates access by US intelligence agencies to data of foreign governments held by US companies. A non-US country needs to agree to be a ‘qualified foreign government’ for its data to be exempt. This requirement came to the public’s attention last year when the Australian government awarded the Covid-19 app data-storage contract to an Amazon cloud subsidiary. At the time, the government said, ‘This is the way of the future between like-minded countries.’

What constitutes like-mindedness is being continually redefined. It’s not clear how the question of data sovereignty will affect the territory’s data centre project in practice or how many, if any, agreements will be needed. And data sovereignty is just one of the potential policy challenges the NT will face.

Achieving the vision of a Southeast Asia data centre ecosystem requires more nuanced legislative framing by the Australian government. But the more significant point is that post-Covid nation-building requires proactive policies that anticipate and enable, rather than restrict or simply respond to, innovative initiatives and solutions.

Covid-19 means live, virtual and constructive training’s time has come

The world has changed rapidly over the past 18 months and the way Australia’s defence organisation trains its people needs to change with it, or skills and readiness will surely decline.

A combination of the Australian Defence Force’s involvement in responding to natural disasters over the summer of 2019–20 and Covid-19 restrictions throughout 2020 resulted in the cancellation of major military exercises such as Hamel, and the scope of those that did proceed was reduced. Pitch Black 20, initially cancelled, was eventually held as a scaled-down virtual exercise. This pattern was consistent across the Five Eyes, with RIMPAC also drastically reduced in scale and scope.

Despite this reduction in activities, military personnel were still required to retain their individual skills and the ADF to maintain its readiness and preparedness levels. However, the lack of realistic training opportunities no doubt resulted in some atrophy of the ADF’s operational ability.

Despite the availability of a vaccine, Covid restrictions are going to remain with us for a while yet, precluding a return to large-scale training activities and preventing international travel to exercise with allies and partners. Greater investment is needed in alternative approaches that leverage emerging trends in simulation to rectify the deficiencies that the reduction in training will produce.

Live, virtual and constructive training, or LVC, is a taxonomy used mainly for military training, where there’s a mix between real people, simulated capabilities and environments, and computer-generated elements. Imagine a soldier in the field in the Northern Territory, calling in a simulated airstrike from an F-35 pilot seated in a simulator at a Royal Australian Air Force base in New South Wales against a computer-generated threat.

The holy grail of LVC is the ability to integrate all the individual components to conduct complex multidimensional training at varying levels of complexity and security, with widely dispersed personnel and platforms. The ultimate goal is an event that links all components together, giving the participants the maximum training benefit in as realistic an environment as possible.

The ADF conducts LVC to a limited extent. During 2020, the ADF participated in virtual exercises such as Coalition Virtual Flag, Wirra Jaya and Fleet Synthetic Training, to name a few. While all were international, they were constrained to a narrow focus on elements in the air, land and sea environments.

Unfortunately, LVC hasn’t yet reached its potential. The main obstacles are the cost of implementation and of service-specific training systems and, up until last year, the abundance of live training activities and exercises. The changed environment wrought by 2020 has provided the opportunity for a more considered approach to LVC for the ADF.

Covid-19 isn’t the only catalyst for change; the complexities of contemporary military equipment necessitate and complicate the development and implementation of LVC. The combat systems and weapons on high-end platforms such as the F-35 joint strike fighter and air warfare destroyer operate on manufacturers’ proprietary systems at high levels of classification and consume and create massive volumes of data. Stringent security protocols are required to protect both the source codes and the data that is carried, as well as access to a large amount of secure bandwidth.

These weapon systems are also expensive to operate. Combat aircraft cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour to fly, so every hour flown in a simulator means a flying hour saved, a longer period between maintenance cycles and a longer airframe life.

While increasing the scope, quantity and frequency of LVC activities would undoubtedly maximise training opportunities for the ADF and improve the skills and competencies of personnel, it will be difficult to achieve. However, there are some steps that could be taken to improve LVC opportunities.

To begin with, all relevant simulators and computer-based training systems need to be compatible with the LVC network. This will take a change to procurement processes, as current training systems often support only the needs of a particular weapon system, with little thought given to broader interoperability. Where appropriate, new and emerging systems should have LVC compatibility mandated. An extant system should be modified only if it will provide a proven return on investment.

Next, a stand-alone, multi-security, layered IT network should be established. This would remove the added bandwidth demands required to operate LVC from daily operating systems, reduce the chance of data spills and remove any possibility of a simulated scenario being mistaken for an actual event. A robust network may also help to assure manufacturers that their proprietary information won’t be shared with a competitor.

Importantly, an LVC network must be easy to join. A system that’s difficult to get into and navigate will be underutilised and likely provide no training benefit. The system needs to be built for the user and not the IT specialist.

Finally, LVC should not and cannot be pursued by Defence alone. LVC needs a balance of contributors: those who build and maintain the environment, those who provide the training expertise and those who use it. It must be a combination of military and civilian personnel with a broad mixture of qualifications and practical experience.

There’s already a community of Australian companies providing expertise and services in this area. Cubic Australia, for example, currently provides support to all three services across Australia and Milskil, mainly focuses on supporting the fighter force at RAAF Williamtown. Teaming and agreements are already in place and non-defence investments are being made. The North Queensland Simulation Park, or NQ SPARK, is a collaborative activity involving government, industry and academia that’s aimed at providing a multi-user simulation facility.

A more nuanced approach to LVC is needed but it won’t happen unless it is given a higher priority. Resources (particularly budgetary ones) and personnel need to be devoted to building the LVC enterprise. Importantly, LVC needs to be championed at the highest levels to ensure its implementation is promoted and enforced.

While the holy grail will likely never be achieved, circumstances have changed and the requirement to conduct more blended exercises creates opportunities to improve the quality and availability of LVC for the ADF. Training is about people and not just simulators or computers. Any LVC solution needs to be simple to use and provide a training benefit, not a burden.

Cutting-edge simulation facility planned for Townsville

The impact of Covid-19 and Australia’s rapidly evolving strategic environment have highlighted the requirement to invest in a sovereign defence industry. The Australian government clearly articulated its ambition for a strong and sustainable capability in the 2020 defence strategic update and, to its credit, also expressed the desire to maximise opportunities in regional Australia.

That’s a sensible approach. The political and military realignment underway in the Indo-Pacific region is thrusting northern Australia into a position of strategic importance it hasn’t had since World War II. The north is increasingly valued as a location for forward mounting bases and training areas for the Australian Defence Force and allied militaries but, as I highlighted in a previous Strategist post, there’s no point positioning ADF units forward if supporting industry and logistics are far removed in distance and time.

Most of Australia’s people, industry and manufacturing are in the southern half of the country. Altering that distribution is no easy task. ASPI’s John Coyne suggests that establishing a defence industry in regional Australia will require coordination across governments and agencies. Achieving cooperation between government, defence and industry is never easy, but the greatest challenge is to first understand which industries to encourage, where they’re located and how to maximise outcomes for all involved.

Although the 2020 force structure plan details significant investment opportunities for defence industry, it isn’t the Defence Department’s responsibility to stimulate local economies or invest in infrastructure without some meaningful return. Accordingly, Townsville in north Queensland has developed a strategy for promoting defence industry based on delivering mutually beneficial outcomes for Defence and the region through carefully targeted opportunities.

One example is the proposed North Queensland Simulation Park, or NQ SPARK. The defence organisation clearly understands the importance of live and simulation-enabled training, and Townsville is ideally placed as a regional location for the development of innovative training capabilities. Lavarack Barracks is home to the army’s 3rd Brigade and the combat training centre. A new 4G/5G-enabled training range commissioned for the training centre near Townsville has been designed and delivered by Townsville-based Cubic Defence Australia. Cubic is a world-leading enterprise in blended live and synthetic collective training solutions and command and control systems.

NQ SPARK will consolidate and exploit a unique confluence of defence and health knowledge and simulation expertise to construct a multi-user simulation training facility. It will become foundation infrastructure for an advanced training and research and development precinct. The facility will be positioned on James Cook University land with a common boundary between Lavarack Barracks and the Townsville University Hospital, close by two world-class, instrumented military training areas (Townsville and Greenvale)—a location unrivalled in Australia.

The facility will be equipped with cutting-edge technology, including immersive visual systems, precision motion capture and, most importantly, a private 4G/5G-compliant LTE network for advanced simulation training and experimentation. The network capability is a key enabler for advanced operational test and evaluation activities in highly realistic operational scenarios exploiting advanced simulation technology. NQ SPARK will uniquely feature both public and private LTE networks—something that’s much more difficult to achieve in major southern population centres.

Defence forces around the world are investing in autonomous technology. A key requirement for the operation and control of uncrewed systems is a secure and robust communications architecture. NQ SPARK will be centrally located between air, land and sea ranges and corridors for unmanned vehicles stretching from western Queensland to the Coral Sea. Sections of these ranges will be instrumented and networked to support integrated research and development across multiple domains in tropical conditions. This will enable the ADF to test and train in conditions replicating environments they may be called to fight in.

Townsville City Council led the initial coordination of the project, with cooperation from the Queensland government, health authorities, academia, emergency services and defence industry. The state government is preparing a business case, and federal funding for construction is under consideration through the Townsville City Deal agreement.

Defence won’t contribute to the cost of the infrastructure but will indirectly support the operational viability of the proposal. Cubic and affiliated companies have significant contracts with Defence and will be major users of the facility when delivering training, simulation and other high-tech capabilities.

The Defence Science and Technology Group funds research in collaboration with James Cook University, presenting opportunities through NQ SPARK for industry and academia to access funding from the Next Generation Technologies Fund and the Defence Innovation Hub. Of interest is a potential requirement for industry-led cooperative research to improve the integration of soldier systems. NQ SPARK could be an ideal location to base a new defence cooperative research centre, linked through James Cook University to other national universities to focus on operational capabilities such as integrated soldier systems.

Not only will NQ SPARK link Townsville’s defence, research and health capabilities with national and international defence industry and research organisations, but it will also facilitate significant industry investment within the precinct and provide employment for a highly skilled workforce including veterans and STEM graduates.

The NQ SPARK proposal is a model for collaboration among governments, agencies and defence industries to simultaneously deliver transformational projects for the economies of northern Australia and contribute to the security needs of the nation.

Filling the hollow middle in Australia’s defence industry

Ever since Covid-19 started cutting a swathe through global supply chains, countless column inches in Australia have been devoted to the need for sovereign manufacturing capabilities as a defence against future disruptions. To its credit, the federal government has heeded these calls and is supporting the development of Australian industry capability, particularly in the defence sector, with a heavy focus on small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

This focus on domestic capability and the various forms of assistance from different levels of government are both welcome and necessary, particularly in the context of the economic downturn. However, a number of issues are working to hold back Australia’s defence manufacturers and prevent them from making the leap from SME to major player.

At the top of the list—ironically—is the focus on SMEs, followed closely by the Defence Department’s aversion to risk and the nature of the bidding process itself. Reforms in these areas will go a long way towards taking Australia’s defence manufacturing sector to the next level.

Australia’s defence manufacturing industry is shaped like an hourglass: there are a large number of small firms at the base, a smattering of mid-sized companies in the centre, and large foreign primary contractors at the top. The problem with this structure is that a collection of small supply chain companies doesn’t constitute a sovereign defence industry capability. While these firms provide essential products, at best they can supply projects run by larger players from overseas. What we need is a number of local primes that can integrate and sustain complex capabilities. Unfortunately, our current arrangements work against such developments.

At the moment, we have a situation where incentives for defence companies dry up as they grow larger, which can leave them in a precarious position and have the perverse outcome of discouraging them from taking on workers or even bidding for contracts they would be capable of delivering if it meant hiring more staff. Too big to be small, but too small to be big, they are trapped in the middle of the hourglass. If these firms are going to achieve the economies of scale that will allow Australia to have a truly sovereign defence industry capability, they will need to be encouraged to grow to that next level.

Distorting incentives are just one factor holding back our defence manufacturers. Another is a culture of risk-aversion within Defence that predisposes decision-makers towards having foreign primes oversee programs, with a reluctance to appoint local companies to take on larger projects.

This can result in absurd situations where a foreign prime is imposed on top of Australian companies that already have the capability, equipment, knowledge and experience to deliver projects in their own right. Defence’s efforts to mitigate any risk involved with having a smaller company deliver the product or service come at considerable cost to local firms and to taxpayers.

Examples abound of companies that have done everything the government has asked of them by investing in local jobs and local high-end technology and gearing their businesses for export. But in many cases they have found themselves ineligible for government incentives on the one hand, and untrusted to deliver by Defence on the other. Despite the difficult situation they find themselves in, companies are reluctant to complain publicly for fear of biting the hand that feeds them.

Finally, bidding for defence contracts isn’t cheap, and firms can be left significantly out of pocket following an unsuccessful campaign. Again, this counts against mid-sized domestic companies that are fully able to deliver the proposed capability but lack the financial firepower to compete in the bidding process with large foreign primes. While writing off a million or so dollars on a failed bid might be uncomfortable for a foreign prime, it can be ruinous for a mid-sized local manufacturer. That’s without taking into account the lost productivity as staff are taken away from their profit-making activities to work on the bid. Of course, on the flip side is the fact that winning a major program could be transformative to an Australian company, its workers and its supply chain.

The answer could be a subsidised bidding process, where the government underwrites the costs of qualified Australian companies and the funding is paid back by the successful bidder, while unsuccessful firms reimburse the government an amount that’s calculated based on how far they progressed in the bid. This would decrease the financial risk of bidding for programs and increase the pool of Australian companies bidding for, and winning, work.

As has been pointed out ad nauseam over the past six months or so, Australia needs to boost its manufacturing capabilities as a hedge against future supply-chain disruptions. If we are to be successful in this endeavour, it’s time for government policy to catch up with defence industry developments. We need to increase the width of the hourglass and create local primes that can partner with global industry and provide us with the best of global technology that can be built, integrated and sustained here.

That’s what a sovereign defence manufacturing sector looks like.

Exmouth base needed to plug naval gap between Perth and Darwin

To make sure that northern Australia is ready to support a range of defence contingencies, the region must have socially and economically prosperous communities. Supporting the development of these kinds of communities is no easy task, because it requires a coordinated effort across multiple levels of government.

With few votes, and even fewer politicians representing the voters who cast them, getting coordinated policy action on northern Australia in Canberra is a challenge.

Australia’s traditional approaches to critical infrastructure investment, like the user-pays model, do not work as well in the north. It’s little wonder, then, that local, state and territory governments and entrepreneurs in the north look to the defence organisation to support their ideas.

Our progressively more unpredictable strategic environment supports the bold new infrastructure investments (such as condensate plants, rail spurs and ship lifts) proposed for many northern jurisdictions. These kinds of investments often benefit national security and defence contingencies while also stimulating short- and long-term economic activity. Unfortunately, market forces usually fail to support such investments.

Western Australia’s North West Cape illustrates this point well.

Since World War II, the North West Cape and, in particular, the town of Exmouth have been an operational and strategic outcrop for Australia and its allies. Today, with rising geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the area is key strategic terrain for a range of contingencies.

The Exmouth township sits approximately 1,300 kilometres north of Perth. It rests on the closest point of the Australian mainland to Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the Sunda Strait in Indonesia—one of Australia’s main ocean trading routes to Asia.

Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt sits 25 kilometres north of Exmouth on the North West Cape. It is home to the very low frequency radio transmission facility designed to communicate with both Australian and allied submarines.

The strategically important Royal Australian Airforce Force Base Learmonth is 35 kilometres south of the town and shares facilities with the local airport.

Unfortunately, Exmouth itself remains severely underdeveloped, which imperils the resilience not only of the local community, but also of the defence presence in the area.

Road trains supply Exmouth with fuels for both civilian and Australian Defence Force use. Aviation fuel in Western Australia is single-sourced from the state’s only operating refinery, which is in Kwinana, south of Fremantle. Every one of the approximately 6 million litres of aviation fuel stored at Learmonth is trucked 1,300 kilometres by road.

The 8 million litres of diesel consumed annually at the joint communications facility is imported from overseas via a tanker berth at Point Murat, which is adjacent to the facility but unfortunately also within the Ningaloo Coast World Heritage Area.

These arrangements leave the Defence Department with significant supply-chain vulnerabilities.

At present, there are very few viable options for refuelling warships between HMAS Stirling in Fremantle and Darwin. The absence of an appropriate port facility also means that naval vessels operating to the west and northwest of Australia must return to Stirling for refuel and resupply.

Enhanced maritime infrastructure at Exmouth could extend the range of the Royal Australian Navy’s operations in the Indian Ocean. Refuelling the Collins-class submarines in Exmouth would likely extend their patrol ranges by up to two weeks.

A veteran-owned and privately funded multiuser port is currently being planned for Exmouth. A multiple-berth jetty is intended for vessels of up to 12 metres of draught, which would allow the operation of every class of RAN vessel and most allied ships in service.

This project offers multiple benefits to both Australia’s sovereign strategic fuel resilience and the RAN’s operational sustainability.

RAN fleet unit replenishment could be conducted at this new facility before operations and during respite periods. Replenishment at sea could also then be undertaken via tankers drawing from Exmouth fuel reserves.

The Australian Border Force would also benefit significantly from this option.

This kind of investment will also provide long-term benefits for the local community by promoting several new economic opportunities.

So, with all these potential security, social and economic benefits, what’s the problem? Especially given that the federal government is looking to enhance resilience, promote economic growth and invest in critical infrastructure.

Defence is reticent to make a long-term commitment to using the facility when its long-term operating budget seems in general to be on shaky ground.

The Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility’s loans don’t support the kinds of infrastructure investments that Defence and northern communities need either. And without a long-term Defence commitment, NAIF and equity investors are far from keen to invest. And without an ‘anchor’ client, making the project work is hard.

This is not an argument for Defence to jump into the driver’s seat. The department, with its growing long-term commitment to capital investments, is understandably loath to make long-term operational expenditure commitments or infrastructure investments outside its existing bases.

Defence also can’t be expected to carry the northern Australia resilience and investment can alone.

In the absence of a national security strategy and a national security adviser, the government needs to consider establishing a strategic investment fund that is focused on supporting these kinds of entrepreneurial efforts and could underwrite Defence’s contribution. A key priority for the fund should be identifying nation-building projects that have economic, social, resilience and national security benefits but have not yet been able to get off the ground.

Renewable energy exports could be vital for Australia’s post-fossil-fuel future

Development and industry investment in the Northern Territory has long been hampered by the cost of energy. The territory’s focus on natural gas and liquefied natural gas for almost all of its energy exports has placed it in an increasingly insecure position as the world looks to switch to lower-carbon energy sources. Australia’s key energy markets are all considering how to reduce their dependence on Australian coal and gas.

But a major new project in the NT may light up a way forward to a more sustainable export model for the long term.

During the 2019–20 bushfire season, Australia felt the effects of climate change driven by high global emissions, but the nation has fallen behind other countries in responding to renewable energy opportunities.

We can no longer rest on the argument that our net emissions make little impact on humanity’s carbon footprint. Australia is the world’s 20th largest consumer of energy, and that doesn’t take into account our relatively small population or the contribution our large exports of coal, oil and gas make to global emissions.

China and India have seen substantial growth in their renewables sectors in recent years. China has outpaced the entire European Union with its take-up of solar and wind power, and more than one-fifth of India’s electricity generation comes from renewables.

The Northern Territory has a unique opportunity to capitalise on one of the largest new renewable energy projects in the southern hemisphere. Sun Cable, an initiative funded by a group of Australian investors, is planning to build the world’s largest solar farm at 15,000 hectares near Tennant Creek. Most of the energy will be stored and exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable to Singapore.

The $20 billion-plus project will include a 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels and battery storage to ensure a reliable energy supply. That’s around 30 times the capacity of the Channel Island Power Station, which provides most of Darwin’s power. The cable is set to pass through Darwin and Indonesia on the way to Singapore, making connecting to the Darwin power grid a relatively simple matter.

Sun Cable is an ambitious project that looks decades into Singapore’s energy future. As natural gas (which currently makes up around 95% of Singapore’s energy imports) becomes more expensive, and the cost of solar panels continues to drop, this project will offer new energy opportunities to the city-state.

The NT is similar to Singapore in its high dependency on natural gas for its electricity, but is uniquely placed to reap the benefits of its rich potential for renewable energy production.

For decades, Australia has enjoyed significant economic benefits from exports of coal and other non-renewable resources. If we hope to maintain jobs, and our role as an energy exporter, we need to manage the shift to renewable energy with the same level of foresight and long-term planning that informed the Sun Cable project.

The opportunities don’t need to stop there. The Asian Renewable Energy Hub, backed by CWP Renewables, Macquarie Group and Vestas, is planning to build 15 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. The project, set to begin construction in 2026, aims to provide cost-effective renewable power to the Pilbara as well as to export markets.

A 3,500-kilometre-long submarine cable will connect the Pilbara, one of the world’s best regions for solar and wind resources, with Singapore and Indonesia. Connecting Indonesia’s Java–Bali power grid to the Australian grid, through Australia’s north, would help efforts in both nations to achieve a 100% renewable power system by 2050. Not only would this be a significant step towards reducing Australia’s carbon emissions, but it would also help revitalise Australia’s energy sector as our trading partners begin to move away from importing fossil fuels.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of the Japanese company SoftBank, has announced his vision of connecting Northeast Asia’s energy grids with Southeast Asia’s. That would open up the possibility of Australia exporting renewable energy not only to Singapore and Indonesia, but also to the wider region. This would be a major business opportunity, while simultaneously helping Australia meet its carbon emissions reduction targets. Shifts in the Asia–Pacific energy market could put the NT at the forefront of a renewable energy future.

The territory has an opportunity, via the Sun Cable and Pilbara projects, to lead Australia on its transition from fossil fuel exports to renewable energy exports.

Industry leaders and government decision-makers should reach out to Sun Cable for partnership opportunities. The planned array of solar panels could easily supply renewable energy for the whole NT—if there’s the political will and industry support to make the transition.

All bases aren’t equal in the defence of Australia

I read with interest the recent Strategist posts by John Coyne and Graeme Dunk in which they apparently took different stands on the importance of northern Australia for our defence. With better definition of how the Australian Defence Force uses its more than 100 bases, I can see the common threads of both authors’ arguments. The north and south of Australia offer unique characteristics that, taken together, serve to support the ADF’s capability to defend Australia.

Given current events and emerging tensions, understanding why ADF bases are where they are is even more critical. Defence Minister Linda Reynolds noted last October that the Defence Department was working on reassessing the strategic underpinnings of the 2016 defence white paper—not too soon.

Where the bases are and what purpose they serve are fundamental to Australia’s force posture. How the ADF is postured is key to its capability to offer the greatest range of response options to the government. Central to this range of options is the ADF’s ability to generate the right forces for any required deployment. The concepts of force generation and force deployment are the foundation of basing decisions. The ADF has home bases, mounting bases and bare bases, all of which serve specific purposes.

Home bases are used for force generation and maintaining preparedness. Bare bases are activated, and mounting bases are established for specific operations and contingencies. The ADF needs the right mix of types and locations of bases to achieve the greatest flexibility to be successful in the widest range of operations.

Decisions on home basing locations are significantly influenced by sunk costs, the cost of ownership of expensive platforms and the retention of ADF personnel. They involve significant infrastructure optimised to produce the best-prepared forces for contribution to the joint force for deployment. They are also generally single-service bases to enable maximum stability of location for ADF families and engagement of local industry.  Decisions to change home basing locations are significant, with long lead times and high costs. This force generation responsibility is the primary concern of the service chiefs. Force generation involves keeping all elements of the ADF well prepared.

A mounting base is chosen for a specific offshore operation as the most suitable place on Australian soil from which to mount a force. It is generally an expansion of a suitable home base. A mounting base will not typically have all the force elements required for a specific operation given the joint requirements of most missions. It provides a place to assemble force elements from home bases around Australia to form a joint taskforce.

The function of a mounting base is to receive and integrate a joint team. Once the team is assembled, the mounting base is used to prepare and rehearse the integrated force for likely tasks, and then deploy the force into the designated area of operations. The operations to which they might deploy range from disaster recovery, evacuation or humanitarian relief through to combat.

The characteristics that influence the suitability of locations in Australia for home bases and mounting bases are different. A home base requires liveability and lifestyle for families, defence industry support for cost-effective maintenance of platforms and equipment, and infrastructure to optimise training. Home bases for the navy and air force need to be situated where personnel can access the skills and services to support their platforms and equipment. There are lots of these in the southern parts of the country.

A mounting base, on the other hand, is selected based on proximity to potential operations. Considerations include operational security; accessibility by road, rail, sea and air; and sufficiency of infrastructure and logistics to support mounting, deployment and generally sustainment of the force.

The Australian Army’s three combat brigades are on home bases that have ready access to large and suitable field training areas. There are lots of these in the north. They also happen to, most often, offer the best mounting bases.

Utilisation of the optimal mix of home, mounting and bare bases is what enables the ADF to offer the greatest flexibility in providing effective response options to government. Mounting bases are identified as needed, based on the type and location of an intended operation and the preparation and integration needs of the mounting force. If the joint taskforce has significant land force elements, then the mounting bases are typically in northern Australia.

Both Coyne and Dunk make some good points, and the way each of them describes the problem provides important insights. What is clear is that southern Australia is key to successful force generation, particularly for the air force and navy, and northern Australia is key to successfully mounting and deploying joint forces. A useful discussion would centre on how all levels of government and business can work together to optimise national security and best support ADF capability.

Darwin and Townsville complement each other in defending Australia’s north

Walter Cronkite, the American broadcast journalist, was an avid sailor and explorer of the United States coast. He wrote books of his voyages and, in his twilight, returned to familiar haunts along the northeastern seacoast with marine artist Ray Ellis. Together they published North by northeast as Cronkite rediscovered his passion for the region through the lens of Ellis’s watercolours and oil paintings.

Perhaps it’s also time to revisit familiar territory in the northeast of Australia and view Townsville from a new perspective.

In recent contributions to The Strategist, John Coyne and Graeme Dunk have debated Australia’s force posture with a focus on Darwin verses south central Australia. Coyne acknowledges the shared importance of the north in future contingencies and says that Darwin could well become the Australian Defence Force’s forward operating base or a stepping stone to another location in the Pacific.

But the merits of a northern force posture can only be assessed when Darwin and Townsville are considered as complementary partners negating each other’s geostrategic limitations. As Coyne notes, ‘strategic geography remains important’.

There were many reasons the US developed Townsville as the forward operating base and birthplace of the 5th Air Force to defend its air and sea lanes of communication with Australia during World War ll. Of primary importance was an assessment of Townsville as the Goldilocks of northeastern Australia: not too far north to be at unacceptable risk of attack, too far south to impede the speed of initiative, but just right sitting on the route to our southwest Pacific island neighbours.

Townsville has remained the forward operating base for all subsequent major regional operations in the Pacific.

No one location in the north answers every military challenge. Dunk’s concern about the transit of an amphibious taskforce through a significant choke point like Torres Strait is valid but irrelevant if Darwin is the launchpad for operations in the northwest and Townsville for operations in the Pacific.

Equally, I believe it’s disingenuous to argue that Townsville is ‘bedevilled by the need to transit the Great Barrier Reef through one of a small number of navigable passages’. There’s only one exit from Sydney Harbour or Cockburn Sound, and it would be inconceivable for an amphibious taskforce to sail in time of conflict without sustained anti-submarine coverage to ensure safe passage.

Forward positioning of a suitable proportion of the Australian Army’s combat capability doesn’t mean that airlift or sealift elements must also be located in the north in order to achieve the speed of initiative, as Dunk contends. Even at high levels of readiness, a degree of force preparation is required prior to any deployment and that can be achieved concurrently as ships or aircraft move to any forward operating base.

Strategic lift capabilities can reside in more secure southern locations and still support operational flexibility. Strategic advantage is achieved by preparing and sustaining a force as close as possible to its area of operations.

Geography is but one of Townsville’s key enablers as the launchpad of choice for Pacific operations. The Australia–Singapore military training initiative will deliver not one, but two networked, all-weather, all-season training ranges. Supported by the Army Combat Training Centre with world’s best simulation-enabled training, there’s no better location to hone military skills. Equally important is the ability to project and sustain the force.

The Port of Townsville is getting a $1.6 billion upgrade to deepen and widen the approach channel. A 62-hectare land-reclamation project is delivering additional capacity to berth large Australian and coalition naval vessels. Upgrading and lengthening the runway at RAAF Base Townsville will enable operations of any fully loaded, wide-bodied aircraft.

The key deficiency is the lack of local logistics infrastructure and capacity. I believe Coyne identifies the heart of the issue with his observation that, ‘Defence needs a scalable defence industry presence in northern Australia to support its future operations in the region.’

A forward operating base can have the best port, airfield and training areas in the world, but it cannot function in isolation. There’s no point positioning ADF units in the north if the supporting industry and logistics are far removed in distance and time.

Perhaps the appetite for broader discussion of Australia’s defence posture in a rapidly evolving strategic environment has taken a back seat to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the speed of change has also renewed our appetite to reconsider the concept of national security.

The opportunity now exists to consider force posture through the new perspective of a post-Covid-19 world. Any assessment of northern Australia cannot be piecemeal or city by city, but requires an honest appraisal of the sum of all of its parts.

Northern Australia needs to be ready to meet climate-change-driven security challenges

Over the coming decades, climate change will have serious and pervasive impacts on human security across the Indo-Pacific region. From supporting regional disaster-assistance missions to responding to sudden climate-change-related mass migration, Australia’s north will need to be prepared to meet the challenges of a changing climate.

Projections of sea-level rise suggest that mass migration in the Indo-Pacific will become a fact of life by 2100. But the escalating frequency and severity of natural disasters will likely destabilise the region long before then.

Regional instability will present both short-term and long-term risks for human security in the region.

In the short term, floods and storm surges will pose the greatest threat to local communities and will likely increase the flow of migrants across international borders. Timor-Leste and Indonesia’s Maluku Islands are particularly at risk as they don’t have access to the level of resources and infrastructure that neighbouring islands like Java have.

Cyclone Lili passed directly through the region in May 2019 and could easily have set in motion a chain of events leading to the evacuation of the hundreds of small islands in the area. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of these natural disasters, limiting the opportunity for governments to recover from a disaster before the next one hits.

Long-term risks to the region may be less immediate but have potentially even more devastating impacts. Sea-level rise is the most likely driver for climate-change-driven migration in the Indo-Pacific: some island nations are predicted to disappear below sea level in as little as 20 years. A World Bank report has already called for Australia to begin accepting around 1,300 migrants a year from Tuvalu and Kiribati to avoid a mass forced migration in a couple of decades.

Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and more frequent extreme weather events. While the Pacific islands are more vulnerable, Indonesia has a larger population and is geographically much closer to Australia, so a climate emergency in Indonesia will have a far greater impact on our north.

The country lies in one of the world’s most natural disaster-prone areas, with an average of 289 significant natural disasters every year. The average annual death toll in Indonesia from such events is 8,000. Many of the more than 260 million Indonesians live close to the coastline.

The nearly 10 million Indonesians living in Jakarta are already dealing with the health and economic impacts of living in a city that’s sinking. By 2030, 90% of the city is expected to be below sea level. Indonesia is planning to build a new capital in Borneo, but that island is also prone to flooding and storm surges.

Indonesia already spends around half a billion dollars a year on post-disaster reconstruction. The figure was closer to $7 billion in 2004 following the Indian Ocean tsunami and $2 billion following the 2010 Mount Merapi volcanic eruption.

Climate change is already affecting food production and the availability of fresh water across the Pacific and parts of Southeast Asia. The increasing rate and severity of natural disasters will only speed up that process, rendering many islands across the region uninhabitable. As one of the leading economies in the region, Australia will be called on to help address this problem, and we are nowhere near ready to respond.

In the likely event of sudden climate-induced migration, the Northern Territory will need to be Australia’s first line of response to humanitarian crises. However, with one of the least developed infrastructure systems of any state or territory, the NT is woefully underprepared for the magnitude of future climate crises.

Australia’s north needs to be better prepared for the coming climate emergency.

We need to start with investing more in training humanitarian and defence teams to react to climate disasters. These teams will also need to be ready to deploy to our neighbours to help maintain stability and security in the region. Overseas deployment will be crucial for Australia to maintain its international standing and influence and to be a leader in Pacific security. The Department of Defence would be well advised to continue to invest in preparing Darwin and Tindal airbases to support response operations.

Australia should invest early in the necessary infrastructure in the Northern Territory to ensure it is ready for future climate-driven migration and extreme weather events. Darwin, despite its recent success in dealing with Australians evacuated there at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, needs further infrastructure investment to ensure it is ready for future climate-driven migration and extreme weather events.

Australia also needs to work closely with other Indo-Pacific nations to help prepare them for future environmental challenges.

Defending Australia’s north: proximity does matter

In October 1942, Edward Ward, the minister for labour and national services, accused the Australian government of having planned to abandon the country’s north in the event of a Japanese invasion. While the ‘Brisbane Line’ accusation was never substantiated, its legacy has lived on, especially in the cultural memories of the northern centres that were bombed by Japan.

In a recent Strategist article, responding to two of my pieces, Graeme Dunk breathed new life into the Brisbane Line myth. His thesis is that Australia can be best defended from the south.

While acknowledging that the north ‘obviously needs to be appropriately protected’, Dunk offers a cavalcade of reasons why the navy and army couldn’t, or rather shouldn’t, be defending our nation from the north. But in doing so, Dunk has missed the nuances in my reasoning and misunderstood my argument.

Most strategists, policymakers and governments are in fierce agreement on the strategic importance of Australia’s north, but they can’t seem to articulate a coherent long-term plan for defending it. My argument is that the current force posture in northern Australia is not fit for purpose. There’s more than a little irony that while the Australian Army continues to reduce its presence in Darwin, the US Marines increase theirs.

To clarify, I don’t contend that Defence’s move north is inevitable, but rather that it’s reasonable to think that northern Australia could be used as a forward operating base or lily pad in a future conflict.

Given the limited planning range of the Royal Australian Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jets, the lily pad option is looking pretty good. It also explains why the government continues to invest in the development of the RAAF base at Tindal in the Northern Territory.

The idea that the Attack-class submarines would travel to the South China Sea, expend their ordinance, then sail for two weeks back to Stirling in Western Australia to rearm—while under threat from anti-submarine warfare, as they’d have likely compromised their location—before sailing for another two weeks to get back into the fray clearly illustrates the tyranny of distance.

Both examples also demonstrate that at times proximity to the battlefield does matter, and extended transit times can expose the Australian Defence Force to additional risks.

To his credit, Dunk makes some valid points about the challenges of operating from Australia’s north. Forward positioning all our air and sea lift capabilities in Darwin would of course expose them to greater risk.

In contrast, finding the right capability mix for our northern force posture would have benefits. For example, it would allow the ADF, in a time when extreme weather events are occurring more frequently, to provide government with options, including the ability to rapidly respond to regional events, or perhaps to contribute a battlegroup to a regional response.

Defence needs a scalable defence industry presence in northern Australia to support its future operations in the region, whether that’s responding to a pandemic, contributing to a multinational peacekeeping operation or engaging in some form of conflict. Assumptions that industry can fill short-notice operational needs without such a presence are ill-founded. Logistics matter, and in this case so does proximity. And Dunk is right, we need to ‘acquire a level of defensive capability that we currently don’t have’ to protect these logistic functions.

He is also is right about the challenges of navigating Australia’s northern waters. And that deploying to the Pacific by sea from Darwin makes little sense. But that’s why I didn’t argue that Darwin itself would be a suitable forward operating base for all conflicts, just that it could be important.

Nonetheless, the idea that operating from Australia’s southern ports offers the ADF increased survivability doesn’t adequately acknowledge the challenges of modern warfare. And it smacks a little of the ‘it’s all too hard to operate in the north’ argument that has prevailed since Paul Dibb’s landmark 1987 defence capability review.

Neither Australia nor any of its Five Eyes partners has been able to maintain the intelligence edge that it enjoyed in the 1990s. The proliferation of low-cost space capabilities has been a great leveller in terms of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Australia cannot assume it will have air or sea superiority in any future conflict. China has substantially increased the size, range and lethality of its blue-water fleet. It has increased the range, mobility and accuracy of its strategic strike capability. In a future conflict, our southern ports and airfields and their approaches may be as susceptible to a surprise attack as those in the north.

Dunk’s final paragraph crystalises the absolutism that underpins his position: ‘We need to ensure that we continue to realise the benefits that this geography provides, rather than sacrifice them, and potentially lots more, in an attempt to get closer to the fight.’ But speaking in absolutes brings inherent danger.

The way that geography is understood can indeed change with time and context. Australia has become key political, military and economic terrain in this new era of major-power competition. Japan’s massive investment in energy resilience through the Inpex LNG plant near Darwin and Sun Cable’s proposal to build a $20 billion solar farm to supply power to Singapore illustrate this point.

I hope that Defence’s ‘re-assessment of the strategic underpinnings of the 2016 Defence White Paper’ carefully considers the strategic importance of Australia’s north and our force posture there.