Strategist Posts Archive - Page 1194 of 1204

The ADF and expeditionary warfare

5 October 2012

Al Palazzo’s post ‘A defence dividend need not become a defence liability’ raises some important points and provides sage advice to those responsible for the management of the Defence budget. One of the critical points in his argument is set around the fact that the Australian way of war is fundamentally ‘expeditionary’.

But what is meant by the term expeditionary? Especially in relation Dr Palazzo’s call for the ADF to maintain core expeditionary capabilities in order to ‘retain [its] utility to Government’.

Interestingly, while Dr Palazzo identifies expeditionary as at the heart of the Australian way of warfare you won’t find any mention of it in the 2002 ADF publication The Australian Approach to War Fighting (PDF), nor is there any joint ADF expeditionary doctrine. The Army’s publication The Fundamentals of Land Warfare talks about the ADF being prepared ‘to provide a versatile, adaptable and agile expeditionary force’ but it provides no definition of the term. Meanwhile the Air Force views almost everything that it does as expeditionary in nature to the point where one senior RAAF officer has even described its participation in air shows as expeditionary. Read more

Britain looks east

4 October 2012

The Ditchley Foundation is a respected British think tank established in 1958 to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties. Today it’s increasingly interested in the Asia–Pacific and I attended a recent Ditchley conference on ‘Security and Prosperity in East Asia’, a gathering of fifty or so that included current and retired officials, researchers, journalists and people from the private sector.

So what do the great and good (plus yours truly) think about Asia when they gather at an English country manor? The meeting was run under the Chatham House Rule, so I can’t attribute specific comments, but here are my highlights of the discussion.

The state of China–US bilateral relations dominated. The good news is that most people thought there was a depth of engagement between China and the United States and a mutual commitment to keep the relationship stable and strong enough to manage strategic tension. The bad news is that the same people thought that there was a profound mistrust between the two countries and a lack of confidence-building and crisis-management mechanisms. China sees calls for transparency in defence planning as a Western stratagem to constrain its freedom of movement. In turn, the US and its allies think Beijing’s accusations of having a ‘Cold War mentality’ avoid serious discussion about managing tensions. Read more

Air combat capability: the good news and the bad news

4 October 2012

The Australian National Audit Office last week released a pair of related audit reports, on the acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the management of the current fast jet fleet. The reports are worthwhile reading—not because they are sensational, but because they aren’t. The audit office has done a fine job of shedding some light into the corners of the very complex business that is managing the current air combat capability while simultaneously developing its successor. And it does so in a dispassionate and balanced way.

Not surprisingly, they find that there are some real risks emerging about the timeline for acquiring the F-35. The current plan for retiring the ‘classic’ Hornets, 71 of which form the lion’s share of the fast jet fleet, is to have them withdrawn from service in 2020. The ANAO note that the difficulties arise from a combination of development issues in the United States (over which the Australian Government has no control) and decisions made locally to delay earlier F-35 delivery intentions. Together, these make the ‘planned transition to an F‐35‐based air combat capability in the required timeframe, so that a capability gap does not arise between the withdrawal from service of the F/A‐18A/B fleet and the achievement of full operational capability for the F‐35’ a real challenge.

Not surprisingly, and like ASPI last year, the ANAO wanted to know what the contingency plans are. They got a partial answer: Read more

A defence dividend need not become a defence liability

3 October 2012

The Australian Government has recently announced a series of cuts to the Defence budget. According to Greg Sheridan, writing in The Australian, more possibly loom on the horizon. Those with an awareness of Australian defence history will know that this is not unusual; alternating periods of largesse have consistently been followed by periods of intense austerity.

What is less commonly acknowledged is that, while such redirections of money offer the government a short-term defence-sourced dividend, they also create long-term liabilities in capability that don’t reveal themselves until Government urgently requires the military to do something. Past history suggests that budget reductions quickly result in a hollow force, so that when the government next calls on the military, the services have far too little time in which to overcome such dividend-inspired deficiencies to provide the effect that is wanted. Read more

Minister, mandarins and the military

3 October 2012

Who is really in charge of the Defence Department? Many would guess the military chiefs, which is logical enough. Some would even say the Minister—civil control and all that. Or perhaps, given the recent discussion about the influence of Ministerial advisers over the public service, others would suggest we should be looking to the Secretary—Sir Humprey always did seem to get his way.

Another way to ask the question would be to consider who got the blame when reviews such as Rizzo, Black and Coles highlighted a lack of accountability, confused responsibilities and dysfunctional linkages between levels of authority across the Department? No clear answers there.

There is something even more telling, however, than the inability to identify who is really in charge of Defence. Read more

ASPI suggests

2 October 2012

The Strategist team is back with our weekly compilation of latest reports, interesting discussion and upcoming events.

The Australian National Audit Office has just released two linked audit reports on a subject near and dear to ASPI: Australia’s air combat capability. The first looks at issues to do with the acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (PDF) and the other examines the management of the existing fleet of Hornet and Super Hornet aircraft (PDF). Not surprisingly, the narrowing of the timelines involved that were identified by ASPI last year is a major focus.

Moving offshore, a new post by Adam Elkus who blogs for the Center for a New American Security in Washington DC opens with a succinct overview of the basics of ‘strategy’. The rest of the article looks at how ‘strategy’ and ‘policy’ are understood in the context of targeted killings, but the intro is useful in evaluating government policy and action.

Next, the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research has released a new edited volume on the challenges facing China’s military modernisation. You can also check out interviews with individual book chapter authors on topics such as China’s evolving land force or the implications of China’s growing capabilities for Northeast Asian security.

RAND Corporation has a new monograph out on the uses and limits of small-scale military intervention. The monograph examines the concept of ‘minimalist stabilisation’ in a number of case studies ranging from El Salvador, Colombia, Operation Enduring Freedom and the Central African Republic. While the key findings are prescriptions for the US military, many are useful for Australia in considering regional interventions, particularly building local capacity and combining military and non-military instruments.

In regional news, there’s a short piece in Monday’s Jakarta Post that looks at military diplomacy between Iraq and Indonesia. Of note is Iraq’s potential as a market for Indonesia’s defence industry. Iraq’s Deputy Defence Minister Gen. Mohan Hafedz Hamad has shown interest not just in weaponry but other products like shoes, helmets and halal rations for soldiers.

For those interested in national security, Commander Stuart Watters RAN will deliver a presentation on what constitutes a security issue, looking at the Tampa affair as a case study and its implications for the ADF. His presentation is part of the AIIA ACT Branch 2012 Essay Competition Finalist Presentations, Thursday 11 October from 5.30pm.

Finally, the Kokoda Foundation’s Young Strategic Leader’s Forum will host a presentation by Jason Mundy on Australia’s strategic interests in Antarctica. Jason Mundy is the General Manager of the Australian Antarctic Division’s Strategies Branch, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. You can catch his presentation on Thursday 18 October from 6pm.

Two cheers for ministerial staffers

2 October 2012

Jennifer Westacott of the Business Council of Australia deserves credit for her speech on public service reform (PDF) a fortnight ago, and for the attention which she also drew to the roles of ministerial staff. Her focus on the importance of good quality processes as an essential prerequisite for making good quality policy must surely have been met with approving high-fives inside the Parliamentary Triangle.

Westacott, though, overstates the need for a separation between policy making and the political process:

While a high performing public service is still answerable to its political masters, the policy making process can and must transcend political cycles. Most importantly, it must independently and diligently put the right things on the agenda.

As presented here this conflates two important but separate ideas. The public service isn’t independent of government, nor is it a neutral entity (except during pre-election caretaker periods). It’s there to advise government on policy design and to implement that policy. As such, policy has to take account of political cycles. For this process to work a general principle must apply that governments care as much about delivering good policy outcomes as the public service. Read more

Maintaining shipbuilding skills – a reader response

2 October 2012

Andrew Davies’ recent post on workforce skills and program continuity is a breath of fresh air. Andrew cuts through the rhetoric on this issue and rightly concludes that any proposals to bring forward production simply so as to ensure workforce continuity need to be subjected to careful cost-benefit appraisal.

But I don’t think he quite covered the full set of alternatives. It’s important that the range of options considered not be limited to ‘doing nothing’ versus ‘bringing forward additional procurement’. Rather, there are also other options worthy of being analysed. For example, if the goal is to ensure skills remain available, experienced personnel could be offered payments to keep their skills intact—a capacity payment, similar to those made for physical production capacity. Equally, experienced personnel could be given certification, with those retaining that certification over time being offered higher wages on subsequent programs.

The precise design of these options, and the cost-benefit appraisal more generally, requires a better understanding than we now have of the skills/experience relationship. For instance, do higher levels of productivity depend on cumulative experience, or on continuity of experience (or both)? At what rate do experience-related skills depreciate? How costly is to maintain those skills out of the direct shipyard situation?

It’s also important to understand the relationship between work experience, skills and remuneration. While productivity may rise with experience, so too will remuneration, at least for transferable skills in a competitive labour market. That means that some (possibly all) of the returns on higher productivity are captured by employees, not taxpayers, making it somewhat less valuable to ensure workforce continuity. In practice, in the labour markets at issue, not all of the benefits of experience will be transferable between industries, and not all of the productivity benefits from those skills accrue to individual employees in the form of higher earnings. However, knowing the extent to which that is the case is important to properly analysing the costs and benefits of alternative interventions (including the ‘do nothing’ option).

In short, Andrew is absolutely right—the mere fact of a relationship between work experience and productivity is far from meaning we should ensure workforce continuity at all costs. This is an issue crying out for serious analysis and Andrew is to be congratulated for making a start in that direction.

Henry Ergas is a senior economic adviser, Deloitte Access Economics, and professor of Infrastructure Economics, University of Wollongong.

The future of US conventional extended deterrence (part II)

1 October 2012

Last week, I identified some of the possible dilemmas for US conventional deterrence in East Asia, so it’s now worth looking in more detail what this might mean for Australia. At least four points can be made:

First, as the United States shifts its conventional deterrence strategy towards greater strategic depth in the Asia–Pacific and a greater reliance on long-range strike, Australia and Japan become much more important allies from an American perspective, for both political and geostrategic reasons. The recent CSIS report on the future American force posture in East Asia makes this amply clear. Using Australian airfields in the north for long-range strike provides US planners with additional options to complicate Chinese planning in the event of a major crisis. Indeed, in a future Asia–Pacific strategic order, Australia might become the latest in a line of America’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers.’ But this also means that in a future contested Asia–Pacific, Australia’s heightened relevance in US operational planning will make such installations a potential target of Chinese strikes in the event of a war. Burden-sharing within ANZUS will thus (again) take on a new quality, similar to the Cold War when Australian defence planners were worried about Soviet strikes against joint US–Australian facilities at Pine Gap and elsewhere. In that case, investing in defensive systems to prepare for such a scenario would move up the priority order of Defence’s core capabilities. Read more

We’ll be back tomorrow

1 October 2012

It’s a Labour Day public holiday in Canberra so we’ll be back tomorrow with our usual considered analysis, stats and graphs for your reading pleasure.

The Strategist team