Tag Archive for: Pine Gap

The joint facilities: still the jewel in the crown

Since the 1980s, Australian defence ministers have made regular parliamentary statements about the roles and functions of the US–Australia joint defence facilities (at Pine Gap, North West Cape and, until 1999, Nurrungar). These are important statements that go to the core of Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States. They are intended to establish that Australian interests are served, and our sovereignty protected, while we jointly pursue intelligence activities with the United States.

No other parliamentary statements are prepared as carefully as the ones on the joint facilities. Be assured that each word is sweated over because of the highly classified nature of these intelligence operations. It’s worth carefully noting the nuances of the language used, including changes from and similarities to past statements, and considering what is left out of the statement as much as the words delivered.

Defence Minister Christopher Pyne made his ministerial statement on the ‘Australia–United States joint facilities’ on 20 February. The previous statement on ‘Full knowledge and concurrence’ was delivered six years and five defence ministers ago by Stephen Smith on 26 June 2013. Here are my top 10 takeaways from a close read of Pyne’s statement and of the speech in reply by Shadow Defence Minister Richard Marles.

Stronger regional focus

Pyne’s statement is more strongly focused on regional security than previous ones, which tended to locate the work of the joint facilities on the global strategic balance. The current statement links Pine Gap to the security of Australia’s ‘maritime trade routes’ and says:

Regional actions have the ability to adversely impact regional security and economic stability. Facilities such as Pine Gap help reduce this risk, in support of the rules based global order, by providing early warning of potentially hostile activities and developments that threaten to destabilise the region.

Rough translation: ‘China, we are watching you.’ Beijing will also note the line: ‘Potential adversaries understand that an attack on Australia is an attack on the alliance.’ This is good, solid language, not mincing words about the core strategic purpose of the alliance.

Solid take on extended nuclear deterrence

The statement also strengthens language around Australia’s support for extended nuclear deterrence (END): ‘global geopolitics have changed, but the core principles of extended nuclear deterrence have not.’ Australia is ‘an active supporter’ of END through the work of the joint facilities.

It’s noteworthy that the statement says that US nuclear deterrence deters the possibility of any type of attack on Australia, nuclear or conventional. That stands in contrast to the language of the 2017 foreign policy white paper, which couldn’t quite bring itself to use the term ‘extended nuclear deterrence’ and said: ‘only the nuclear and conventional military capabilities of the United States offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats [my emphasis] against Australia’. Pyne’s statement gives END a wider role—that’s one in the eye for the arms controllers and one up for the strategists.

Technology change and deepening cooperation

The statement puts more emphasis than its predecessors on the impact of technological change helping the joint facilities to keep pace with a more dynamic strategic environment. The word ‘change’ is used six times and ‘innovation’ three times, referring to new ‘cutting edge’ technologies. It’s difficult in an unclassified statement to do more than hint at these developments and the reality that Australia and the US continue to deepen and broaden their cooperation on innovative intelligence work. That sense of rapid change infuses the statement.

Puzzling cyber omission

Stephen Smith’s 2013 statement did a good job of setting the broader context of alliance activity, of which the joint facilities are a part. For example, he referred to the September 2011 agreement at the AUSMIN meeting in San Francisco that henceforth ‘a cyber attack on either country would trigger the mechanisms of the ANZUS Treaty’. It’s puzzling that cybersecurity isn’t mentioned in Pyne’s statement. In the very week that the prime minister revealed that a ‘sophisticated state actor’ had attacked the IT networks of our major political parties, the joint facilities statement could have usefully made the point (as set out in Smith’s statement) that such an act creates an opportunity for Australia and the United States to ‘consult together and determine appropriate options to address the threat’.

FK&C—still finger lickin’ good

‘Full knowledge and concurrence’ is the policy framework originally designed by the Hawke government to ensure Australia understands and agrees with the activities undertaken in a joint facility. The language used to describe how this works in practice is identical in the Smith and Pyne statements. The subtlety to this is that Australia claims to understand and endorse categories of activity without necessarily approving each activity.

Pyne’s statement goes further than previous ones in talking about how FK&C is used to address ‘any new purpose for any activity, or a significant change to an existing purpose’. There’s a lot of new stuff going on under those golf-ball domes, it seems.

Terrorism two-step

Pyne’s statement (like Smith’s) acknowledges that the joint facilities deliver intelligence ‘on a range of contemporary security priorities, such as terrorism’. But then we have a rather coy statement that the government couldn’t possibly comment on public theorising that Pine Gap makes a ‘contribution to US operations against terrorism’. The right language surely is ‘US and Australian’ operations against terrorism. Is the implication that we gather intelligence on terrorism but do nothing with it? A smoother formulation of words should have been developed.

Where are the Marines?

It’s disappointing that there’s no reference to the US Marine Corps’ rotational deployments in Pyne’s statement. This was fulsomely addressed by Smith, as it should have been, because it reflects a tangible American commitment to the security of Australia and of Southeast Asia. At a time when the region worries about America’s sticking power, the Marine presence should be celebrated loudly, brought in under FK&C and aligned with Australia’s strategic planning for our regional defence engagement.

Subtle alliance warnings?

Pyne’s statement warns that ‘the alliance and regional stability cannot be taken for granted’. That’s correct, but the success story of the joint facilities shows the enormity of Australia’s strategic problems if the US does indeed turn inward for a period. Without the alliance Australia is way back in the pack of regional defence players. The government and opposition clearly understand that plan A is to do everything to sustain the alliance. But every plan A needs a plan B—thinking through worst-case scenarios is what defence organisations do. So, what’s our plan B?

Intelligent bipartisanship

The Pyne and Smith ministerial statements were made in parliaments just a few months away from elections. In replying to Pyne’s statement, Marles makes it clear that he has visited Pine Gap and seen how it operates. He offers complete bipartisan support for the facilities with the nice phrase that ‘the performance of those functions almost define Pine Gap as being the centre of trust as it is expressed in our alliance with the United States’. This is a valuable promise of continuity based on genuine cooperation between the major political parties acting as shared custodians of the joint facilities.

Alliance leadership

Like the 2016 defence white paper, one finishes reading Pyne’s statement impressed with how much ‘the alliance has grown in depth and complexity over time’. That growth is apparent in every area but one—the annual AUSMIN meeting remains the sole ministerial-level mechanism to steer the alliance. Can an annual dinner and a six-hour meeting really give momentum and purposeful shape to a rapidly changing alliance? The answer is no. The ship needs a new bridge if we are to set the right direction for the future of the alliance.

Reader response: John Blaxland on Des Ball and Pine Gap

I can’t let John Blaxland’s recent Strategist piece ‘Pine Gap at 50’ (and his comments on the recent Background Briefing program) go without comment. Although I’ve written widely on Pine Gap—mainly in partnership with Desmond Ball—I won’t comment here on John’s claims about the base itself. But I will correct the record on three deeply disappointing counts: two instances of misrepresenting Ball’s position, and one particularly egregious instance of red-baiting.

First, Blaxland seriously misrepresented Ball’s position on Pine Gap, both during the Cold War and in recent years. Despite fiercely advocating the closure of North West Cape and Nurrungar during the 1980s, and while highly critical of the Australian government for being evasive and misleading about the functions of the base and the risks attached, Ball reluctantly came to the position that the contribution of Pine Gap to US–Soviet arms control treaty verification meant that, on balance, the base had one legitimate function at that time. His reluctance to come to that conclusion derived from Pine Gap’s contribution to nuclear war planning and fighting, and, of course, its uncontested position as a high-priority Soviet nuclear target.

Yet Ball was clear that it was always a matter of balancing negative and positive aspects of the base’s operations—always to be judged in the context of Pine Gap’s changing technical characteristics and military roles, as well as the prevailing world order. None of that’s evident in Blaxland’s account.

In recent years, precisely because of those changes at Pine Gap and in world politics, Ball felt compelled to change his mind on Pine Gap, and publicly abandoned his previous position, telling the ABC in 2014:

I’ve reached the point now where I can no longer stand up and provide the verbal, conceptual justification for the facility that I was able to do in the past. We’re now linked in to this global network where intelligence and operations have become essentially fused and Pine Gap is a key node in that whole network, that war machine, if you want to use that term, which is doing things which are very, very difficult, I think, as an Australian, to justify.

Second, Ball’s condemnation of Pine Gap was founded on an understanding of the consequences of the integration of Australia into all American operations at the base, but without the requisite political and strategic controls a country able to maintain policy autonomy and accountability requires. Asked what Australia was getting out of Pine Gap, in his last public interview a few weeks before his death, Ball replied:

Everything, and nothing. Everything, in the sense that we get access to all this intelligence flowing through. Nothing, in the sense that it’s not really what we want … We get all this wonderful raw and processed intelligence, we have 50 Australian intelligence officers working alongside Americans seeing everything, and it’s about finding individuals and targeting them for killing by drone and air strikes, in battle zones and in places that are not designated war zones.

In that interview, Ball was very clear about the malign, counterproductive and outright illegal involvement of Pine Gap in supplying targeting data for US drones strikes and special forces assassinations—and he insisted that Australia has a law-based alternative that needs to be taken up: ‘Our participation should be governed by rules, principles and procedures. Capture, arrests, warrants, evidence. We should leave the killings to the CIA and JSOC cowboys at Menwith Hill.’

Before his death, Des Ball, Canadian sigint specialist Bill Robinson and I completed eight of the 11 papers planned for our Pine Gap project. Taken with the last three to appear in the coming year, they provide abundant evidence of the rationale for Ball’s change of position, especially regarding the transformation of Pine Gap’s focus from strategic intelligence at a national level to close involvement in US warfighting worldwide—nuclear, conventional, ‘lawful’ and otherwise.

Finally, I take exception—both at a personal level and as an analyst—to Blaxland’s anachronistic and erroneous red-baiting account of the Cold War Australian peace movement campaign against Pine Gap.

‘From the Soviet position’, John Blaxland writes,

undermining the facility through public information campaigns made sense. Fortunately for them there were enough people sympathetic to the Soviet position to keep up a level of activism, which kept security authorities on their toes to protect the facility from intruders and sabotage.

Let me declare my position here: I’m one of those ‘protestors’ whose claims and actions John so disdains. Moreover, in the 1980s I was an active participant in the development and strategy of the country’s largest peace movement group concerned about Pine Gap during the frightening days of Ronald Reagan’s plan to abandon the flimsy assurances of nuclear deterrence and fight to ‘prevail’ in a nuclear war.

As convener of People for Nuclear Disarmament in Victoria I, and most of my colleagues, knew that there were those in the peace movement who thought that Soviet nuclear weapons were merely defensive, whereas those of the United States were a threat to world peace. Most of us presumed that some among that tiny group had some kind of link to the Soviet Union—either by sympathy or more organisationally. Some may indeed have made their way to the Soviet embassy.

Yet in rallies involving hundreds of thousands of Australians, and in the daily organisational grind involving large numbers of organisations, long-term activists, and remarkable numbers of people of no particular political background driven to urgent activity for the first time by the threat of nuclear war, the influence of those aligned with the Soviet position was negligible. Notwithstanding the fruits of ASIO’s regular break-ins to our offices for membership lists and movement planning documents in the search for Soviet influence, there wasn’t much to be found.

Indeed, the first Peace Dossier I commissioned in 1982 for the Victorian Association of Peace Studies was American bases in Australia by Desmond Ball. We sold thousands of copies in community meetings and rallies around the country. It was Ball’s contribution to the education of Australians outside the ivory tower that formed the foundation of the public understanding of the dangers of Pine Gap, not the furtive disinformation campaign of some diabolical Soviet mastermind.

Recently, we’ve seen the return of red-baiting in this country—be it the prime minister’s mutterings about a leading Indigenous intellectual’s Stalinism in suggesting our public statuary show some small measure of historical balance about our foundation in invasion, or a Liberal senior minister’s likening of discussion of increasing inequality to socialist revisionism à la communist East Germany.

And now here on Pine Gap.

Pine Gap at 50: the paradox of a joint facility

The late Des Ball once described the joint military facilities that Australia hosts for the United States as constituting the ‘strategic essence’ of the Australian–American relationship. When he offered that observation, the three facilities he was referring to were Pine Gap, the North West Cape naval communications station and Nurrungar, all established in the 1960s.

Since then, facilities associated with ‘space awareness’ have been added to support a space surveillance radar and a space telescope. Of the original facilities, technology rendered Nurrungar redundant, though a backup facility for its function was established at Pine Gap. North West Cape was placed under Australian control and remoted from HMAS Stirling. Technological developments over the past few decades, however, have substantially increased Pine Gap’s significance to both the United States and Australia. It is now arguably the most significant American intelligence-gathering facility outside the United States. In its genuinely joint character it is unique, and this year it turns 50.

Pine Gap continues to feature in the Australian defence debate generally in the context of issues relating to Australian sovereignty. While the debate is nowhere near as intense as it was in the first 25 years of Pine Gap’s existence, it still swirls around what is known of its functions. Its technological capability and how it operates are thoroughly understood by relevant Australian ministers and public servants, but its effectiveness and operations remain closely held.

Support for Pine Gap has been bipartisan, and successive Australian governments have persisted with their preparedness to host it. That status, however, hasn’t come without intricate attention to the facility’s functions and operations that from time to time has entailed a deal of soul-searching.

Its 50-year history can be roughly divided into two periods—before and after the Cold War. Before the Cold War’s conclusion, the story on the Australian side was dominated by securing confidence in our relevant officials’ full knowledge of and concurrence with its operations. In the aftermath, it’s the steady integration of Pine Gap within our own intelligence and armed services operations that has marked a real functional change. It is now as vital for us as it is for the Americans.

A constant theme among Australian officials has been the critical leverage it has given us in our relationship with our ally. Far from detracting from our sovereignty, our willingness to ‘burden-share’ through it has strengthened our capacity for independent foreign policy initiative. It has deepened the value of Australia as an American partner and given us strategic weight in the relationship. Should technology render it redundant, we would lose a great deal. Our involvement in new developments with space awareness, which has substantial intrinsic merit, is also potentially a hedge in this regard.

More than for the Coalition parties, the joint facilities have been a source of controversy inside the Labor Party. Labor established a formula for supporting them in the 1960s. That revolved around the issues of ‘full knowledge of and concurrence with’ their operations and the belief that they served stability in the Cold War’s global strategic balance and contributed to prospects for arms control and the avoidance of nuclear war. That latter purpose particularly applied to Pine Gap. Burden-sharing was real because we recognised publicly that they could be targeted in a nuclear exchange in which we might not otherwise be engaged. We were unique among American allies. Others consumed American security. They faced threats which could have embroiled America in a conflict in which the US could be devastated. With us there was no such problem. The US appreciated that consequence for us. In my experience, and from my knowledge of the experiences of others who held the most relevant portfolio, Defence, the US has been willing to heed our concerns.

The US has always been prepared to accommodate us on full knowledge and concurrence. That was formalised in 1976. In the 1980s, technological developments produced a substantial problem. Before then, the surveillance had been largely backward-looking. New technologies produced a massive change in operation. Pine Gap went ‘real time’ and its importance increased to the day-to-day operations of the American client. The only solution for full knowledge and concurrence was to put Australian officials into the heart of the operations so we had real-time understanding of them. Australians were placed on all the shifts and commanded two of them, and the Australian deputy commander was placed in a line of authority.

At the same time, it became obvious to us that while the product of Pine Gap was important to senior American policymakers, they weren’t aware of the operations themselves. Accordingly, we put the facilities onto the agenda of AUSMIN meetings. When the new US secretary of defence, Richard Cheney, came out for his first AUSMIN we took him to the facility. I remember his turning to me in amazement as the shift commander began briefing him on the operation. ‘She’s an Aussie’, he said.

The paradox of that deepened, unprecedented Australian involvement was that Pine Gap became critical for us. It’s now part of our intelligence and defence order of battle. A statement to parliament in 2013 by the defence minister Stephen Smith was the frankest yet made by any Australian government on the operations at Pine Gap and included our own national interest:

Through the information gathered at [Pine Gap], Australia is able to access intelligence and early warnings that would be unavailable from any other means and is unique in our region. Pine Gap delivers information on intelligence priorities such as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and military and weapons developments.

We would be deaf and blind without Pine Gap. The 50th birthday party this year is a genuinely joint celebration.