Defence Force manoeuvres

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.