The government’s decisions to shrink or cancel previous choices on the acquisition of armour may well be appropriate to Australia’s changing strategic circumstances.

Fast, agile, easily deployable and long range, armour is not.

But there is potentially a significant strategic casualty from the decisions that followed the defence strategic review: Australia’s defence reputation with a key regional partner, the Republic of Korea. It’s possible, too, that an opportunity to develop a significant defence industrial base and export opportunity in southern Australia has been lost.

It’s not been easy or straightforward to give substance to Australia’s proclaimed objective of a closer defence relationship with Korea. Despite much rhetoric, neither government has put priority or substance behind repeated political proclamations.

In 2012, the outgoing Australian Labor government cancelled a plan to build in Australia 30 K9 self-propelled howitzers (SPHs) and associated ammunition support and recovery vehicles. Samsung Techwin (now Hanwha Defense) and Raytheon had tendered for the project but the cancellation came before a contract was signed. This was to be Australia’s first major defence acquisition from an Asian country, worth around A$1 billion.

Its abrupt cancellation was badly received by Korea, which saw Australia as an unreliable partner. In a country where long term trusted relationships define the business culture, this was a particularly damaging decision.

But Korea is not, in the end, anything but practical and pragmatic—and mercantilist, so the revival of the contract by the Morrison government in 2019 was welcome, if not effusively received, in Korea.   In the intervening period, Korea’s main naval shipyard, DSME, had shortlisted for construction of two projected Australian naval supply ships. The contract was in due course won by Navantia of Spain, and the decision, surprisingly, created little attention or unhappiness in Seoul. Korea had moved on—it had plenty of alternative defence customers emerging as the scale and quality of its order books expanded.

Hanwha committed to build the howitzers in a new purpose-built factory at Avalon, near Geelong. The company saw this as a bridgehead, an entry point into Australia’s defence capability acquisition chain. Geelong was suffering high levels of skilled unemployment after the closure of the Ford vehicle manufacturing plant there, a resource Hanwha—already conscious of the politics—decided it could draw upon.

It began, too slowly and under pressure, to explore the capabilities of Australian companies that could be utilised, and indeed those that might offer innovative products that could be utilised in the global Hanwha defence production supply chain. It also slowly began to build its understanding of and links to Australia’s complex and changing defence procurement system.

Separately, Hanwa saw a massive opportunity in the Land 400 Phase 3, the intended replacement of the ADF’s obsolete tracked infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) capability. The Vietnam-era M113s were to be replaced with 450 state of the art IFVs.

In response, Hanwha developed the prototype AS21 Redback, an IFV design optimised for Australian requirements. It was selected as a bidder for the contract along with Germany’s Rheinmetall Lynx IFV. Both companies subsequently sent prototypes to Australia for evaluation and field testing.

Finalisation of the contract has been delayed several times as Defence has pressured the two bidders to reduce prices, and more recently, to bid against a reduced number of vehicles, as the likely outcome of the DSR came into view. In short, the project has become yet another delayed, amended and yet further delayed program, an outcome by now typical of Australia’s convoluted defence procurement processes.

And then the Ukraine war happened which, on one reading, might have revived views on the need for a substantial ADF armoured capability. But Australia’s needs and likely contingencies are different, and it is difficult to argue with the DSR’s emphasis on agility, mobility, range and regional reach.

For Korea’s defence industry, however, the Ukraine war is a game changer. Although, much to the chagrin of the United States, Korea’s defence industry has been a massive beneficiary, securing very large new armour contracts with Poland, in particular, Romania and others. Korea’s combination of speed of delivery, quality and state of the art technology has catapulted it into the front ranks of global weapons suppliers.

In Europe, Korea has also benefitted from judgements that Germany’s production capability will be fully extended by the needs both to rebuild the German armed forces and to supply Ukraine or partners sending equipment to Ukraine. An indication of this is Rheinmetall’s apparent decision to contract its Australian subsidiary in Queensland to build Boxer eight-wheeled armoured vehicles for the Bundeswehr, alongside those being built for the Australian Army.

Of an original 450 IFVs proposed to be acquired by Australia, the government, post DSR, has reduced this number to 129. It will be marginal for either Rheinmetall or Hanwha to build such a short production run in Australia, although arguably there may be export opportunities if Australian costs are competitive. Whichever company wins the contract, it’s equally likely they’ fill it from much bigger production runs in Europe or Korea.

For Hanwha, the cancellation of a second tranche of SPHs is a further blow to its plans to build a significant manufacturing base at Avalon near Geelong and could negatively impact any decision on production in Australia of the Redback, should it be the successful tenderer.

Faced with the strategic uncertainties in its immediate neighbourhood, Korea sees value in diversifying its production base away from the Korean peninsula. But it may wonder whether Australia presents a reliable and attractive location. The upshot is that southern Australia could miss out on a new defence production base, with all the associated benefits for employment and Australian subcontractors. That result would be at odds with the grander objectives of the DSR.

 

Reflecting on Australia’s armoured vehicle debate, it’s apparent that advocates and sceptics often talk past, rather than to, each other, with a sense of good faith sometimes lacking. The topic often sees the privileging of commentary on specific platforms, like the M1A2 Abrams, rather than discussion of what a relevant system of systems might provide.

Mapping this commentary is important if we’re to stop circling the buoy. We then need to develop and implement innovative concepts for the land force. That’s essential regardless of where one stands on the future of armour: Defence appears set to recapitalise the tank fleet and a decision on eventual infantry fighting vehicle program looms later this year.

Among the group I will describe as the advocates, former major general and senator Jim Molan is perhaps the most prominent. Various Australian Army officers have argued for armoured capabilities across various forums. Recently retired major general Adam Findlay offered a characteristic full-throated defence of armoured vehicles during a recent ASPI event.

Defence is clearly in this camp, too, having just doubled down on armoured vehicle capabilities with its decision to upgrade the main battle tank fleet from the M1A1 to the M1A2 Abrams, along with the acquisition of breaching and bridging variants. A long-anticipated decision to buy as many as 450 IFVs may cement this commitment even more deeply.

Advocates work from the premise that tanks and armoured vehicles are key building blocks of ‘combined arms’ approaches to warfighting—the combination of infantry, armoured vehicles, artillery and other fires, aviation, engineers and so on as the inescapable essence of prosecuting close combat successfully. Related threads emphasise the importance of armour in urban fighting and as an enabler of the close fight or ‘last 400 metres’ of an attack.

These thinkers acknowledge the lethality of anti-armour weapons, loitering munitions and drones but view them as incremental developments in a perpetual tussle between protection and lethality, not as game-changers that render armour irrelevant.

They cite similar and erroneous conclusions about the death of armour after the performance of anti-tank guided missiles during the Yom Kippur War, for example. As always, ‘It was complicated.’ That conflict demonstrated the potentially fearsome lethality of this new class of weapons, but armoured vehicles remained a key part of land forces capable of high-end combat.

The premise underwriting this argument, sometimes but not always articulated, is that the government needs the Australian Defence Force to be able to fight in ‘high-end’ land combat—indeed, that this is non-negotiable. An assumption that needs to be brought to the surface here is the army’s deep institutional belief that the government will inevitably ask it to fight and it must be prepared to carry out that fight.

This view insists that the ‘real world’ will get in the way of elegant deterrence plans. That’s born from the experience of senior officers asked for response options in unexpected crises, starting with East Timor in the late 1990s. It’s also born of the view that serious land capabilities are required because they’re likely to play a role in conflict with a major adversary that remains below escalatory thresholds involving long-range strike missiles and attack submarines. This is congruent with a view that the capacity to wage high-end land combat is fundamental to Australia’s ‘shape, deter, respond’ posture, though the assumptions here run deeper than that policy formulation.

The other key camp we can fairly dub the ‘sceptics’. It has a wider range of voices and ASPI has provided a platform for many of their arguments. ASPI’s own Michael Shoebridge, Marcus Hellyer and Andrew Davies are in this group. Hugh White is another, as is Greg Sheridan of The Australian.

There are two interlocking strands of scepticism. The first questions the utility of tanks and other armoured vehicles in a generalised sense. These analyses tend to point to observations from the 2014 Russia–Ukraine war, the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the still-evolving 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. For the sceptics, a salient observation is the lethality of modern anti-armour missiles and rockets, cheap drones (including loitering munitions) and long-range artillery, alone and in combination. Sceptics are less convinced that this development is merely incremental and consider that armour may now be a losing proposition.

These thinkers highlight the strategic mobility limitations facing the ADF. Notwithstanding upcoming investments under Defence’s Land 8710 (littoral manoeuvre) program, only a handful of amphibious vessels and strategic-lift aircraft can move armoured vehicles and they’re vulnerable to some of the same things that threaten armoured vehicles. It bears noting that, while our prioritisation of protection in armoured vehicle design has led us to ever heavier vehicles, that result is not inevitable.

The second sceptical strand is best summarised as a question: even if armour is still useful for fighting on land, does the government really want the army to be involved in that kind of fighting? The sceptics look at Mosul and Kyiv and question our capacity for human and material losses. They then look at our region and ask what an appropriate Australian contribution to a major regional conflict would look like.

Their answer is that, in an era of concern about ‘beyond-peer’ threats, our only choice is to focus on strike capabilities (like submarines, offensive cyber and long-range missiles) that might deter an adversary. They highlight the opportunity cost of spending billions on armoured vehicles as opposed to nuclear submarines, autonomous systems, hypersonic weapons, sovereign supply-chain resilience and other worthy priorities. Under this argument, Australia can do with a lighter army capable of less demanding tasks in the near region, and our contribution to a coalition need not involve heavy combat brigades.

Both these perspectives are advanced by serious people who have thought seriously about the army’s role in contemporary Australian defence strategy. Most sceptics are smart and understand that tanks are often valuable in combat. Most advocates are smart and understand that serious land combat is costly and difficult, but they think it’s unavoidable.

This leads me to the task of marking out, in summary, what is actually contentious. What questions are different analysts seeking answers to? I think there are four.

First, what is the future of armoured systems and what is the current and future balance between lethality and protection? This is probably the only place where advocates and sceptics (sometimes) do address each other, but it’s marked by an unhelpful binary. It’s also probably unanswerable to a significant degree. Clearly, the options for armoured vehicles should not be ‘lots’ or ‘none’. So, what is the precise balance we want in the land force and how do we want to employ armoured vehicles?

The one position I will stake out is that any conclusion that armoured vehicles are completely obsolete still seems premature. They are vulnerable in many circumstances to cheaper, lighter weapons, especially if armour is employed amateurishly, as it appears to have been in the Nagorno-Karabakh war and by Russia in Ukraine. But it’s also difficult to envision many forms of offensive ground combat in the absence of any armoured vehicles, and protection measures will evolve in time. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Australian Army fighting without armoured vehicles in a regional urban environment, like Marawi, against even a moderately well-equipped adversary.

Second, do we want land forces as part of the ‘credible military force’ capable of partaking in ‘high-intensity warfighting’? Do we want the army to be able to partake in major land combat against capable adversaries in the region? Current investments clearly signal that the government’s answer is ‘yes’. We might also ask how land combat might be required to enable other deterrent capabilities like missiles. Consideration of scenarios in which US engagement in a regional conflict is less than complete but Australian interests are considered critical is key here.

Third, how much faith do we have in strike capabilities and their deterrent effect? Much scepticism is directed at the viability of armour on a contemporary battlefield. What about scepticism directed towards critical deterrent capabilities? What if future missile systems or submarines fail us? What if they work in a technical sense but fail to deter, or only deter a certain kind of threat? If we’re not sure of the answers to those questions, what does it mean for the kind of land force we want to retain?

Fourth, what does the future operating concept look like for the land component of the joint force, grounded in our regional geography? What contingencies do we envisage armoured capabilities being a part of the answer to? Of these contingencies, which ones will be answered by relatively ‘traditional’ combined-arms formations and which ones may need armoured vehicles?

Now I await accusations that I have mischaracterised every author mentioned here. A little more good faith would go a long way. Let’s at least agree on what we’re arguing about and stop circling the buoy.