Australia's Defence

Towards a New Era?

,

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522866070
• eBook ISBN: 9780522866087
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Almost half a century ago, the Australian National University's TB Millar penned a seminal book on Australian defence policy in the lead up to the Vietnam War. Today, Australia's defence forces are returning from long conflicts overseas, while the rise of China and the economic integration in the Indo-Pacific presents a complex mix of challenges and opportunities.
Drawing inspiration from Millar's original volume, Australia's Defence: Towards a New Era? brings together leading experts to examine the domestic and international context of Australia's defence policy, Australian strategy and the size and state of our armed forces. As the country heads towards a new era, this book provides an in-depth overview and key insights into the past, present and future of Australia's defence.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

At the heart of Australian defence policy is a tight ball of contradictions, which is what makes this topic so fascinating. Take, for instance, the paradox of Australia’s geography. Australia is the only country that is also its own continent. Its size makes it difficult to defend. It also makes it extremely difficult to attack and close to impossible to invade and occupy. These notions manifest themselves in the minds of Australians in two seemingly contradictory ways. First, Australians have historically had a deep sense of vulnerability. This ‘security anxiety’ has most visibly manifested itself in Australia’s desire to tightly align itself with a ‘great and powerful’ friend: first Great Britain and later the United States.¹ On the other hand, Australians have historically been comfortable spending relatively little on their defence, presumably because they cannot see any immediate conventional military threat and therefore believe that a small defence force is adequate.

Considering these contradictions, it becomes less surprising that a survey of Australian defence scholarship points to all thirty-two points of the compass. There is no shortage of new defence strategy suggestions, and they vary dramatically. They range from Hugh White’s plan of ‘sea denial’ through to Ross Babbage’s deterrence by punishment strategy, which would enable Australia to ‘“rip an arm off” any major Asian power that sought to attack Australia’.² An options smorgasbord is presented to Australian policy-makers, which contributes heavily to the current indecision. Clearly, we are in need of a tool to help navigate through this web of countering arguments. How would we know a ‘good’ defence strategy if we saw one? Alternatively, and more pertinently for this book, how should we attempt to evaluate the different defence strategies currently available to Australia? Despite rivers of ink having flowed during the second half of the twentieth century on seemingly every aspect of strategy, answers to these questions remain elusive. Most previous research has concentrated on the formation of strategy,³ the nature of strategy,⁴ or the specific ‘types’ of strategies (e.g. nuclear or counterinsurgency).⁵ This combined understanding points us in the right direction, but fails to get us all the way to an answer. The central aim of this book is to take our knowledge of strategy that final mile and construct a framework that can ‘test’ proposed defence strategies and identify their respective strengths and weakness.

There is broad agreement that Australia is in need of a new defence strategy that better suits the challenges of an increasingly contested Asia. Beginning in the 1990s, economic and military power has dramatically shifted away from Europe and towards Asia. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the year 2012 marked a watershed moment in the history of world affairs with Asia spending more on defence than Europe for the first time in the modern era.⁶ Second, despite it being likely that the United States will remain the most powerful international actor for the foreseeable future, its unchallenged global primacy is fast coming to an end. This is particularly true in Asia. The confluence of these first two factors means that Australia has entered very uncertain times. Although no country in the region poses a direct military threat to Australia, the instability caused by these seismic power shifts and the emergence of great power rivalries in the region are collectively the greatest security challenge Australia has faced since World War II.

The Australian Defence Force has spent almost two decades on high-tempo operations in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. These long deployments were in conjunction with other demanding operations, including the Solomon Islands intervention. All these operations are now, however, drawing to a close. Alan Dupont has called this window of opportunity an ‘inflection point’, suggesting: ‘In every era there are inflection points which require long-established institutions to re-evaluate their goals, strategy, structure and resource allocations to ensure their future health and relevance. As a major organ of state, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is no exception.’⁷ Australia now has an opportunity to carefully evaluate and develop its defence posture, strategy and organisation to respond to the changing power dynamics in the region.

The argument

The central argument of this book is that the philosophy of strategy should be used as the basis for defence strategy evaluation. Breaking down strategy into its component parts allows them to be marshalled into an effective evaluation tool. A good strategy is the application of resources to achieve a high-end political goal, in the knowledge that friends and competitors are likely to adjust their own strategies in reaction to your own. Although this is my own definition, it is a close paraphrasing of classic definitions that can be found in writings on the subject dating back two centuries.⁸ Thus, the essence of strategy can be broken down into three main elements: (1) the pursuit of high-level political ends, (2) the strategic interaction in competition or cooperation and (3) the economic, cultural, geographic and political constraints. This is a relatively uncontroversial method of breaking down strategy. After surveying more than 200 years of strategic thought, Beatrice Heuser comments: ‘[T]he link between policy at the highest level and the use of military force as a tool, postulated by Clausewitz but not yet coupled by him to the word “strategy”, gradually became a matter of universal consensus.’⁹ This book makes a substantial deductive theoretical step: taking our philosophical understanding of strategy and converting it into a practical evaluation tool.

Since antiquity, politico-military scholars have attempted to formulate a set of rules for fighting wars and winning battles. This book is not one of those. The celebrated Swiss military scientist, Antoine-Henri Jomini, has come to personify the ‘rules of war’ or even the ‘science of war’ school of thought.¹⁰ This association is somewhat unfair, being primarily due to his short flirtation with the geometrics of interior lines of advance. There was a moment for Jomini when the neat columns of soldiers moving across the battlefield conjured up comparisons with Newtonian astronomy, which also had appeared random until a threshold of scientific knowledge was reached, unlocking the workings of the solar system. But Jomini was not the first, and certainly not the last, military scholar who was seduced by the dream of uncovering the laws of war. The idea that war has certain enduring and universal principles that young officers could learn, apply and win battles with has been popular throughout history. These ideas gained particular currency following the European Enlightenment and, by the Franco-Prussian War, the French were instructing their officers on the ‘laws of war’ with the only disagreement being whether there were twenty-four or forty-one principles.¹¹

On a casual first reading, my approach might seem to be in this tradition. It is not. War, and therefore strategy, is a highly unpredictable phenomenon. The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, argues that phenomena can be positioned on a continuum between ‘clouds’ and ‘clocks’.¹² On the ‘cloud’ extreme he placed highly unpredictable phenomena, such as a swarm of flies that acted completely randomly except that they would turn inward if they found themselves too far from the centre. Human societies, international politics and economics would all fall on this end of the spectrum. On the other extreme, he placed the solar system, which follows the laws of physics and is extremely ‘clock-like’.¹³ War and strategy are far more ‘cloud-like’ than ‘clock-like’. Despite the nature of strategy being much closer to Popper’s swarm of flies than the solar system, it is possible to identify certain broad characteristics. Each individual fly’s movements might be random, but they will tend towards the centre. The time and place they swarm might be completely unpredictable, but they will appear only during daylight.

Many regard Carl von Clausewitz as history’s greatest military philosopher.¹⁴ Although they never met, the Prussian philosopher was the contemporary and rival of Jomini. Virtually ever since, scholars have compared Clausewitz’s more ‘cloud-like’ conceptualisation of war and strategy with Jomini’s supposedly more ‘clock-like’ approach.¹⁵ Clausewitz even came close to using the ‘cloud’ analogy for war when he spoke of ‘all action’ in war taking place ‘in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight’ distorts ‘objective knowledge’.¹⁶ Over time, this idea has been remembered as the ‘fog of war’. Clausewitz was a staunch critic of the scientific approach to war, writing that he pitied ‘the soldier who is supposed to crawl among these scraps of rules, not good enough for genius, which genius can ignore, or laugh at’.¹⁷ For Clausewitz, war and strategy existed in a world of chance, luck, probability, uncertainty and ‘friction’.¹⁸

Nevertheless, Clausewitz would have supported our three principles on the essence of strategy. Those principles are not attempting to predict the behaviour of individual flies, but rather point out that they will turn inward if they get too far from the centre. Indeed, all three elements of strategy can be found in Clausewitz’s own writings. The first ideal is directly derived from Clausewitz’s observation: ‘War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.’¹⁹ The second, that strategy involves opponents and friends who may change their own strategies in response, can also be tracked back two centuries: ‘… war is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter as is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but passive and yielding, as is the case with the human mind and emotions in the fine arts’; rather, according to Clausewitz, ‘In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.’²⁰

Finally, Clausewitz was fully aware that the resources of a state were finite and that this meant that strategy was always a matter of trade-offs. In his analysis of depots, for instance, Clausewitz discussed how more was always better but would inevitably mean cutbacks somewhere else in the military. He argues: ‘One has to remember that since no state ever has more money than it needs, the high cost of maintaining depots will necessarily cut into the expenditure on the armament and the size of the army.’²¹ As such, our three elements of strategy can be directly traced back through two centuries of thinking on strategy to the writings of Clausewitz. As set out earlier, these three propositions (i.e. (1) that strategy should be linked to political ends, (2) that it should consider the reaction of other actors, and (3) that it should consider domestic cultural, political and resource considerations) are not, in themselves, contentious.

The second part of the book is devoted to using th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Evaluating defence strategies
• 3 Evaluating Australia’s defence strategy options
• 4 Strategic interests and strategic objectives
• 5 Australia’s historical strategic interests and objectives
• 6 Australia’s strategic interests in a contested Asia
• 7 Prisoners’ dilemmas and spheres of influence
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index