Des Ball was one of Australia’s greatest strategic thinkers and analysts; an unassuming patriot. His thoughts and analysis pervaded Australian political debate and consideration of our national security interests for decades. His output and his scholarship were prodigious. While Australia has produced a number of outstanding strategic thinkers, none have written more influentially than Des Ball and certainly not in sheer volume.

When I was defence minister I feared we would lose Des to North America or the United Kingdom. At that point I saw his thinking as essential to our national deliberations on Australian security policy. His departure would have diminished our capacity to round out some important directions in planning for the defence of Australia. Accordingly, I wrote to the ANU asking the university to appoint him as ‘special professor’. To do so, I argued, ‘would do the nation a substantial service’.

Others have done justice to the breadth of his work and interests in the obituaries and commentaries here and elsewhere over the last week. I want to focus on one major aspect of his contribution. His writing on the key elements of Australia’s relationship with the US and our national strategy, military strategy and force structure came to public attention precisely when his work was most needed. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and in the wake of the so-called Nixon doctrine and the British withdrawal east of Suez, Australian consideration of our national security needs was in a state of flux. Debate evolved around two core questions: What should we contribute to the US alliance? And what should our national defence posture be? Des’s research—deep, authoritative, detailed, and publicly available—was critical to the way our debate evolved.

Des was particularly important to discussion within the ALP as it positioned for its longest period in government. As I have written elsewhere, he was essentially a ‘man of the left, not only intellectually but in lifestyle and demeanour’. He was particularly influential with sections of the party who were critical of alliance relationships and uncertain about the priority accorded to defence spending. His political leaning made him, more than most others, a voice to be considered—not by just ALP members but broader groups in the community critical of past directions.

But he also transcended the left. His integrity compelled him to seek a deep understanding of the global distribution of power. He was not interested in finding fault with allies and conservatives per se. He wanted to know how the systems worked. How and on what basis decision-makers in the system made their calculations. His was what is these days described as a granular approach. His understanding of political calculations was consolidated in his understanding of the capabilities deployed. It was not sufficient to find fault. It was essential to understand. The sheer detail of his work, both on the infrastructure of the Australian contribution to the global central balance and the latter’s broader structure, meant he enjoyed trust across the political spectrum. That flowed through to the work he was doing alongside others in fleshing out the detail of Australia’s defence planning, strategy and policy under the rubric of the ideal of ‘self-reliance’.

A standout book published in 1980 was A suitable piece of real estate. This went to the heart of what he described rightly as the ‘strategic essence’ of the Australia–America relationship. With its publication, those of us in political life were compelled to incorporate the joint facilities and their role in the balance of terror within our own calculation of the Australian national interests. That included the possibility of Australian involvement in a nuclear exchange.

Having set the hares running, he went before a parliamentary committee arguing that though the joint facilities would be targeted, we could live with them. Their role in deterring war and enhancing transparency in the system essential for arms control agreements and strategic stability amply justified their continuation. However, Australia needed the capacity for full knowledge and concurrence with the capabilities and operations of the stations. This was essential for democratic decision-making. It was a basic requirement of Australian sovereignty. Ironically, by pursuing formulas that Des essentially developed, we now effectively incorporate the facilities directly in Australia’s intelligence order of battle and the functioning of our forces. What was required knowledge for our political system’s integrity is now integral to our defence.

This doesn’t do justice to a life’s work that canvassed justice for minorities in our region, the development of regional institutions for strategic confidence-building and transparency, the broad issues of the global distribution of power, and our own direct defence issues. His reputation, however, could stand on the alliance issues alone. It seems to me his work doesn’t have to be enumerated so much as weighed. Certainly if his retained research documents are thrown in, we are talking in terms of tonnes!

Des Ball was one of the most unselfish academics I have known. As I was transitioning from academic life to politics he rang me up to contribute a chapter for a book on civil defence. ‘Didn’t have the time to do it justice’, I said in those pre-internet days. ‘No worries’, said Des as he dumped on me a stack of his own research. I’m aware I’m not alone in this. He had a talent for friendship and his friends were a broad set. He was largely bereft of bitterness and fault-finding and pleased to be in an environment where rational discussion was possible. You had to be out in the field when you researched. When you get to the field, you aren’t sure what you’ll find. In our region, Des found people who engaged his heart. He found them at home too with his seminal writing on the contribution of indigenous Australians to our national defence.

We will not see his like again.

Des Ball was an extraordinary Oz strategist in range and depth.

Des, who died last week, was a virtuoso on global strategy, Asia–Pacific security and Australian defence policy. He worked at the highest level on the perils of nuclear war yet also devoted years to helping Karen forces along the Thai–Burma border. To the Karen, he was ‘a big brain’ from Australia.

The big brain ranged across much territory: Australia’s need to defend itself in the post-Vietnam era; signals intelligence and the role of US bases on Oz soil; he was a leader in Asia’s second track attempts at transparency and strategic dialogue. Ball was a Cold War scholar who gloried in the opportunities flowing from the collapse of that superpower stalemate.

An academic who never held a security clearance, Ball could find and reveal secrets (the spooks worried about him for decades). This searcher for truth—a ferociously independent academic—was ever exact with his forest of footnotes. Nicholas Farrelly’s fine interview with Des Ball got his range into its headline: ‘a career with global impact’. Most of the quotes in this piece are from a book of essays honouring Des, perfectly titled ‘Insurgent Intellectual’.

The bearded, bushy Ball was an Australian original, able to construct a roll-your-own cigarette with bushie aplomb—often using weed more exotic than tobacco.

Arriving at the Australian National University in 1965, he led protests against conscription for the Vietnam War, shifting from economics to strategy with a doctoral thesis on US nuclear missile doctrine.

The bohemian Ball—‘I rarely wore shoes in those days’—recalled that before his first trip to the US in 1970, Professor Hedley Bull gave him cash to buy a suit and shoes and insisted ‘that at least I wore those shoes’.

Based at the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre from 1974, Ball was a defence intellectual who could never serve inside Defence: ‘I would simply find it unbearable to work in Defence or under any direct or indirect official instruction.’

The former Liberal foreign minister, Alexander Downer, called Ball ‘an academic gem’ who caused government anxiety: ‘He has challenged, revealed, reviled and argued his way through the foreign policy and security debates of the modern era.’

The former Labor foreign minister, Gareth Evans, questioned: Is Des Ball a dove with hawkish characteristics or a hawk with dovish characteristics? Ball answered that he was a realist, as deeply committed to liberal institutionalism as the inductive approach.

Ron Huisken thought Ball defied ideological categories: ‘Des is what I would call a forensic analyst with a work ethic of Dickensian proportion.’ He had ‘absolute faith in the capacity of diligent scholarship to unlock all doors, especially those guarded by official secrecy.’ See this across Ball’s work:

Nukes: Ball had ‘an extraordinary career that took [him] to every high church in the nuclear priesthood’ (a wonderful phrase from Brad Glosserman and Ralph Cossa). His work came to focus on the operational aspects of nuclear targeting. Was limited nuclear war possible? Ball’s detailed answer amounted to a blunt, No!

Des recalled ‘heady days’ working and arguing with America’s nuclear elite—and sitting only feet away from the 1.2-megaton nuclear warheads atop the Minuteman ICBMs at a base. Former US president Jimmy Carter involved Ball in his arms control studies and wrote that Des ‘demonstrated the degree of wishful thinking behind concepts of controlled nuclear escalation. Ball’s work raised the possibility that if both sides were ‘blinded’ early in a nuclear exchange by the loss of [command, control and intelligence] facilities, a catastrophic slide into uncontrolled escalation and all-out nuclear war was a realistic possibility.’

US Oz bases: Ball told Australians what their government wouldn’t—the purpose of three US communications/satellite bases on Oz soil and why they’d be nuclear war targets. Ball killed a culture of secrecy that treated the bases as taboo. Kim Beazley said Ball’s work transformed the significance of the facilities for the whole US–Australia relationship. The knowledge Ball put into the public realm made it possible for the Labor Party to embrace the US bases and re-commit to the alliance. Australia moved to a position of ‘full knowledge and consent’ on the bases.

Asia: Ball thought Asia’s strategic culture was different from the US or Soviet Union. In 1992-93, he helped create the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia–Pacific as Asia’s premier non-government security forum. Ball wrote that CSCAP ‘developed many of the original practical proposals for regional security cooperation in the early 1990s, a lot of which were quickly adopted by the ASEAN Regional Forum.’ In Asia, Pauline Kerr wrote, Ball was a ‘realist with a difference’—building conceptual understanding and dialogue to tackle tensions, seeking new norms to influence behaviour and national interest.

Signals intelligence: Ball produced more than 30 books and papers on signals intelligence, and much of his other work discussed SIGINT as a key element. Jeffrey Richelson said Ball shone a light on the world’s eavesdroppers: ‘Des has been one of the pioneers, to put it mildly, in moving the detailed study of modern-day SIGINT into the academic and scholarly communities.’ Ball remembered how he was in Berlin on 9 November 1989, ‘when the Berlin Wall was demolished, watching the panicked Soviet intelligence officers based in the Soviet consulate desperately reacting to the loss of some of their covert technical equipment.’

Oz self-reliance: Post-Vietnam, the 1976 White Paper proclaimed self-reliant defence of the continent. Ball was one of the minds that worked out what Defence of Australia meant. Des walked the ground and flew the skies of northern Australia, describing the 1980s as ‘the golden age’ of Australian defence policy because of the work on a distinctively Oz military strategy and force. The old nightmare could be banished—Australia would defend itself.

Des Ball was a passionate Australian and a passionate intellectual, devoted to understanding dark topics and telling difficult truths.