Tag Archive for: defence of Australia

Migration vital for northern Australia, and national security

Nowhere in Australia are population and skills shortfalls more apparent than in the north which is heavily dependent on overseas migration to sustain both, and to boost the region’s contribution to national security.

It is good that the federal government’s new migration strategy recognises and responds to markedly different population trends and skills deficits in regional Australia compared to major cities. The strategy specifies actions tailored to the needs of regional Australia, including longer-term population planning with state and territory governments, increased skilled migration and faster visa processing for regional migrants.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the migration strategy will help ameliorate the chronic workforce and skills shortages in northern Australia and persistent population outflows to other parts of the nation.

While many big city dwellers may be anxious about housing and infrastructure deficits exacerbated by post-pandemic population growth, people of northern Australia remain highly dependent on strong overseas migration to deliver all manner of services, provide skilled workforces to sustain economic activity, and support populations of cities and towns. A visit to any health care facility underscores the dependence of northern Australian health systems on skilled migrants.

The north, with more than half Australia’s land area but just 5% of its population and with a critical role to play in national security, should have the south of Australia keenly interested in growing its population, economy and capabilities.

Analysis of 2022 ABS population growth and movement data for local government areas of northern Australia shows trends across the region that underline the vital role of overseas migration. Queensland hosts 74% of the 1.3 million northern population, with the Northern Territory just 19% and northern Western Australia a mere 7% at 95,000 people, in an area larger than NSW.

While northern population growth at 1.2% a year is about the same as in the rest of regional Australia, it’s the makeup of that growth that’s startling. In the 12 months to mid-2022, only 60 more people moved to northern Australia from elsewhere in the nation than moved away. The NT and northern WA lost 2,560 and 566 ‘emigrants’ respectively. Inbound overseas migration of 6,177 people across northern Australia was vital to sustaining its population and workforce. Natural increase (births minus deaths) was 9278 in the year.

If not for overseas migration, the population growth outcome across northern Australia would have been an anaemic 0.7%, and negative in the NT.

This is not just an issue for small towns in the bush. Large regional cities like Rockhampton, Townsville and Darwin rely on overseas migration to keep them functioning as regional hubs and able to service their own populations adequately. Overseas migration to these cities contributes more to growth and maintenance of skill bases than domestic migration. In greater Darwin, overseas migration was the largest contributor to its 0.7% population growth in 2021–22, not natural increase.

Overseas migration to northern Australia is also important for national security. Prosperity across the north makes for a more secure north. The role of Townsville and Darwin as the principal northern defence hubs for Australia should sharpen the focus on the importance of overseas migration to sustaining them.

High population churn is another feature of northern Australia’s demography. The Northern Territory’s annual churn rate is infamously the equivalent of a million residents leaving and entering Victoria each year. Every five years, one-third of the NT population changes. Even Cairns, renowned for its tropical lifestyle, experienced 28,000 residents leaving and arriving in 2021–22, the equivalent of 18% of its population. The level of domestic migration churn in the north is several times higher than for overseas migration.

Such turnover erodes skills bases, stability of employees for businesses and community continuity. It also can severely degrade delivery of critical services such as health care.

On the other hand, arrivals of overseas migrants have helped many communities in northern Australia become vibrantly multicultural. Nearly half of Darwin’s people, for example, are born overseas or have both parents born overseas.

A feature obvious to visitors is the multicultural homogeneity of northern city demographics, rather than enclaves of cultures evident in parts of larger cities.

Populations in the north are generally younger than in the rest of Australia. That reflects the nature of employment opportunities but is also a driver of the rate of out-migration. Often, the pull is towards family and friends in the south, particularly as people start to form families or to seek new job opportunities. For overseas migrants, larger diaspora communities in the rest of Australia can be an attraction to move.

Risks of city-driven changes to migration policy are mitigated by designated area migration agreements (DAMAs), which are in place across much of northern Australia, including the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of WA, the whole of the Northern Territory, Far North Queensland and Townsville.

DAMAs are five-year agreements between the Australian Government and regional representative bodies to provide access to more overseas workers than are available under the national skilled migration program. Under DAMAs, businesses can establish individual labour agreements. Lists of occupations eligible for employer sponsorship under DAMAs are more extensive than national skills lists, reflecting the different labour shortages in regional areas.

The Northern Territory DAMA has recently been extended for one year to the end of 2024 while a new DAMA is negotiated. Other northern Australia DAMAs have several years to run.

A strategic approach to recruitment of overseas migrants is needed to improve their retention. The NT prioritises migrants from nations and regions that already have substantial diasporas living in the territory. A government and business delegation recently travelled to the south Indian state of Kerala to conclude an economic cooperation agreement. Kerala provides many skilled workers to the NT, particularly for the health sector, and is a source of chain migration where family and friends seek to join those already in the territory.

Effective education, training and employment strategies are also needed to fully activate young and migrant workforces alike. A 2023 Infrastructure Australia report on market capacity for construction of infrastructure highlighted underutilisation of migrant engineers, with 47% actively seeking an engineering job in 2021.

Improving liveability in northern Australia is also vital to retain domestic and overseas migrants. Research into factors behind decisions to stay or leave reveal that availability and quality of education, health and family services are key determinants, as is availability, diversity and affordability of housing. Crime and antisocial behaviour have become growing concerns over recent years in many communities across the north.

Townsville’s liveability strategy identifies three critical factors: residents feeling safe, socially connected and included; environmental sustainability; and access to affordable and diverse housing options connected to employment, shopping, parks and community services.

The 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan specifically recognised the liveability imperative in northern Australia in its recommendations for approaches to infrastructure to support communities.

The AIP also called for closer, long-term cooperation between all levels of government and with business and community bodies in ‘place-making’ in northern communities.

While ongoing strong flows of overseas migrants will be required to sustain and secure northern Australia for years to come, Australia’s success in building communities that are better able to retain residents for longer will be a key factor in growing northern populations and skill bases, and consequently reinforcing security.

 

Is Morrison’s strategic update the defence of Australia doctrine reborn?

Since the announcement last week by Prime Minister Scott Morrison of a radical shift in Australia’s defence policy, the question arises whether this marks a return to the defence of Australia doctrine that became official policy in the late 1980s. Our new defence policy proposes a decisive refocus on our own immediate region and a move away from distant operations in the Middle East, which have preoccupied us for the last 20 years.

However, while there are certainly interesting historical parallels to be drawn, they are separated by more than 30 years and there are huge differences in the low-level threat situation in which we found ourselves in the 1980s and today’s worrying strategic dangers.

There is, however, an important parallel in one respect, and that is—contrary to the views of some former prime ministers and defence ministers—a country’s geography must be of abiding concern when it comes to devising a defence policy. As Arthur Tange said, the most important single document in defence planning is a map of one’s own country.

It was Tange’s 1972 defence review that included a map of the hemisphere with Australia at the centre. And it was the 1987 white paper that, for the first time, gave priority in Australian defence planning to the defence of the continent.

In the intervening years, and especially after September 2001, Afghanistan and the Middle East came to dominate our planning and military operations such that former defence minister Robert Hill dismissed what he called ‘the concentric circles’ of defence planning centred on Australia’s northern approaches.

Last week, Morrison noted that the 2016 defence white paper gave an equal weighting to Australia and its northern approaches, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, and operations in support of the rules-based global order. He now emphasises that his government has directed Defence to prioritise the Australian Defence Force’s geographical focus on our immediate region, which he said is the area ranging from the northeast Indian Ocean through maritime and mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea and the southwest Pacific.

That is precisely the area described in the 1986 Review of Australia’s defence capabilities as Australia’s area of primary strategic interest, encompassing Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. So, at least in terms of strategic geography and force structure priorities Australia is now returning home to the defence of Australia.

Morrison made it clear that we cannot allow consideration of contingencies outside of our immediate region to drive the ADF’s force structure to the detriment of ensuring that we have credible capability to respond to any challenge in our immediate region.

This is an epochal move and reflects just how potentially dangerous our strategic situation has become. The prime minister said we have not seen the conflation of global, economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced in Australia and in our region since the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. He observed that in this new and less benign strategic environment, the risk of miscalculation and even conflict is heightening and we must be alert to the full range of threats, including ones in which Australia’s sovereignty and security may be tested directly.

The other relevant comparison to make relates to the strategic policy concept that determines Australia’s defence policy and force structure priorities. In his speech, Morrison defined three strategic objectives to guide our defence planning, including force structure, force generation, international engagement and operations. They are to shape Australia’s strategic environment, deter actions against Australia’s interest, and respond with credible force where required.

These new policies must be able to hold potential adversaries, their forces and their critical infrastructure at risk from a distance and thereby influence the calculus of costs involved in threatening Australia’s interests. This includes developing capabilities in areas such as long-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area-denial systems. It will involve growing the ADF’s self-reliance for delivering deterrent effects.

In the 1986 review, a policy was recommended called ‘a strategy of denial’. The proposal involved a layered defence with forces capable of denying the sea and air gap to our north to any adversary. Our geography would impose long lines of communication on such an adversary and make them more vulnerable.

It needs to be understood that all this was occurring more than 30 years ago in an essentially benign strategic environment. Australia’s area of primary strategic concern—Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific—was seen by the review as ‘one of the most stable regions in the world’. As a result, the review recommended that priority be given to more credible low-level conflict contingencies because more substantial conventional military action against us could only occur were regional countries to develop over time the necessary capacity. That would take many years.

All this is in stark contrast to today’s much more dangerous and unpredictable strategic environment. Australia’s security environment is described in the 2020 defence strategic update as being markedly different from the relatively more benign one of even four years ago, with greater potential for military miscalculation. This could conceivably include state-on-state conflict that could engage the ADF where Australia’s interests are threatened. Accordingly, Defence must be better prepared for the prospect of high-intensity conflict.

There is obviously a huge difference between preparing for low-level conflict in 1986—when the only power capable of doing us some harm was Indonesia—to the situation now where we need to prepare for the prospect of high-intensity conflict with possibly a major regional military power. In an ASPI publication titled Australia’s management of strategic risk in the new era, almost three years ago, Richard Brabin-Smith and I recommended that ‘Much more thought needs to be given to planning for the expansion of the ADF and its capacity to engage in high-intensity conflict in our own defence—in a way that we haven’t previously had to consider.’

Therefore, while Australia has certainly returned to embracing the geography of our immediate region as a priority determinant of force structure in the defence of Australia, the formidable strategic uncertainty we now face results in the requirement for an incomparably stronger and much more offensive ADF. It must be capable of denying any adversary from using military force—either directly or indirectly—against us.

Coercion, deterrence and Australia’s long-range strike options

My ASPI colleague Marcus Hellyer’s two recent posts open up a range of questions about the future role of long-range strike capabilities in Australian strategy. One of the more important questions involves what we want long-range strike to do. At the risk of being overly reductionist, I’d suggest that proponents of long-range strike can be divided into two groups: those who envisage an offensive role for such capabilities and those who envisage solely a defensive one. In part, the division turns on the issue of China, and whether Australia should be prepared to target the Chinese homeland during a conflict. But it turns too on theoretical arguments, such as whether deterrence by denial really is ‘inherently more reliable’ than deterrence by punishment.

Most warfare involves contests in short-range and medium-range weaponry. No surprise there—most of those who fight are neighbours. Even today, long-range strike capabilities are relatively rare. The P5 countries—China, France, Russia, the UK and the US, all of which are officially recognised as nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—have them. Among the four non-official nuclear-armed states, India and North Korea are working to develop intercontinental-range delivery systems, but Pakistan and Israel aren’t. It’s not entirely coincidental that the list essentially comprises nuclear-capable states: for a long time the limited accuracy of long-range systems has meant that only a nuclear warhead could compensate for ‘circular error probables’ that measured in the hundreds, if not thousands, of metres.

So, for most countries, the issue of what to do with long-range strike capabilities simply doesn’t arise. Even in the case of Australia, a country used to fighting its wars at considerable distance from its shores, most of our thinking about long-range strike has been subcontracted to our major ally, the US. Thinking about how we might use an indigenous long-range strike capability has been relatively rare. That it resurfaces now, at a time of shifting relative strategic weight in the Asian great-power balance, means the debate automatically centres on the rising authoritarian power, China.

So, how might Australian long-range strike capabilities—China, remember, already has them—contribute to establishing a more stable strategic relationship between Canberra and Beijing?

Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. In a purely definitional sense, deterrence is a show-stopper. It occurs when country A persuades country B not to undertake a specific action by threatening to impose a set of costs on country B that would exceed the likely benefits it would gain from undertaking the action.

That’s accurate, but long-winded and dull. And it just tells us how deterrence works, rather than what it is. So, what is it? Deterrence is a chapter in the playbook of coercion. And coercion springs from what Thomas Schelling called ‘the power to hurt’. The power to hurt is important because it underpins bargaining power.

That description probably horrifies some readers. Western audiences today like discussions about power to be qualified by adjectives like ‘soft’ and ‘smart’. Coercion, in particular, doesn’t get a lot of mileage in Australian defence white papers. Indeed, we’re inclined to think that coercion is bad, that China coerces but we don’t, and that we live by higher standards and finer principles, essentially those of a ‘rule-bound’ international order.

Moreover, in recent decades Western military capabilities have emphasised precision strike—ironically, the deliberate minimisation of pain—as the key principle in force design. That’s enabled smaller warheads to be effective against targets that previously would’ve required larger ones.

It’s possible to argue that the credibility of both deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial has increased—the first can be more selective, the second more effective. But do adversaries really fear accurate destruction more than gross destruction? If so, why do nuclear weapons retain their strategic importance?

Summing up on this point, when we’re asking ourselves what the link might be between deterrence and long-range strike weapons, we’re specifically asking how such capabilities would allow us to coerce another power—that is, how we might threaten them to our political advantage.

Second point: country B doesn’t have to be merely another second-tier power like us. In deterrence relationships, it matters not which country is stronger. What matters is whether country A can credibly threaten to impose on country B a set of costs that country B finds painful.

That’s why North Korea’s successful, if so far limited, testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile and a thermonuclear warhead is strategically significant. It allows Pyongyang to threaten to impose on the US a set of costs that Washington would find unacceptable even if it could, in response, turn North Korea into a radioactive carpark. That is to say, its subsequent devastation of North Korea would not reduce America’s suffering to any noticeable degree.

French nuclear doctrine during the Cold War turned on precisely the same axis: it threatened to undo the Soviet Union’s standing as a great power. Yes, Moscow could retaliate, but it could not escape the effects of a French strike.

Now, in both those cases, nuclear weapons provide important leverage. It might be that Australia is unwilling to head down the path to nuclear weapons. And in terms of deterrence, that would be a serious constraint, for the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons provides a solid foundation for a diplomatic stance based on coercive threats.

True, the same principles of deterrence apply at the conventional-weapon level. But it’s hard to threaten an aggressor with a set of costs that its leadership would find unacceptable if we don’t have some heavyweight escalation options. And we certainly can’t do that by prematurely rushing to reassure China that its homeland wouldn’t be targeted during a conflict with Australia. After all, Beijing is giving us no such reassurance.

A third point: trying to constrain Australia’s future long-range strike capabilities to those which would augment our existing doctrine—essentially ‘defence of Australia’ accompanied by a side-dish of Pacific ‘step-up’—puts the cart before the horse. Despite Hugh White’s recent effort to show that the defence of Australia doctrine could be deployed against a superpower, it was designed in the 1980s to do something different. It was a formula for managing low-level threats, in a world of US primacy and great-power accommodation. That’s not the future we confront. Belatedly appending to that formula a long-range anti-ship missile capability, so we can threaten the targeting of Chinese ships as they pull out of Hainan, merely confuses an already overburdened defence doctrine.

The threat to hurt is difficult to leverage from a strategic posture that insists on ‘defensive defence’—readers of a certain age might remember the NATO debates of the early 1980s on just that topic. After all, what ‘threat’ would we be actually making? We’d be ‘threatening’ to defend ourselves against another country’s military forces that were already attacking us. The potency of the threat depends on Beijing’s weighing of a shifting balance of conventional forces in a prospective battle far distant from its shores. That threat’s not particularly coercive, not when weighed alongside more offensive possibilities.

Where does that leave us? Three points. Deterrence is the political return from coercive threat. Effective threats can be made against a stronger power by a weaker one. And offensive threats—especially offensive threats of gross destruction—possess a persuasiveness not easily matched by defensive threats. We need to approach the issue of long-range strike with those lessons in mind.

Reflections on the Defence of Australia, 1987 (part 2)

ASPI’s Mark Thomson in his report on this year’s defence budget has drawn our attention to the analysis by the US National Intelligence Council released early this year. The council foresees ‘deep shifts in the global landscape that portend a dark and difficult near future. The next five years will see rising tensions within and between countries.’ Further, ‘for better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II.’

For us, more directly, what has changed since 1987 when we judged that the possibility of ‘escalated low level threats’ would have to determine much of today’s force structure? At that time our GDP was greater than ASEAN’s combined. Now Indonesia alone looks likely to pass us in the foreseeable future. In 1987, non-state actors posed little threat in our neighbouring states and to our sea lines of communication. Now a number of militant Islamist movements threaten governments.

Al-Qaeda includes sea-lane harassment among its ambitions. What are now ISIL affiliates use those waterways to commit acts of piracy. Regional armed forces, previously focused on internal security, are now acquiring force-projection capabilities. The unsettled maritime boundaries of our region, then latent in their impact, are now at the forefront of regional diplomacy.

The calculation beneath the immediate threat in 1987 was that our military capabilities could have to deal with a range of contingencies including ‘increased levels of air and sea harassment’ and air attacks on ‘northern settlements and offshore installations and territories’. Attacks on ‘shipping in proximate areas, mining of northern ports, and more frequent raids by land forces’ were also contemplated.

Over the past 30 years, regional military capabilities to conduct such operations have increased exponentially. Importantly, the calculation of intentions by state and non-state actors is immensely more complicated. The deadening effect on local delinquencies that the cautious Cold War superpowers sometimes exerted has largely disappeared.

We are now in warning time on a variety of fronts. The concept and its systematic force structure guidance has disappeared from our defence white papers. To be fair, pages 22 and 140 of DWP 2016 contain brief sections on managing greater preparedness and responding to strategic risk. There are also references to improving our defence infrastructure in relevant areas. We’ve been effectively engaged in multiple out-of-area activities since the 1987 DWP. That’s consumed official focus as well as resources. Further—much encouraged by us—our principal ally engaged with us and our local friends on security issues in our region more intensively in the last decade. It’s still so engaged, but with a more intensely unilateralist approach.

It’s clear that our problems are immediate. But our planning is not. The excellent capabilities outlined in the DWPs published from 2009 to 2016 are, in many cases, still decades away in planned commissioning of platforms. I’m likely to be dead by the time the first new submarine is accepted and will certainly be by the last. Fortunately, air capabilities are arriving earlier.

More than that we need a focus on the preparedness of the force in being. Those are the capabilities we’ll have for the next 10 years. We need to look at enhancing current platforms and keeping them in service longer. Note that as the US struggles towards a 350-ship navy, many platforms are as likely to be unmothballed as built. We also need to look to war stocks and essential supplies.

There’s a civilian component to this. If one was going to bring forward the 1987 vulnerabilities that are most immediate, one would look to sea lines and oil supplies. Our oil resources are well below international standards and, unlike in 1987, our refining capacity has almost disappeared. International Energy Agency rules say we should have 90 days’ worth of oil supplies. Uniquely among OECD countries, we are nowhere near that. (It has to be said, though, that getting there would be very expensive, with an unwanted load on petrol prices.) We feel secure because our supplies are in friendly Singapore or at sea between us. Singapore is not going to turn off the tap, but those sea lanes are something else.

Hardening vulnerable facilities as well as war stocks would be useful enhancements. Except for the oil issues, that would not be a major expense when compared with the cost of the new platforms. However, we would be running more quickly to the government’s stated target of 2% of GDP for defence spending. For all this to be acceptable, the political leadership in the first place, and then the public, would need to see with clarity the kinds of scenarios that the new capabilities were being acquired to deal with.

That type of planning has to be developed and provided by the government’s defence advisers. It was intensively developed in the 1980s. Its product and the underlying thinking were presented to the political leadership and the Australian people in the 1986 Dibb report and DWP ’87. The principal complaint then was that it was insufficiently ambitious. But even so we didn’t achieve the planned force levels. Now such assessments might well drive and enable a higher commitment.

The US intelligence agencies have given us a warning as stark as we got from President Nixon on Guam in 1969. We’d better respond.

Reflections on the Defence of Australia, 1987 (part 1)

The 1987 defence white paper, The defence of Australia, didn’t represent new thinking. Some observers may have thought that was the case, given the anxious critiques of it by advocates of ‘forward defence’, particularly those politically devoted to identifying gaps between Australia under a Labor government and our principal ally, the United States.

Those commentators portrayed a retreat to ‘fortress Australia’, with the implication that we were establishing a fault line in the Western alliance. What DWP ’87 did was render coherent, for the purposes of our defence force structure planning, years of careful thinking by departmental officials, and, to a lesser but important degree, by governments and the burgeoning national security academic community.

DWP ’87 has to be considered in conjunction with a report written by the minister for defence’s consultant, Paul Dibb, published a year earlier. Terminologies were different then. Dibb had recommended a military strategy of denial that rapidly drew criticism from ‘forward defence’ advocates. ‘Denial’ in the Dibb report was replaced in DWP ’87 by a strategy of ‘layered defence’ and ‘defence in depth’.

DWP ’87 placed the key concepts in the Dibb report within regional and global security structures and commitments—matters Dibb was instructed not to comment on. Doing so blunted, to some degree, the critics. The continuities, however, were vastly greater than the discontinuities. The Dibb document illuminated the rationale behind the white paper. For the first time, and in an era in which national security issues enjoyed political saliency, the Australian public had before them the product of nearly three decades’ worth of official cogitation on the defence of Australia.

The genesis of that thinking can be dated back to the 1959 Strategic basis paper, which, though set aside by the government of the day, reflected widespread internal official views. The paper asserted:

As our forces could be re-shaped only over a long period of years they should be designed primarily with the ability to act independently of Allies. Such forces could act conjointly with Allies in regional defence arrangements. On the other hand forces shaped solely to act in concert with major Allies would not necessarily be capable of an independent role.

Though the Menzies government did not explicitly act on that assumption, ironically it ordered the substance of such a force. That was in response to doubts about the British sustaining their regional presence for the long term, fears about Konfrontasi in Sukarno-era Indonesia, and concerns about whether the US would judge political developments in Southeast Asia as vital to Western security interests. The 1967 British decision to withdraw from ‘East of Suez’ ended any hopes for a return to the old ways. Then came President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Guam doctrine, which assigned Southeast Asia secondary status and enjoined allies and friends to look to their own defences in the first instance.

The key chapter in DWP ’87 for giving coherence to official thinking was chapter 3, ‘Priorities for force development’. Here, I would argue, both for its primary relevance then and its enduring relevance today, was the notion of ‘escalated low level conflict’. It judged that within our region of primary strategic interest the capability existed to mount difficult conventional but still limited military operations against Australia: ‘These could take the form of increased levels of air and sea harassment, extending to air attacks on northern settlements and off-shore installations and territories, attacks on shipping in proximate areas, mining of northern ports, and more frequent and more intensive raids by land forces.’ It was not assumed then that anyone had such intentions, but capabilities in the region were beginning to show the potential for such activities should intentions change.

The carefully calculated dimensions of an ‘escalated low level threat’ drove the defence force structure. The Dibb report and DWP ’87 overthrew the previous driver, the ‘core force concept’. Despite 20 years of revised thinking, we had not moved away essentially from timely replacement of existing capability.

Two concepts supplanted it. The first was the ‘force in being’—the air, naval and army requirements that would be structured and equipped to deal with threat scenarios on the immediate horizon. The second was the ‘expansion base’—the vital capabilities that needed to be kept in service should the worst occur. The basic equipment and skills would be there for an expansion in equipment numbers and personnel. For the navy this dictated, for example, 17 anti-submarine warfare/air-defence capable Tier 1 and Tier 2 ships for the ‘force in being’ based on credible scenarios in the choke points of our northern approaches. This was not a ‘think of a number’ exercise.

As the Cold War ended and we claimed a ‘peace dividend’, those calculations fell into disuse. Faced with extensive out-of-area deployments and the difficulties shown up by the 1999 East Timor commitment, the 1987 rationale disappeared along with the calculations. The excellent performance of our military in the Middle East, Timor and the South Pacific reinforced a sense that nothing was amiss.

That confidence has persisted through the recent white papers. DWP 2016 gave equal prominence to our global and regional commitments as force structure determinants with the defence of our approaches. The ‘core force’ has returned unannounced. It has done so just when our strategic environment has taken a turn for the worse.