Defence Force manoeuvres

The Australian Defence Force is evolving from a misconceived and unbalanced continental defence force into one configured for manoeuvre warfare - highly mobile, joint force operations across a spectrum of conflict in a global security environment.

Between now and 2020, the ADF’s major platforms will be overhauled substantially, its weapons systems upgraded and its deployable combat capabilities restructured. These changes entail, and will be driven by, a profound mutation in its doctrine and training.

The changes are already underway, but will require between five and fifteen years to take effect fully.

This shift has occasioned a desultory public debate but is rooted in a decade of serious thinking - led, by common consent, by the Army - inside the defence establishment.

There are good reasons for this. The Army bore the brunt of Australian military deployments for many years during which it was also poorly funded and cut to the bone in terms of core capabilities. This was due to both the strategic priorities of the old “Defence of Australia” doctrine and the federal Labor government’s budgetary priorities under Hawke and Keating.

The professionals in the armed services, and especially the Army, were aware of this anomaly and the emerging challenges in the security environment. Operating within serious constraints, they set to thinking through how they would meet the current and arising challenges.

From its first months in office, the Howard Government saw a need for major reforms in the defence portfolio but has found them to be far more difficult than might have been expected. Defence establishments in general are hard to reform because of their complexity, conservatism and ponderous institutional structures.

Three problems have needed to be addressed for some time. The first is the dysfunctional bureaucratic structures that have impeded strategic planning, vitiated relations between the civilians and the military within the defence organisation, and diffused accountability in the acquisition process.

The second is the chronic budgetary problem, exacerbated by defence organisation inefficiencies but rooted in the federal government’s chronic under-funding of the portfolio over many years. And the third is confusion over procurement priorities, compounded by the two foregoing sets of problems but rooted in a strategic paradigm which badly needed overhauling.

The good news is that all these problems are being addressed, at least in part, and progress is occurring incrementally on all fronts. Indeed, it might not be too optimistic to state that in strategic terms the “enemy” has been out-manoeuvred and his defensive lines breached. Now is the time to press home our advantage.

In pressing that advantage, however, reformers must be cognisant of three constants in the defence reform equation, which will always set limits to the pace and extent of change: the political election cycle, the budgetary balance and the procurement cycle.

Governments tend to be averse to major reforms - especially in an election year - unless they feel secure about a range of other issues which have only an indirect relation to the substantive matters that need reforming. A change of government may accelerate incipient reforms, but equally may deflect, or occasionally even abort them.

The budgetary balance is a headache for defence establishments in any democracy because voters rarely see defence spending as a priority. This is a challenge in all liberal democracies, but more than usually so in Australia because of the remarkable security we enjoy from the US alliance, and the enormous difficulties for any foe making a significant assault on our shores.

The intractable problem of conflicting inter-service priorities, and the asymmetries in costs between the capital equipment needs of the different services, must be added to the budgetary shortfall induced by voter insouciance.

These factors, combined with the defence bureaucracy’s dysfunctional features, conspire to make alignment between strategic planning, force-structure planning and capital-equipment acquisition chronically tangled and cumbersome.

In addition, there is the procurement cycle to consider. Major weapons platforms might be added in substantial numbers to an existing military, off a galvanised industrial base, in times of war. But on a regular basis, they can only be procured over very long lead times and tend to remain in service for decades.

This means that over any given procurement cycle of around 10 years on a rolling basis (defined as the Defence Capability Plan), there is scope for about a 30 per cent modification of the force structure, making wholesale overhaul intrinsically impossible. Even fundamental change requires many years, if agreement can be achieved.

The strategic vision, war-fighting doctrine, training capacities and maintenance costs associated with such overhaul all impinge on how effectively new platforms (and their associated weapons and communications components) can be integrated into the armed forces.

Such are the threads by which the Gulliver of serious and practical defence reform and force-structure redesign is bound in his efforts to get off the ground. Yet Gulliver is rising because a few professionals, in and outside of the services, for years did the conceptual work indispensable to reform and redesign of the defence force.

Soon after coming to office, the Howard Government signalled its intention to get new thinking off the ground by expressing dissatisfaction with the strategic policy advice and capital equipment procurement processes then entrenched in the Department of Defence.

The difficulties experienced in carrying out the East Timor operation in 1999, coupled with the psychological shocks of September 2001 and October 2002, galvanised Gulliver into starting to snap the threads tying him to the ground.

It is important to distinguish analytically between the conceptual work done by the professionals and the political impulse provided by the Coalition’s broad strategic preferences and the psychological shocks of 1999-2002.

The conceptual work revolved around several fundamental insights into what war-fighting was increasingly becoming as the 20th century drew to an end - and what the Australian Army’s shortfalls were in being able to do its work effectively in that strategic environment.

Both centred on the concept of “manoeuvre warfare”, incubated in the 1980s within the military reform movement in the United States and, in Australia, within the small circle of army officers who developed a vision in the mid-1990s of “Army 21” - the army needed for the approaching 21st century.

But it remains for a broader public to understand the conceptual basis of the reforms and their role in their development of the Australian military’s keenest minds.

Manoeuvre warfare is not a faddish idea, or something feverishly conceived in the wake of 9-11 or during the war on terrorism. It is grounded in insights going back to Sun Tzu, and has to do with some of the most enduring features of war-fighting.

Being able to avoid an enemy’s strength, strike at his weaknesses, and outflank and outwit him are age-old strategic principles, adapted by commanders for millennia as technologies evolved to raise manoeuvre to new levels in range and weapons to new levels of lethality.

The core principles remained constant. But neglect of even the most fundamental principles of military strategy has a long history, and the past two centuries have occasioned some of the most wrenching debates as industrial economies made possible a hammer-and-anvil approach to war fighting.

This approach wrought colossal damage, and was monumentally inefficient in terms of any rational assessment of strategic or political aims. Its inefficiencies are at the heart of debates about the “American way of war”.

In the Australian context, this approach has never made sense, given our paucity of human and financial resources, the vastness of the continent we had to defend against any conceivable attack, and the off-shore environment in which we, in fact, operated militarily over the years.

Yet in the decades after the Vietnam War, we drifted into a confused strategic posture which supposedly guaranteed our security through a combination of a hammer-and-anvil approach to continental defence and a minimalist contribution to such coalition operations in the wider world.

The first was to be effected by maintaining early warning systems and a technological edge in major air and naval platforms to defend the continent’s maritime approaches; the second by sending niche forces abroad, including small contingents of an undermanned and under-equipped army.

During the 1990s it gradually sank in that all this made little sense. What Australia in fact required, and was cobbling together whenever its forces were deployed abroad, was a flexible, highly mobile capability for combined arms operations in complex terrain, against enemies equipped not for hammer-and-anvil warfare, but for asymmetric warfare

It was all very well to see the major air and naval platforms as insurance against a major predator menacing us from the north. But no such predator existed, and the force structure developed in the 1970s and 1980s was not adequately addressing our genuine security concerns.

The operations that were being undertaken, and were likely to be undertaken, required a quite different force structure - a highly mobile army which could be sustained on an expeditionary basis.

This army would be equipped with close armoured support, and would be able to draw down air-strike support and adapt with a high degree of flexibility to complex war-fighting situations blending combat, counter-insurgency, peace-keeping and public relations.

This entailed a different army with a different relationship to the air and naval arms, and a quite radically different strategic role to that envisaged under the post-Vietnam or late Cold War doctrine of continental defence-in-depth and niche contributions to allied operations.

Step by step, this is what we are now starting to get. It is called the seamless joint force and is the concerted objective of those shaping the country’s strategy and force structure under the mature Howard Government.

Quietly and without undue fanfare, the pieces have been moving into place. This has been obscured partly by the fact that the great bulk of new capital equipment allocations has still gone to the Air Force and the Navy.

However, the Army is at the centre of the new strategy, and the criterion by which the platforms slated for acquisition by the other services is increasingly being judged is their serviceability for joint expeditionary operations.

The Army needs to be expanded modestly by around 1,500 personnel to fulfil its duties and ensure units are capable of being sustained and rotated. This will require extra funding, or some hard choices about capital equipment priorities.

The hardening and networking of the Army to equip it for manoeuvre warfare, and the move toward better equipping the Air Force and Navy to work as a joint, deployable force, are all key elements of the new strategic posture and force structure that has displaced the “Defence of Australia” doctrine.

This does not mean defending Australia has been jettisoned - just reframed in terms of classical strategic wisdom and current technological and security challenges.

Defence is investing heavily in concept development and experimentation, leveraging off the Army’s rough and frugal work of the early to mid-1990s and the fruits it yielded. In short, serious debate is occurring and strenuous thinking is taking place. The paradigm has shifted.

The challenge is to keep the momentum going, and to strengthen the institutional basis of joint planning, experimentation and learning. There is a great deal that can still be accomplished.