Tag Archive for: Defending Australia

Australia must plan to defend itself alone

Many people believe that Australia would never need to defend itself unaided. Even if US support cannot be taken for granted in the future, they think that we needn’t ever stand alone, because we have many potential allies among our neighbours. These optimists expect that countries like Japan, India and Indonesia, to name just a few, are natural strategic partners because they share our concerns about China.

I’m more pessimistic. That’s not because I’m against alliances. On the contrary, as I argue in How to defend Australia, we should actively seek regional allies. Only by working with them can we hope to protect our wider strategic interests and thereby limit the risk of a direct military threat against us. Moreover, we should structure our forces in some specific ways to allow us to do so effectively.

But we cannot use such allies as a basis for our strategic posture and force planning. That is why I argue that we should plan to defend Australia alone. This might come as a surprise in view of the much-hyped network of defence partnerships we have built up over the past few decades. Don’t all these partners count as allies?

Well, yes, if we mean that we might cooperate diplomatically to try to resist China’s influence. But that kind of thing doesn’t count when we’re talking about military strategy and force structure. What matters then is whether we can rely on others to fight to help us defend our territory or vital interests.

The only kind of alliance that counts for defence policy is one expressing clear undertakings to fight under certain circumstances. Strictly speaking, we have only two military alliances with neighbours. One is with New Zealand under ANZUS, and the other is with Papua New Guinea under the 1987 joint declaration of principles. The Five Power Defence Arrangements pact doesn’t count because it commits us to help defend Malaysia and Singapore but doesn’t commit them to help us.

The optimists say this is changing. They point to the Quad as evidence that countries throughout Asia are becoming more willing to cooperate strategically to counter China’s growing power and reach. But the busy make-work of defence diplomacy—content-light meetings, scripted exercises, carefully worded joint statements and low-level logistics agreements—all fall a long way short of the kind of serious strategic undertakings that we could plan our defences around.

Nonetheless, many people are confident that true alliances will emerge as and when the need becomes clear. They take it for granted that fellow democracies like India, Indonesia and Japan will be willing to make big sacrifices to help us resist Chinese pressure or threats. And they presumably also take it for granted that we will be willing to make big sacrifices to support them.

This is just wishful thinking, unless we have solid reasons to think that these countries will identify their most vital strategic interests with ours. The common assertion that they will because we all profess democratic values does not suffice. Even if our political values were much more closely aligned than in fact they are, they would not forge effective alliances. History—the only guide we have—suggests that shared values count for little in decisions for war. Shared fears of a common enemy are what count. Military alliances work and endure only when the parties are convinced that their own security depends directly on the security of an ally, and the more direct the dependence, the stronger the alliance will be.

The question, then, is whether shared anxiety about China ensures a sufficient alignment of objectives between us and our Asian neighbours to sustain effective regional alliances. Does India’s or Japan’s security from China depend on ours, and vice versa?

I think the answer is no, for reasons that are rooted deep in Asia’s strategic geography. To see why, it helps to compare Asia with Europe.

Not surprisingly, much of our thinking about potential alliances in Asia draws—explicitly or implicitly—on European models, especially NATO. But Europe’s strategic geography is very different from Asia’s. In Europe a large number of potent strategic actors are jammed together in a tight space. Any major shift in the distribution of power has immediate implications for all of them.

A glance at the map makes it clear that Russia can attack Germany much more easily if it controls Poland and can attack France much more easily if it controls Germany. That means France’s and Germany’s security from Russia depends on defending Poland. That makes for a powerful convergence of strategic objectives between all three countries in the face of a Russian threat.

East Asia is different, in two related ways. Its key strategic powers are much further apart, and they are mostly connected by sea rather than by land. That is even true of India and China, because their long border is so mountainous as to be impervious to large-scale land forces.

That makes it far less clear that Japan’s or India’s vulnerability to Chinese attack depends on Australia’s security, or vice versa. China can quite easily threaten one of them without threatening any of the others. It doesn’t need to go through Japan to attack Australia.

Strategic geography is one of the reasons why there is no Asian NATO, and why the attempt to establish one—SEATO—failed so dismally.

This line of argument does not, of course, apply with the same force to Indonesia. Its position makes its security critical to ours, which makes it highly credible that we would fight in its defence—just as Britain has at times fought to defend France—and (perhaps a little less likely) that it would fight to defend us. Indonesia also has the potential to become a major power and thus a very valuable ally. That is why, as I’ve argued elsewhere, Indonesia may well be our most important strategic partner in the decades ahead. But as the example of Britain and France attests, close neighbours make awkward allies. We can never take Indonesia for granted.

And that means that we cannot count on Japan’s or India’s or Indonesia’s or anyone else’s help if we are threatened, just as they cannot count on ours if they are. A big factor here is that, for all of us, China is a valued partner as well as a scary neighbour. It would have to become a lot less valued, or a lot more scary, before Asian powers overcame the centrifugal effect of geographical dispersion and coalesced against it. And Beijing may well be smart enough to stop that happening: divide et impera no doubt translates well into Mandarin.

None of this means we have no chance of building alliances with countries in our region. Nor does it mean that we shouldn’t build a defence force that would allow us to fight alongside them if we can. But it does mean we shouldn’t base our strategic posture on the optimistic assumption that we will always find a powerful friend when we need one. We can count on New Zealand, but other than that, we need to plan to fight alone.

How to defend Australia: control and denial

Could Australia defend itself independently from direct military attack by a major Asian power like China? That’s the key question I set out to answer in How to defend Australia. My answer was a cautious ‘yes’.

That answer was based on two judgements. The first was that Australia’s key strategic objectives—the things we most needed our armed forces to be able to do in order to defend ourselves—could be achieved with what I called a military strategy of maritime denial. The second was that we could achieve maritime denial with forces which we might, at a stretch, be able to afford.

Two kinds of argument can therefore be mounted against my conclusion. One is that maritime denial is not sufficient to achieve our key objectives. The other is that it’s not as easy, and hence not as affordable, as I had supposed.

Both these arguments have been put forward in the extended discussion of my book which The Strategist has been kind enough to host since it was published in July. The first was set out most persuasively by my old friend and sparring partner James Goldrick, and the second by Richard Dunley.

Dunley focuses on sea denial, which is an essential element of maritime denial, so if his argument about sea denial is right then my strategy of maritime denial is doomed. He subjects my arguments in favour of sea denial to a searching analysis. He is well placed to do this as a naval and diplomatic historian who has researched deeply on these and related issues, and I’m grateful to him for taking the trouble to critique my ideas so thoroughly.

His argument that sea denial is harder than I portray rests on two ideas. The first is that to be effective in defending against a lodgement of enemy forces—as opposed to just disrupting trade, for example—sea-denial operations need to cover the whole theatre all the time, to ensure that the adversary cannot slip through a gap. The second is that achieving sea denial at this level is extremely hard, and in particular that it would require the establishment of sea control.

I think both ideas are wrong. It would require an immense effort to defend all sectors of our air and sea approaches equally and sufficiently to ensure that no adversary forces could ever approach our coast. As Dunley says, even the Royal Navy at the height of its power could not guarantee that German forces would not raid Britain’s coastline—a point Winston Churchill made in a famous wartime speech in June 1940.

But that sets the bar too high. The question is not whether we can be sure of stopping every attack, but whether we have a good chance of stopping the most serious assaults. Small raids are always possible, but they don’t matter so much. The bigger an assault, the easier it is to spot and the more vulnerable it would be to interdiction.

Moreover, the task of detecting an attack as it approaches and concentrating our forces against it is easier than the historical analogies suggest. We have—or should have—much better wide-area surveillance than was available in World War I and our adversary must advance a lot further from its home bases than the width of the North Sea.

More broadly, the question is not whether we can be sure of stopping an adversary, but how sure the adversary can be that we cannot stop them. As I said in How to defend Australia (pp. 91–92), the underlying aim of Australia’s defence posture should be to raise the costs and risks to an adversary of attacks against Australia to the point that they exceed any potential benefits. This doesn’t require us to be certain of stopping them. We only need to make them believe that we have a good chance of doing so.

Dunley’s second argument—that to achieve sea denial is much harder than I suggest—also relies too much on historical analogies. As I argue in How to defend Australia (pp. 101–102), until the end of the 19th century sea denial did require sea control, because only warships could achieve sea denial beyond the range of coastal guns.

But since the development of wide-area surveillance systems and sea mines, aircraft, submarines, torpedoes and guided missiles, it’s become easier and easier to find and attack an adversary’s ships far from shore without using ships of one’s own.

It’s far from clear that surface ships have any cost-effective role to play in multi-domain sea-denial operations. So, achieving the sea control required to allow us to operate ships in the combat zone would not materially contribute to sea denial. In fact, it would detract from it by diverting resources from the core task.

Arguments about future operations are always speculative, especially when the last major maritime conflict ended nearly 75 years ago. But in discussing the future of sea-denial operations we have a major contemporary case study to guide us.

China’s anti-access/area-denial posture works exactly the way I envisage an Australian maritime denial strategy working. And it seems clear that this posture has been very effective in raising the costs and risks to the US of deploying forces by sea against China. It’s not clear to me why this can’t work for us.

James Goldrick makes a different point. He rejects maritime denial as a strategy for Australia because it does not provide a means to defend our trade and especially our fuel imports. It’s an extremely important point.

He’s right that successful interdiction of our trade would be a major strategic disaster for Australia. And he’s right that only a military strategy emphasising sea control would allow us to defend against that disaster.

The question Goldrick leaves unanswered is how such a strategy could be implemented. What forces would be required to give Australia a credible independent capacity to defend even the smallest proportion of our most vital trade? How much would those forces cost?

I think it’s clear, for the reasons I set out in How to defend Australia, that there are no realistic answers to these questions. If the defence of trade is essential to our strategic independence, then strategic independence is beyond us.

To Goldrick and others that doesn’t matter. They don’t believe we need to worry about strategic independence. They are content to assume that we’ll never face a major power alone, because we will always find powerful allies to help us.

I will explore and contest that assumption in my next post.

Engaging the public to counter foreign interference

Australian citizens are frontline actors in today’s national security challenges: as targets of malign interference and coercion, victims of collateral damage, and agents of national resilience.

The establishment of a parliamentary inquiry into social media and foreign interference last week reminds us that global contests for political power are playing out on platforms carried in the pockets of millions of Australians.

Authoritarian governments including China and Russia engage in ‘political warfare’ that views public opinion, democratic institutions and civilian infrastructure as legitimate targets. Indeed, as Ariel Levite and Yoni Shimshoni observed, almost all of the actors challenging the West—both state and non-state—now pursue ‘society-centric strategies’.

As Australia acts to counter these strategies, decisions taken in the name of national security will increasingly affect the lives of ordinary Australians. The government’s effective banning of Huawei and ZTE from the roll-out of the 5G network, for example, imposes short-term costs on consumers and businesses, even as it protects Australia from longer-term risks.

Australia needs a new national security paradigm that recognises the centrality of the social realm and engages citizens as key players.

The obvious reason for this is that citizens deserve and demand consultation and accountability on policies that affect them. While politicians and bureaucrats working on economic and social policy lead listening tours across Australia and pay close attention to public opinion, security experts remain comparatively aloof.

There are other, more instrumental, reasons for increased public engagement. The social realm has been a target since antiquity—economic coercion, violence against civilians and propaganda are well-worn tools of statecraft. However, technology has increased the potency and effectiveness of the tools that states can use to target people and changed the character of conflict in the social realm.

Operations in the social realm are increasingly covert and achieve effects through mistrust and confusion, rather than suffering or deprivation. Previously, populations would know they had suffered a physical attack or had been subjected to a siege or blockade and could identify that a hostile actor was responsible (even if their identity was not immediately known). These activities were chancy in that they could backfire by galvanising the public against the attacker.

The digital environment makes detecting, understanding and attributing responsibility for malign activities—from propaganda to cyberattacks against critical infrastructure—more difficult. By hiding behind a veil of plausible deniability, or engaging in deceptive ‘false flag’ attacks, adversaries maximise the confusion and paralysis caused by their actions. Chinese military strategists, for example, emphasise the way in which a state can impose its will upon another by using cyber-enabled attacks to sow panic and ‘societal disorder’ or induce national paralysis in times of war or peace.

To pierce the veil of plausible deniability that adversaries hide behind, the government needs to prioritise building public trust and educating citizens about the nature of the threats we face. One positive step is the increased public profile of Australia’s spy chiefs. But more can be done.

More frequent, principles-based attribution of responsibility for cyber-enabled activities, such as state-sponsored cyberattacks and data breaches, would help. Building public familiarity with the standards and frameworks used to assess responsibility for such activities can position the government as an honest broker that can be trusted to make correct calls in the future. Agencies could also act to build public awareness of other countries’ political warfare playbooks.

It’s important to note that in the digital age many national security risks are contingent and may never materialise. For example, the decision to exclude certain vendors from 5G infrastructure was not based on a ‘smoking gun’ but on the future risk that access to that network could enable interference and coercion. While Australia has robust processes for crisis communications, agencies will increasingly need to develop ways to inform the public about risks in the absence of an actual incident.

Failing to adapt to an era of society-centric competition and conflict will not just result in poor strategy. It also risks exacerbating domestic political friction, particularly if citizens perceive that national security policy is being made without their buy-in or is not calibrated to the threats we face. This would be the worst kind of own-goal, since the main reason adversaries target the social realm in the first place is to exacerbate infighting and divisions.

This year, there has been much debate about how we can ‘defend Australia’. The bottom line is this: if we do not understand, protect and engage genuinely with the social realm, we cannot defend Australia. Successfully doing so will require an evolution in the way that national security agencies and decision-makers have done business for decades.

What the Battle of Britain can teach us about defending Australia

On 13 August 1940, the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air arm, set out to destroy the Royal Air Force’s ability to defend the airspace over and around Great Britain. That day 79 years ago—code-named Adlertag (‘Eagle day’)—was the beginning of the main phase of the first campaign of strategic consequence fought entirely in the air. When the dust settled at the end of October, the RAF had emerged the victor of the ‘Battle of Britain’, ensuring that German invasion plans would be put on hold indefinitely.

I started thinking about the lessons from 1940 and subsequent air campaigns after reviewing Hugh White’s How to defend Australia here in The Strategist. Hugh essentially sees Australia as being in a similar position to Britain in 1940, relying on the combined efforts of a large strike fighter force and submarines to thwart designs a major power might have on Australian territory. I’ll look at the air component of his vision in this post.

To extract the appropriate lessons from history, we need to understand which factors are enduring and which were specific to the time. And we need to understand what actually happened, rather than a romanticised version. The commonly held view of the campaign today is largely based on the words of Winston Churchill, who characteristically seized the moment in 1940 with a bold rhetorical flourish. His construct regarding the RAF’s Fighter Command—‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’—memorably invokes an image of a small and outnumbered but supremely gallant band of airmen fighting off the Nazi hordes.

But while it’s true that Fighter Command came under enormous stress and suffered terrible losses, that picture is far from complete. In fact, despite loss rates that modern air forces couldn’t sustain for any length of time, the RAF had more fighters and more pilots at the end of the air campaign than when it started. The numbers in the table below are telling—at no stage from Adlertag onward was the RAF outnumbered in either fighter or pilot numbers. In addition, an efficient maintenance and repair capability ensured that RAF fighters were consistently maintained at higher levels of availability—an important force multiplier.

RAF July 1940 RAF October 1940 % change Luftwaffe July 1940 Luftwaffe October 1940 % change
Single-seat fighter pilots 1,200 1,550 +29% 900 650 –28%
Single-seat fighters 900 950 +5% 950 780 –17%
Serviceability rates 90% 88% –2% 78% 78% –

Source: Air Vice-Marshal Peter Dye, ‘How the west was won’, Aeroplane Monthly, July 2010.

We can add a few more statistics to complete the picture. The RAF’s fighters flew more than 20,000 sorties in August, compared with 13,000 by Luftwaffe fighters. The differential was even greater in September, when the battle reached its peak: in the week of 23 September the RAF flew almost 5,000 fighter sorties to the Luftwaffe’s 1,000. And the numbers of aircraft arriving from the factories were startlingly different: Britain produced 4,283 new fighters in 1940, compared with 1,870 from German plants.

Given how much numbers matter in air combat, having more aircraft, more pilots and higher rates of availability placed the RAF in the box seat to prevail—despite losing more than 50% of its aircraft and 20% of its pilots in both August and September. The other factor it had going for it was geography; it was operating closer to home, so aircraft range and endurance were less constraining than for the Luftwaffe. As well, RAF pilots who bailed out were likely to be back with their squadrons in a day or two, while surviving Luftwaffe pilots ended up in POW camps.

That brings us to Hugh White’s ‘Battle of Australia’ scenario in which 200 frontline aircraft form a bulwark against a hostile power. The lessons from 1940 mostly apply, with the exception of the rapid production of replacement aircraft, given that the lag time for a new strike fighter is well over a year.

Numbers still matter, and in a defensive posture geography would be on our side. Taking steps to ensure we could generate the number of sorties required would maximise the chances of success. Here are the enablers that need to be in place to make best use of an expanded fast-jet force (some of which Hugh includes in his book):

  • an adequate number of hardened forward bases to reduce transit time to operating areas
  • reliable supplies of fuel and other consumables to those bases
  • more trained pilots than aircraft (I doubt we could do that now with half the aircraft numbers)
  • efficient and effective forward maintenance facilities to reduce turnaround times between sorties
  • efficient second-line maintenance and repair to return aircraft to service
  • tanker aircraft to keep aircraft airborne for longer
  • an efficient rescue capability for ejected pilots (from both sides).

If we could do that, it would make the projection of air power against Australia a formidable task and would go a long way to ensuring the nation’s security against overt armed attack. (Though, as Peter Hunter points out in his recent ASPI report, that should be only part of a national strategy.)

‘Never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to a combination of an efficient training pipeline, good field logistics and effective just-in-time mobilisation of the industrial sector’ doesn’t have the same stirring ring as Churchill’s famous line—but it would have been more accurate.

Requiring ‘balance’ in the ADF’s force structure is lazy thinking

The old defence dictum that talking dollars is a necessary condition for talking policy is applied in spades in Hugh White’s most recent book. After a discussion in the early chapters of our strategic challenges and the dangers we might have to confront, Hugh turns his mind to the investment in defence capability required to deal with them.

The section starts with a splendid introductory chapter on how decision-makers should think about defence capability—and notes that they all too often don’t. It ought to be required reading for defence planners (my ANU students will certainly be reading it). Most of my favourite rant topics are in there, including the significant extra cost of the last few percentage points of capability, the benefit of additional numbers (‘quantity has a quality all its own’) and the way in which cultural preferences within the three services skews the force structure away from purely strategic considerations. It would have been nice to see the sunk cost fallacy get a run too, especially given how strongly it influences defence decision-making, but you can’t have everything.

Hugh reserves particular criticism for the iconic ‘balanced force’ notion, and he’s right to do so. Requiring balance in force structuring is lazy thinking. After all, there’s no law of nature that says a balanced force will better meet strategic challenges than one in which certain capabilities are emphasised. It makes far more sense to think hard about the capabilities that will best enable our forces to prosecute the most vital missions. As Hugh notes, ‘In war there are no prizes for second place’.

Nonetheless, ‘balanced force’ has a certain rhetorical appeal that makes for a useful argument at defence committee tables and lets each of the services take its share of resources. The enduring attraction of the argument means that the ADF of today (or even 20 years from now) would be readily recognisable to defence planners from the Menzies government. That’s despite sweeping technological and strategic changes to the world the ADF operates in.

A great thinker like John Stuart Mill wouldn’t have fallen for balance as an end in itself. As he wrote in a different context:

I have heard a great deal, Sir, about the balance of the Constitution. What this means, I confess myself to be in ignorance. One would think it must be something unspeakably excellent, judging from the encomiums which are heaped upon it. It is in truth a mere metaphor. There seems to be something singularly captivating in the word balance: as if, because any thing is called a balance, it must, for that reason, be necessarily good.

So balance has to go. In that, the force structure ideas in this book aren’t entirely new. Rather, they’re refinements of ideas Hugh put forward in his 2009 Lowy Institute paper A focused force. (My modest contribution was the suggested use of the positively connoted word ‘focus’ to rhetorically counter ‘balance’.)  As he should, he starts with the vital military roles identified earlier and then tailors a force to deliver the desired outcomes. The major role of the ADF in this vision is to defend Australia itself—a territory-based approach that has little time for expeditionary adventurism or the long-distance deployment of ADF platforms.

The navy would get the biggest overhaul, with a submarine force greatly increased in numbers and augmented by other sea-denial weapons such as mines and land-based anti-shipping missiles. Investment in those would be at the expense of large and expensive surface combatants. I think the basic notion is right. I argued at the recent ASPI ‘War in 2025’ conference that large and slow multibillion-dollar platforms constrained to a two-dimensional surface have little future in the 21st century. In fact I think we passed that point decades ago, but, in the absence of a large-scale maritime conflict between near-peers since 1945, nobody noticed.

My one criticism of the sea-denial-focused navy being proposed is that it’s too submarine heavy at 24 to 32 boats. While Hugh and I agree that $3 billion surface vessels are a non-starter, I still see an important role for a large number of smaller vessels (including unmanned ones), especially in the anti-submarine warfare role. ‘Corvettes for everyone’ was my shorthand response when asked about my prescription for maritime forces at ASPI’s conference—shorthand for a few eggs in each of many baskets. Dispersed and numerous forces are much harder to defeat than a force that can only afford to lose one or two major units before losing a lot of its combat mass.

Another headline force-structure story in How to defend Australia is a reworking of the army to make it fit for defeating a large-scale lodgement of adversary forces on our territory. That’s a significant change of focus from the amphibious expeditionary approach that has occupied a lot of recent thinking. (I’m okay with scaling back on amphibiosity.) Perhaps realising that having an army that’s large, mobile and hardened enough to fight back a determined adversary presents a real challenge, the book’s prescription is for long-range missile forces to bombard any landing area.

I might be doing Hugh a disservice here, but I think the land forces chapter is included more out of a sense of completeness than a heart-felt conviction about the likelihood of prevailing in land battles on our shores. Rather than ‘fight them on the beaches’, I get a sense that the underlying vision is more ‘Battle of Britain’, in which a would-be invader is defeated at sea and by never being able to establish air superiority. The chapter on the air force reinforces that feeling by arguing for 200 fighter aircraft backed by substantial support forces and surface-to-air missile systems. I don’t have a lot to argue about there—air forces almost by construction fit the ‘numerous and dispersed’ model I think necessary in modern warfare.

I don’t know how confident Hugh is that anyone will be prepared to take a hard look at the roughly $250 billion of investment that will go into the defence forces in the next 20 years and make those hard decisions. I wouldn’t bet on it—there would be too many losers for it to be palatable to conservative service chiefs and to our political class with their narrow three-year (at best) horizon. The current lack of urgency to deliver major maritime platforms betrays a lack of strategic acumen.

While I don’t agree with all of Hugh’s prescriptions, I can’t argue with the idea that we need to be doing much more thinking rather than sleepwalking towards a dangerous future.

‘Sociable’ nuclear proliferation

In recent weeks a lively debate has swirled around Hugh White’s canvassing of a possible indigenous nuclear-weapon program in Australia’s future—or, more accurately, in that version of Australia’s future where the US presence in Asia and extended nuclear deterrence have collapsed and Australia, ‘home alone’, is attempting to defend itself against a hostile, powerful China. In this post, I want to transplant that scenario to the broader regional framework and unpack some preliminary thoughts about what Australian strategy—as opposed to Australian defence—might look like.

As I’ve observed in a previous post, the failure of US extended nuclear deterrence would result in a profound imbalance of residual nuclear capabilities in Asia. The remaining nuclear powers would be—in order of arsenal size—Russia, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea. (Russia’s arsenal is currently measured in the thousands, China’s in the hundreds, Pakistan’s at about 140 warheads, India’s at perhaps 120 warheads, and North Korea’s at roughly 40–70 warheads.) Only one of the five is a democracy and it has the second smallest nuclear arsenal and a strategic doctrine that still bears the marked imprint of non-alignment. Even without a single warhead being fired in anger, the gravitational effects of that imbalance would be felt—intolerably—across the region.

Now, that’s the scenario which underpins the current debate over whether Australia might reconsider its nuclear options. But, so far, much of our debate has centred too narrowly on our immediate defence needs and on whether we even have the capabilities to build nuclear weapons anyway. There’s a much bigger question that arises, and it’s one that concerns a range of regional countries and not merely Australia. Isn’t this a situation where a—measured—cascade of proliferation would enhance regional stability rather than undermine it?

If we judged that rectifying the regional nuclear imbalance was important to us, we’d see our policy options in a different light. Australian proliferation would probably be part of the rectification, but a small and slow part. By ourselves, it would take decades to build a credible arsenal. And geography still wouldn’t be our friend—the brutal truth, which in many ways is a virtue for Australian security too, is that Australia stands too far back from the critical force balances along the Eurasian rimlands to be seen as a central player. In short, regional stability would continue to turn primarily upon balances other than the China–Australia one.

So, might we see nuclear-weapon programs unfold elsewhere across the region? Yes. And we shouldn’t expect them to look like the proliferation efforts of the past, which were typically national-centric efforts. The nuclear-weapon states the world has now are—broadly—great powers and rogues. Great powers needed little help to proliferate; rogues attracted little help to proliferate. But we shouldn’t automatically expect status quo middle powers, driven by a sudden imperative to proliferate, to behave the same way. ‘Sociable’ proliferation, where partners work together to obtain nuclear capabilities, is much more likely—particularly if those middle powers share a set of strategic interests that they see as stabilising and regionally beneficial. Thus we might see both a new, cooperative model of proliferation and a different region emerge at the same time.

Of course, sociable proliferation would still mean the end of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A range of status quo states would have to leave the treaty, and they’d probably be leaving not one by one but two by two. Their doing so would, in all probability, collapse the tent. After all, Asia’s not the only region where a sudden cascade of proliferation might make sense. Nuclear-weapon programs would likely spring up elsewhere—in both the Middle East and Europe, for example—whether Asia acted or not. Some would succeed, some would fail; not all countries are well placed to proliferate sociably.

But let’s wrench the argument back closer to home. Would there be a case for Australia to do more to support rectification of the nuclear imbalance in Asia and, if so, what should we be doing? (Just as a forewarning, readers should remember that the following recommendations are scenario-dependent—they are not designed for the world we live in now, or even for the world most likely to come into being.)

Since the fundamentals of Australian security are set at the Eurasian rimlands, yes, Australia should be doing more to correct the nuclear imbalance the scenario depicts. We might do so, timidly, by signalling our understanding of other countries’ proliferation efforts in cases which we saw as regionally stabilising. Signalling is cheap but not especially sociable. More practically, we might consider a range of supportive or cooperative linkages to other countries’ efforts. At the other end of the spectrum from supportive signalling are actual joint proliferation programs where countries share both the burdens and the rewards of proliferation.

Northeast Asian countries are generally further down the track in terms of nuclear latency than their Southeast Asian counterparts. So we would be talking a lot more to Japan and South Korea about shared interests and prospects for cooperation. Within Southeast Asia, we would probably be canvassing with Indonesia and Vietnam the opportunities to enhance bilateral or even trilateral cooperation. And we would likely be talking to New Delhi about how Australia could help India strengthen its position on the regional nuclear ladder.

Thinking about Hugh White’s scenario in its strategic dimensions highlights just what a different world that might yet turn out to be. Big questions would confront Australia—and none of them would have simple, rules-based answers. But the big questions would likely reinforce our core strategic principle: that partnerships have been the basis of real Australian leverage in the world and we should work with others, not alone, even in the hard area of proliferation.

Australia, nuclear weapons and America’s umbrella business

Hugh White’s new book, How to defend Australia, has stirred up a hornet’s nest on the topic of potential nuclear proliferation. In one sense, that’s a surprise, since anyone who’s read the relevant chapter knows that it’s book-ended by carefully crafted paragraphs which state explicitly that White ‘neither predicts nor advocates’ Australia’s development of an indigenous nuclear arsenal.

But in between those paragraphs White explores the history of Australian interest in a national nuclear weapons program, underlines the dwindling credibility of US nuclear assurances to allies, canvasses a possible nuclear doctrine for Australia, and recommends a force structure—more submarines—suitable to what he sees as our new straitened strategic circumstances. If he’s not advocating a nuclear arsenal, why is he telling us so much about what it ought to look like?

Let’s start with the possibility of Australian nuclear proliferation up front. As I wrote recently for a chapter in After American primacy, there are five barriers to Australian proliferation: ideational, political, diplomatic, technological and strategic. Briefly, crossing the nuclear Rubicon would require:

  • Australians to think differently about nuclear weapons—as direct contributors to our defence rather than as abstract contributors to global stability
  • a bipartisan political consensus to support proliferation, during both development and deployment of a nuclear arsenal
  • a shift in Australia’s diplomatic footprint, to build a case for our leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and abrogating the Treaty of Rarotonga, while still being able to retail a coherent story of arms control and nuclear order
  • serious investment in the technologies and skill-sets required to construct and deploy, safely and securely, both nuclear warheads and appropriate delivery vehicles
  • and a strategy which gives meaning to our arsenal and an explanation of our thinking to our neighbours and our major ally.

White’s chapter draws together a set of thoughts that relate primarily to the fourth and fifth barriers. His focus is on defending an Australia that’s ‘all on its own’ against a nuclear-armed—and conventionally well-equipped—great power. If he didn’t at least consider the option of an ‘Aussie bomb’, his work would be incomplete.

Still, White sees the primary threat as one of nuclear coercion—nuclear blackmail, he calls it—rather than actual nuclear attack. In response, he argues in favour of a ‘minimum deterrence’ nuclear posture for Australia, citing the British and French programs approvingly. Minimum deterrence, says White:

[D]oes not envisage that nuclear weapons would ever be used [in actually fighting wars], or indeed used at all: their sole purpose is to deter nuclear attack by others. It is one of the bewildering paradoxes of nuclear strategy that if an attack occurs then the strategy has already failed, and there is not much point in using the weapons to retaliate. But their effectiveness as a deterrent depends on their being evidently capable of use, and on those responsible for ordering their use being evidently willing and ready to do so.

But ‘minimum deterrence’ is a slippery term—Chinese, Indian and Pakistani declaratory policies have all, at one time or another, applied it to their own programs. The term, by the way, typically means something different from what readers might think; it means the minimal nuclear capability necessary to underpin effective deterrence, not—as a literalist might imagine—the nuclear capability necessary to underpin a minimal level of deterrence. In the French case, for example, Cold War nuclear doctrine called for an arsenal that could ‘rip the arm off’ a superpower, leaving it an amputee among its more able-bodied peers. For contemporary British doctrine, see here.

Australia, were it to develop nuclear weapons, would need a nuclear arsenal and nuclear posture aligned with its strategy. So, what is it we might want nuclear weapons to do? If we want them to constitute an effective deterrent against an authoritarian great power, neither arsenal nor posture could be threadbare. And we surely couldn’t espouse a doctrinal position that minimum deterrence would fail with an adversary’s first use and that there would be no point in retaliation.

What, after all, might drive a decision by Australia to proliferate? White argues that it would be Australia finding itself—like Kevin McCallister in the movie—‘home alone’. If so, what’s happened to our current strategy of working with allies and partners to promote and defend the regional order we most want? A nuclear-armed Fortress Australia isn’t especially appealing. I think there’s a different scenario in which Australia might choose to build a relatively modest, but capable, nuclear arsenal, and that’s where we would be trying to underline both a condition of prickly regional multipolarity and our capacity to play a role as a regional security contributor.

Australia’s security is fundamentally shaped by the global and regional orders. At the moment, US extended nuclear deterrence is a key ingredient of those orders. The US nuclear umbrella protects almost 40 allies worldwide. What happens if America goes out of the umbrella business? Well, we know what our region would look like: the remaining nuclear powers would be Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

As I said in an earlier post, the maldistribution of residual nuclear weapons would reinforce the power shifts already under way within the region. Moreover, a fast-rising power, like China, could choose to ‘sprint to parity’ with the US and Russia under such conditions—it’s certainly not constrained by formal arms control agreements.

That would be a world where Japan, South Korea and Australia had shared incentives to proliferate, and perhaps Indonesia and Vietnam too; where we probably wouldn’t be the first horse out of the gate; and where we might reasonably hope to ‘share’ the challenges of proliferation with others.

Let me say that such a future world is less attractive than the one we live in now. Asia typically hasn’t put a high priority on nuclear weapons, which tend to sit in the strategic background rather than the foreground. A sudden cascade of nuclear proliferation would make for a more fraught and difficult region—which is one good reason we ought to be working harder to keep the US engaged in Asia and its umbrella business healthy.

China can’t discount America’s resolve in Asia

Hugh White’s How to defend Australia shows a master storyteller at work. It’s part of a debate Australians must have.

While the book starts that debate, its core judgements shift from possibilities to certainties, and its assumptions shift and expand without explanation. This undercuts its conclusions—including its proposals for Australia’s defence strategy and forces.

In the Indo-Pacific, along with China, India’s power will grow, as will Indonesia’s. Japan will remain a major power, with a growing willingness to use that power for regional security.

White assesses China only wants to resume ‘its rightful place as East Asia’s leading power’, and that ‘China for all its potential strength, will not become predominant beyond East Asia and the Western Pacific, because it will be resisted by India, Russia and Europe as well as America’.

So, the argument continues, America won’t ‘accept the costs and risks of trying to prevent China from dominating East Asia’ because ‘America’s own security does not depend on this’. And America does not have the resolve to fight a war with China that might involve nuclear weapons, while China’s leaders do.

If this is right and the authoritarian Chinese state’s ambition is restricted to wanting to dominate East Asia, then Australia and the other countries in greater Asia—and the Indo-Pacific—have nothing to fear from the enormous strategic shifts we’re living through.

I’d like to believe that ‘we might expect, and certainly hope, that China’s leaders, who are keen students of history, recognise that they would be better off exercising primacy with a light touch, as America has done so successfully’.

Unfortunately, the evidence we have of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s use of power makes this unlikely. A majority of Southeast Asian policymakers, business people and academics think China wants to be the dominant power in Asia, and only 9% of them think that China would be a ‘benign hegemon’. The people of Hong Kong and Taiwan also don’t believe in Beijing’s light hegemonic touch.

The book stretches assessment of relative Chinese and American power and resolve much further than East Asia, though, saying America will cease playing a significant strategic role in Asia at all, with ‘US leadership gradually fading away and China’s influence expanding to take its place’.

The scenario this paints for Australia is stark: ‘we really will be on our own’. It leads to a proposal for a new type of defence force requiring funding worth 3.5–4% of GDP.

All this relies on the idea that if the US can’t dominate Asia by itself, it will leave Asia. America is Lego Batman: ‘I work alone’. If that doesn’t work, it’s back to the Batcave to sulk.

This is caveated by acknowledging that America ‘will retain important interests in Asia that it will seek to uphold’, but in a classic case of damning with faint praise, goes on to say that ‘America will never disengage entirely from Asia’. Which has the effect of leaving exactly that idea of entire disengagement in the reader’s mind.

That’s a bad fit for the world we live in—even one in which Donald Trump, perhaps the most instinctively isolationist US president for decades, occupies the White House. His signature foreign policy initiative has been his engagement of China’s leadership because core American national interests are bound up in Asia—and in China in particular. He’s also spent lots of political capital on North Korea, again because America’s interests are engaged fundamentally there.

If Trump judges American interests are deeply engaged in Asia, it’s a reasonable assumption future US presidents will too. As Arthur Culvahouse, America’s ambassador to Australia, has noted: ‘This region is fundamental to the United States….and we are committed to the region as much as we have ever been’.

This is not sentiment. It’s because economic interests drag in strategic interests. As Culvahouse says, America is the leading investor in and deep economic partner of Australia and many Asian states, while China is its major trading partner. And, as we have seen with North Korea, countries which can reach America with nuclear weapons—as China can—get American leaders’ attention.

A core judgement here that Australian policymakers have to continue to get right is about American resolve to use its power to protect its interests in Asia.

The good news is that America’s national interests remain deeply woven in with Asia’s security and prosperity. The darker news is that this means American resolve to protect those interests will remain strong—up to and including using its nuclear arsenal in a war with China.

White assumes leaders in Beijing will use nuclear weapons on American cities. But no leader in Beijing can afford to discount the prospect that in a major war, America would destroy Beijing, Shanghai and other iconic Chinese mega cities. America is the only state that’s ever used nuclear weapons in war—and it did so in East Asia.

On top of this, White says, ‘America shall remain a very powerful country, with the world’s second- or third- biggest economy, a huge population, immense resources of talent and energy and formidable instruments of influence, including its armed forces’. In fact, America is an outlier in the developed world by having a growing and relatively young population, which is a source of continuing economic and national power.

China’s best demographic days are behind it. Its population will decline by some 60 million by 2050, and its working-age population will shrink by about a third. And its need to devote huge resources to maintain internal control is clear both on the streets of Hong Kong and in its spending on internal security, which is higher than its massive military spending.

So, Australia is unlikely to be living in an Asia without America. And Asia is very likely to have powers who share interests with Australia—including constraining an assertive, authoritarian China.

That’s fortunate, because a ‘fortress Australia’ strategy that seeks to sink Chinese ships and shoot down aircraft attacking Australia has enormous conceptual gaps. It requires assuming China would only use a tenth of its military might against Australia. White argues that ‘happily, long-range ballistic missiles are expensive and hardly make sense to deliver conventional warheads’, even though ‘defence against intercontinental range missiles is not practicable’.

Chinese leaders won’t send a just-the-right-size conventional force for the 200 fighters and 24 submarines White says Australia should have to sink, but not use missiles to destroy our ability to do so because of the cost. They’d also attack critical vulnerabilities like our unprotected international supply lines—without which we have only 25 days’ fuel. Thinking otherwise would be a happy, but fanciful expectation.

How to defend Australia portrays powers like India, Indonesia and Japan as both potential adversaries and potential partners of Australia. It’s simply bad strategy to tell such partners that one reason we’re building a large, capable defence force is in case we have to fight them, while also seeking to work with them in regional coalitions in the face of aggressive Chinese power.

Good strategic policy from Australian’s current and future leaders must revolve around thinking of these three nations as strategic partners. And that means acting accordingly, including before any war, as Australia’s military chief, Angus Campbell, recently observed.

Good policy in a multipolar Asia also means having more independent capability of our own, using the best technology we can get our hands on—notably American.

As my colleague Rod Lyon has observed, Australia has never gone to war alone. If we ever did have to fight a major power—including China—we would do it as we have in previous wars: with partners. A key one being the United States of America.

Hugh White’s plan for defending Australia simply isn’t viable

How to defend Australia sets out four strategic objectives for Australian forces: defending the continent, securing the neighbourhood, supporting maritime Southeast Asia and preserving the wider Asian balance.

To achieve this, Hugh White proposes a maritime denial strategy to stop adversaries—including a great power like China—from being able to send military forces to attack Australia. The strategic objectives are all eerily familiar to Australian policymakers over the last 40 years—because they’re based on our geography.

Australia, along with Southeast Asian and ‘wider Asian’ powers, now needs to factor America out of security calculations, according to White. And we have to pursue these key strategic objectives, some of which involve ‘substantial’ or ‘significant’ military contributions to regional coalitions, while allied to no one. Both are deeply flawed judgements.

Worse than this, White says Australia must be able to ‘deter or repel a direct military attack against us by a major Asian power such as China, India, or perhaps Japan or Indonesia’. So, we need to simultaneously arm against India, Japan and Indonesia while seeking to work with them.

Cobbling together ‘regional coalitions’ with partners of convenience who know you also consider them potential military threats is a poor basis for achieving security. Add to this the book’s assessment that China has the ‘necessary levers’ to prevent regional powers from acting collectively, and this seems a bizarre prescription for Australian leaders.

The force structure that follows this assessment would see the air warfare destroyers retired, frigates cancelled, the two big landing ships sold off, and the purchase of lots more advanced fighters to bring the strike jet fleet to 200. White is open-minded about whether the fighters should all be F-35s or a mix including more F/A-18 Super Hornets. What’s left of the Royal Australian Navy would get more light frigates similar to the Anzac class for stabilisation missions in the South Pacific.

The showcase item would be 24 new submarines more like an evolved Collins class than the Attack class now being designed by France’s Naval Group. The Attack class would be scrapped as too expensive, too late and with too much focus on operating further afield than the archipelago to Australia’s north. The submarines would have no anti-submarine role, but would attack an adversary’s ships beyond the range of land-based aircraft.

The Australian Army would eschew heavy combat capabilities and become a light force for stabilisation operations in Papua New Guinea and the broader South Pacific. It would have no role in meeting the four outlined strategic objectives or being involved in wider conflicts in Asia. White argues that missile-equipped submarines and aircraft can make warships or troop transports indefensible.

The idea that land forces could stop adversaries seizing bases and territories closer to Australia is missing from How to defend Australia. It should not be, particularly if our neighbours want more commitment from Australia than just using their territory as the place from which we defend against attacks on the mainland. Strategy is about more than fighting, it’s about shaping the environment so that war is prevented and if it has to be fought, it’s fought from the strongest position, with the strongest team on your side.

The approach also neglects the threat environment that ‘light expeditionary forces’ may face in undertaking stabilisation operations.

White makes strong points in his criticism of the small numbers of complex, expensive weapons that Australia is acquiring. It’s true that surface warships now need to use a lot of their systems for self-defence against missile and submarine attack, and so have less offensive firepower than would seem to give a good return on investment. And he’s right that value for money of spending $50 billion for the developmental and still-a-long-way-off Attack-class submarines, equipped with small numbers of torpedoes, is questionable.

But his prescriptions don’t seem radically different on these value-for-money issues. He’s doubtful of the power of emerging capabilities like autonomous systems and, besides, they’ll be expensive. I think he undervalues the power of some of these new capabilities, and discounts the ability to acquire them much more cheaply than manned alternatives. The future Royal Australian Air Force would be broadly more of the same, supplemented by even more information and intelligence systems, and advanced missiles.

Where the forces would differ to now is in giving up on anything other than sinking ships and shooting down aircraft on their way to Australia, supplemented, perhaps, by attacking bases that support such an endeavour—unless that will make the bases’ owner very unhappy.

That leaves a big vulnerability in the plan. Maritime denial is all about preventing forces from attacking us. None of White’s proposed force structure seems well-placed to protect shipping and aircraft bringing what our economy would need to sustain a conflict lasting more than a couple of weeks.

Fuel’s an obvious example. If we can’t protect shipping against submarine, surface ship, aircraft and missile attack, we’ll run out of fuel in around 25 days. Australia needs to be able to defend its long international supply chains.

White argues the best path is to attack the adversary’s trade, and to stockpile loads of stuff. He pretends that this will be enough in the case of every adversary, as all have trade dependencies. But China could sustain a conflict longer than we could despite Australia’s best efforts to attack its supply lines.

I think he knows his ‘solution’ here is no answer, as he volunteers that Australia ‘could not maintain its sea lines of communication with allies and suppliers’ and this ‘is a reality we have to live with’. It’s a reality to live with and lose by if we adopt these plans. I’m also not sure who these allies are in White’s world.

White’s contention that his force structure proposals could be paid for by a defence budget amounting 3.5% or 4% of GDP is nonsensical. That’s partly because the cost of sustaining capabilities in the much deeper local way he proposes would require a radical re-engineering of the economy and workforce. And because of the considerably higher costs of sustaining and operating the myriad systems on his menu without the access to US data, logistics, capabilities and intelligence we now have. Our access through the alliance is uniquely deep and adds considerably to our defence capabilities.

As an example, the F-35 and other high-technology US systems like the EA-18 Growler aircraft are software dependent, with Australian ability to sustain them reliant on updates from the US. Removing this dependency is probably not feasible from a technical or capability perspective. His calculations are wobbly on whole-of-life costs for major platforms, but this is a minor detail given the flawed conceptual architecture.

My view is that the front-end strategic assessment that leads White to his conclusions is wrong (to be set out in a separate article). Australia needn’t live in an Asia without American power and we shouldn’t plan for powers like India, Indonesia and Japan to be both adversaries and partners. If we had to do so, we’d need a different plan to the one White proposes in How to defend Australia.

How to defend Australia: can the circle be squared?

Hugh White’s book How to defend Australia tries to square the circle that has become the global community’s critical security problem: reconciling China’s growing strategic power with the dramatic loss of US strategic authority. China is searching for the authority that it expects as a consequence of its power, but has so far been unsuccessful. The US built its authority through its sponsorship of the post–World War II international rules-based order, an authority it is now abandoning with astonishing recklessness.

This is a critical problem for Australia, as it is for the entire Pacific community. The inherently disruptive policies of China and the US are divergent, and the consequent impossibility of taking secure policy bearings from either of the dominant powers leaves Australia with unprecedented strategic policy and capability planning issues.

As ever, White’s approach is elegant—detached, didactic and relentless in taking the reader to surprising and confronting destinations. The scope of this volume is relatively narrow: how to defend Australia against armed attack by an aggressor state in contemporary and emergent circumstances. It focuses on the kinetics of warfare—the forces necessary to wage war—not the intrinsic politics of war. Passing comments aside, White is less interested in explaining why Australia finds itself in the unsatisfactory defence position he identifies than he is in offering his solution to its consequences.

White has provided a useful summary of his proposals, and Brendan Nicholson has detailed the platform numbers and costs. So there’s no need to rehash them here. White’s foray into nuclear weapons acquisition, however, is curious. He evinces a disarming neutrality on the strategic and moral complexities of this proposal that sits oddly with the robust clarity of his other prescriptions.

At first blush, White’s proposals look achievable, if daunting. But, just as it is impossible to square a circle, so too the issues that give rise to potentially existential strategic problems cannot be resolved simply in terms of kinetics and cash. The relentless focus on the force dimension, without consideration of the intersecting political, economic, cultural and social dimensions, undersells both the complexity of the problem and the pertinence of the solutions.

While not its primary purpose, How to defend Australia implicitly challenges 50 years of strategic policy, defence capability planning and systems acquisition. But the challenge begs the answer to the old gag about how to get to Dublin—you don’t start from here.

The trouble is, if you don’t know why you are where you are and how you’ve got there, it’s difficult to avoid repeating your navigation errors. White offers a concise commentary on Australia’s strategic posture, for instance. But he does not examine the policy effects of Australia’s seemingly entrenched strategic culture.

Australia’s strategic culture is as much an artefact of its history and its politics as of its geography. It displays an ingrained sense of ‘the other’; as fundamental to our inability to reconcile with Indigenous Australia as it is to our preoccupation with the yellow peril and the red menace. Our sense of discomfort in an alien land is exacerbated by the tyranny of distance and its consequent sense of isolation, and reveals itself in Allan Gyngell’s apposite phrase ‘the fear of abandonment’.

An analysis of Australia’s strategic culture, as distinct from posture, might have offered alternative or expanded answers to ‘how to defend Australia’.

White also refrains from evaluating risk- and burden-sharing relationships that could mitigate the military threat that China might pose. There is something of an irony in White’s advocacy of the Palmerstonian concentric circles of strategic interest as a basis for identifying Australia’s permanent strategic interests when Lord Palmerston was himself very much more preoccupied with the statecraft needed to extend Britain’s imperial power than with force expansion.

Our contemporary fascination with the supposed inevitability of conflict between China and the US has perhaps distracted us from Thucydides’ equally important observation that identity of interests is the strongest of bonds whether between states or individuals.

Focused as it is on the physicality of war, How to defend Australia preserves the dichotomy between foreign and defence policy, and dismisses the possibility of more structured diplomatic and defence arrangements with Indonesia or Japan, for instance, as inviting the risk of entrapment or abandonment. Rather, White encourages us to bite the bullet on the question of whether Australia is a ‘middle power’ or a small one. To be a middle power, we simply need to spend more.

But where does the money come from? And it is here that I would have welcomed a frontal assault on a key strategic issue for Australia: population as a driver of economic strength. To reach defence spending of 4% of GDP, we must either substantially cut social policy programs or grow the economic cake. We might have the 13th biggest economy in the world—pro tem—but we have the 56th biggest population. And while that imbalance remains, defending Australia as a middle power will remain problematic and possibly unachievable.

Population impacts as much on manpower as it does on funding. Crewing a six-fold expansion of the submarine force when the RAN cannot crew its fleet of six boats, put enough submariners through the Perisher course to maintain capability, or find the sailors to liberate HMAS Perth from dry dock, highlights the problem.

For me, How to defend Australia is a capstone crowning half a century of Australian strategic policymaking, an epitaph for decades of lost opportunity, pulled punches and ministerial hobbyism. It’s less a new dawn for defence policy than the curtain’s descent on several generations of defence force planning.

It is an important book that begs a sequel.

How to defend Australia is published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.