After American Primacy

Imagining the Future of Australia's Defence

Peter J. Dean, Brendan Taylor, Stephan Frühling

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522874556
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over seventy years the 'Lucky Country's strategic position had been anchored by the US-led international order that has been in place since the ending of the Second World War. But that order is now under strain due to a confluence of forces, including US President Donald Trump's 'America first' policies, increasingly assertive authoritarian regimes in China and Russia, and the rise of new powers - such as India and Indonesia - as more powerful international players.In this new era, beset with rapid strategic and technological change underpinned by increasing major power jostling in a more multipolar Indo-Pacific, what does the future hold for this region and for Australia's defence policy?Like its companion volumes, Australia's Defence: Towards a New Era? (2014) and Australia's American Alliance (2016), this book brings together leading experts to examine the future of Australian defence policy after American primacy, plotting possible, probable and preferable strategic futures for a country that faces unprecedented strategic challenges.

Part I

Imagining the future defence of Australia

CHAPTER 1

The defence of Australia From lucky country to uncomfortable normality

Stephan Frühling

In the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian Government stated that the first objective of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) was to ‘deter, deny and defeat attacks on or threats to Australia and its national interests, and northern approaches’.¹ The proposition that it is the purpose of the ADF to defend Australia is uncontroversial. But what emphasis this implies for preparing to do so through operations in and from Australia’s own territory—the often capitalised ‘Defence of Australia’ or abbreviated ‘DoA’—as opposed to operations alongside Australia’s allies further afield, is not. The neat distinction between these two types of operations will increasingly blur, however, as the scale of threats to the Australian continent increases. From being a lucky country that enjoyed geographic isolation from direct great power threat, Australia will increasingly join the ranks of those countries around the world for which the possibility of direct attack on territory and population is part of an uncomfortable geostrategic normality.

The Defence of Australia and its ‘great and powerful friends’

The basic defence problem that colonial and federated Australia has always faced in its short history is how to defend a small population, relative to the size of the country and to our neighbours to the north, which is moreover located on a continent off the South-East Asian archipelago and far removed from its traditional Anglo-Saxon allies.²

As a colonial settler outpost that was dependent for almost everything, except land, on the trading networks of its native Britain, it was natural for Australia to think about the essential basis of its security in the same way as Britain itself had done since the Tudor age, if not since the attempts of Alfred the Great to meet the Vikings with a nascent Wessex fleet: the Royal Navy’s command of the seas surrounding its native isles.³

There is, however, a fundamental mismatch between the military power that Australia could and can hope to generate on its own, and what is required to make a significant impact on the maritime balance of power in Asia. Hence, if one looks beyond the questions of national identity and emancipation from colonial links that continue to dominate Australia’s debates about its ‘great and powerful friends’, Australia’s dependence on its friends and allies against a hostile preponderance of maritime power in Asia will remain a fact of life. Whether the United States will be willing and able to bear the cost of doing so in the future is therefore of fundamental importance to Australia’s defence, but the answer is not a binary one: all chapters in the second part of this book will discuss credible possibilities for US engagement in Asia that are more or less probable, and more or less desirable from an Australian point of view.

These US choices will be consequential not just because of what they mean for the US position in Asia but also for what Australia might be called upon to do. It was to support Britain against threats wherever they might have arisen, and thereby protect Britain’s ability to rule the waves that also broke on Australia’s shores, that Australia sent an ‘Australian Imperial Force’, twice, to fight in Europe and the Middle East. By the end of World War II, it had become clear that it was now the strength of the US Navy in the Pacific rather than that of the Royal Navy on which Australia’s future security would rest. As Prime Minister Curtin famously stated, ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’⁴ Friendship, if not alliance, with the major maritime power in Asia remained the source of Australia’s own security—and Australians continued to acknowledge that they needed to do their part to help secure that power’s ability to maintain the position on which Australia’s own security depended. In that sense, the defence of Australia has never been geographically bounded.

Alas, as the saying goes, history rhymes even if it does not repeat itself. If true, the fate of earlier settler colonies, also born of a homeland whose maritime preponderance ultimately proved evanescent, should be a salutary warning. Far more picturesque than anything that would be left of Australia’s European phase, the ruins of Greek cities and temples in southern Italy point to another fact of fundamental importance: dependence does not guarantee support. US commitment to active global leadership and extending security guarantees began only after 1946. Before that, avoidance of enduring alliances and focus on the security of the western hemisphere alone was the natural inclination and the actual policy of the United States. The US decision to abandon George Washington’s exhortation in his farewell address: that ‘tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world’,⁵ was a monumental change that remains within the living memory of some Americans (and Australians). Today, Australia’s reliance on the willingness and ability of the United States to bear the cost of maintaining a favourable maritime balance in Asia is therefore a bet that the US policy inclinations of the last seven decades will remain more important for the future of US engagement with the world under and following President Trump than the sixteen decades that went before. All authors in the third part of this book engage with the question of what it might mean for Australia if that bet did not go Australia’s way, in which case concern about the direct defence of the Australian continent would almost certainly become a matter of even greater concern than it is today.

Hence, the problem is not just that the power of countries waxes and wanes over history’s longue durée but so also do their strategic attention and priorities in the short term. Given the basic factors of Australia’s geography, strategic potential, culture and history, Australia’s ‘great and powerful friends’ are central to its strategic concerns, but the converse is far from true. The unopposed expansion of European, US and Japanese colonial presence in the Pacific Islands, the fall of Singapore, international indifference to Indonesia’s appropriation of Dutch West New Guinea, US reluctance to promise support during Konfrontasi with Indonesia, and even the less-than-hoped-for US contribution to the INTERFET peacekeeping operation in East Timor in 1999, are all episodes in Australia’s history in which it became clear that the defence of the Australian continent and its immediate interests ultimately matter more to itself than to any other country halfway around the world.

It is to manage the risks of this aspect of dependence that the concept of the self-reliant ‘Defence of Australia’ (or DoA) arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It entailed a priority in ADF equipment, doctrine, posture and readiness for operations required to defend the continent without allied assistance, if required, over preparations to support allies further afield. In the heated debates about this policy, managing the risk of a lack of allied support was often understood, rightly or wrongly, as Australian lack of interest in alliance itself. In recent years, Australia’s defence policy was then based on a broad, bipartisan consensus that the ADF needed to do both: be able to defend Australia itself while also bearing Australia’s fair share of the burden carried by the United States and its allies further afield. The way Australian defence planners and policy-makers approach the question of what the ability to defend Australia itself requires, however, remains heavily based on the approaches, concepts and thinking of the 1970s and 1980s DoA era. To understand the future, we therefore need first to look to the past: on the near-half century following the Vietnam War, in which Australia the lucky country could plan to defend itself on the premise that geography would isolate it from the direct effects even of great power conflict in Asia.

The defence of Australia in the DoA era

The defence of the Australian continent has always been a part of Australian defence thinking, but its importance in terms of resource allocation is easily overshadowed in collective memory by overseas operations and conflict. Before the creation of the Australian Regular Army in 1947, improvised military establishments had to be created for overseas deployment in both world wars and Korea, as the Citizen Military Forces (CMF) could not legally be used for operations outside Australia itself. Significant infrastructure investment was undertaken in World War II to fight off Japanese air and naval threats. A ‘bare’ airfield at Exmouth (RAAF Learmonth) and a new airbase at Tindal were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s.⁶ What changed in the early 1970s, however, was that preparation for the defence of Australia became the main focus of the newly created ADF, which also absorbed the CMF, as concern with overseas deployment dropped away.

When the ‘Defence of Australia’ became the focus of Australia’s strategic policy and force structuring after the Vietnam War, the spectre of communist expansion had receded, and the new post-colonial countries of South-East Asia had begun to build regional stability through the nascent ASEAN community. For a time, Australian military support for US operations and commitments further afield was neither politically palatable nor requested by the US policy set out in the 1969 Guam doctrine. In the 1970s and into the 1990s, Australia therefore saw its geographic remoteness as a source of security, far removed as it was from the centres of international Cold War tension and conflict. Regional neighbours had neither the intention for aggression against Australia nor the capability to harm Australia beyond its thinly populated North.

But whereas the ‘Defence of Australia’ provided a clear objective and geographic context, how to plan and establish requirements in terms of force structure, posture and capabilities for the task was less straightforward. In the absence of a clear and present danger to the country, and given Australia’s preponderance in economic and military terms over all of South-East Asia, Australia based its defence planning on regional capabilities, not intentions: there was no direct great power threat; any limited threat from the Soviet Union would have been certain to draw US attention and direct support; and the way Australia could find security from regional threats was by simply maintaining the most capable defence force south of China: both in the force-in-being and, through conceiving of the defence force as an expansion base, against future threats.⁷

Whereas Australia’s defence and foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s were closely aligned in their focus on instability in South-East Asia, they diverged in the 1970s and 1980s. There were few actual operations, and the ADF force structure was developed without any observable hostile intentions on the part of regional countries. The postulate of major conflict with Indonesia became the ‘pacing threat’ that Australia sought to be able to manage ‘self-reliantly’; that is, without direct reliance on US combat or combat support forces. As hypothetical as this was, it did provide a coherent basis for decisions on ADF force structure, infrastructure, doctrine and readiness from the 1970s and into the 1990s. But despite the organisational, cultural and financial difficulties faced by the young Department of Defence and ADF in preparing for this threat, it was ultimately not a very challenging one: a point driven home by the term ‘escalated low-level conflict’, which the Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities (1986) used to denote the most stressful scenarios that the ADF should be able to manage at short notice.⁸ Small-scale infiltration, sabotage and, at most, isolated air attack bore no comparison in terms of operational and technical complexity, risk and cost to the challenges faced by Australia’s northern hemisphere allies, as they prepared to do nuclear battle with the might of the Soviet army.

Australia never excluded using the ADF, despite the fact that it was structured for DoA, for operations elsewhere. After 1991, a series of new ADF operational commitments from the South-West Pacific to the Middle East then indeed turned the attention of government, the department and the ADF away from the scenarios that had underpinned force planning for DoA in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 2000 Defence White Paper, support to countries in Australia’s own region, and support to the United States beyond, became additional tasks that the government required the ADF to be able to undertake. Sustaining significant numbers of ADF personnel on operations led to a decline in warning time and expansion thinking, and the level of interoperability with US forces that Australia sought to achieve grew to near-seamless integration. In South-East Asia, ambitious plans for major defence build-ups had largely fallen afoul of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The offensive and defensive capability of the ADF’s major air and naval platforms significantly increased nonetheless, as they now also had to be able to operate and survive against far more advanced potential adversaries in the Middle East and North Asia.

In a narrow, regional context, the ADF of today is thus arguabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I. Imagining the future defence of Australia
• Part II. Imagining US futures in a contested Asia
• Part III. Imagining Australian defence policy without the alliance
• Part IV. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index