Tough times ahead for Australia's Defence Force

In the movie Titanic there is a scene where the lookout sees the fatal iceberg and calls a warning to the bridge. An urgent order to change course is given, but the massive liner responds too slowly to the helm, with the inevitable result.

National security policy, the official organisations which conduct it and indeed nations themselves are in some ways like ocean liners, though they do not automatically have to share Titanic’s fate. Indeed, though swift and decisive action can be called for, a due measure of careful deliberation rarely goes amiss.

What is more, the global security environment itself does not often change at breakneck pace - though it can do so, as during the collapse of communism and the former Soviet Union. Regional security environments, of course, can be somewhat more volatile.

There has already been a significant shift in Australia’s strategic circumstances: the challenges we face now are not those of 20 years ago. We face a terrorist threat, but the chances of our being attacked one-on-one by some hypothetical aggressor nation have never been lower. The only shooting wars in which we have been involved have been those we ourselves chose. Instead, we have had to deploy in disaster relief (on a large scale to Indonesia after the tsunami) or peace support and stabilisation missions as in East Timor and the Solomons.

But behind the clear terrorist menace lurks another challenge, one which will change the natural environment, and thereby our future security context. Global warming, not terrorism, has already been identified by Mick Keelty of the Australian Federal Police as the most serious long-term threat we are likely to face.

We can barely begin to assess the security implications of climate change. It will affect us directly, of course, notably in agriculture, but it will also affect our region. Any significant rise in sea level could have serious consequences for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. We cannot say how Asia’s traditional rice-growing areas are likely to fare as rainfall patterns change. In all probability significant effects will be patchy around the world - desertification here, a new coastline there, new wetlands somewhere else. Some adaptations will be possible - for instance, warming does imply longer growing seasons for some places - but these will be long-term.

We can at least be assured that whatever changes these new circumstances produce, they will not mostly occur over two or three years, as did the end of the Cold War. More likely, we are talking decades for the full impact to be felt.

In this context a lot of the standard national security vocabulary begins to look somewhat old-fashioned. And something else that looks rather old-fashioned in parts is the Australian Defence Force.

I don’t mean that we have lots of ageing or obsolete equipment - we have some, but any military always does. We also have problems in major defence acquisition projects, but I’ll say more on that below. It’s the thinking behind the design and the potential uses of our forces, not the equipment itself that is becoming obsolete due to changing circumstances and challenges.

What are the unavoidable challenges we are likely to face?

With Commissioner Keelty, I believe climate change and its consequences are going to become very important factors in our security environment, though the precise nature of the challenges it will present cannot yet reliably be forecast.

Their severity still (it is fervently to be hoped) depends on how well we - the human race that is - do at restraining ourselves. What should be done, for instance, about recalcitrant emitters who refuse to mend their ways, retaining dirty technology and adversely affecting the whole world? If things turn out poorly as climate change bites, this question is likely to be asked, in ever more stringent language, by important and powerful people.

I do not think that the current wave of religiously-inspired terrorist fanaticism is likely to end any time soon; this too is a threat we have to consider very seriously. I won’t dwell on it here, but it cannot be discounted. The need for integrated intelligence collection and quality analysis, critical factors for counter-terrorism, is a principal contemporary imperative for maintenance of close ties with the US.

Nor is there any reason to think that demand for the highly proficient Australian military as peacekeepers, stabilisers and disaster-relief logistic support providers is likely to fall away. Requests for assistance from our region will always be hard to refuse; indeed, as John Howard discovered after he knocked back a 2000 request from the Solomons, it’s not always wise to refuse.

We will also face the challenge of calls for contributions to “coalition” operations from our American ally. The alliance with the US is necessary, but it does not come free. Nevertheless, we are not obliged to heed every call: US allies have on occasion declined, yet remained in alliance with Washington (of course, it would not do to decline all such requests). The Iraqi fiasco warns us to be careful: hopefully this time (unlike after Indochina) the lesson will be learned.

We are not, however, faced with any direct military threat. No one wants to invade us, or grab a slice of Australian territory. It would take anyone a long time to develop the military capacity to make either threat credible. Instead we face maritime poachers and, on occasion, people smugglers, and the need to maintain effective surveillance of maybe a tenth of the Earth’s surface.

What does this combination of factors suggest as a sensible prescription for the future structure of our security forces?

Our low population base, coupled with a vast area of responsibility, leave us little choice but to use technology as a so-called “force multiplier” because we lack the population to field a mass force. Our forces are always going to have a substantial high-tech component. Moreover, “coalition” demands from the US require that we be capable of interoperability with the Americans.

In present and likely future conditions, more extensive surveillance and patrolling of our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ - out to 200 nautical miles from the coast) and of the broader maritime approaches will probably be required. Not only for the monitoring, management and protection of important maritime resources, but for security, should climate change phenomena trigger significant regional population movements.

Taking these considerations aboard, it seems our forces, in conjunction with law enforcement and intelligence communities as required, need to be capable of:

• counter-terrorism;
• regional peace support and stabilisation missions;
• maritime patrol and surveillance; and
• coalition operations.

Additionally, there will be requirements generated by climate change and other factors which cannot presently be specified.

Our existing forces have these capabilities, but their mix, however appropriate in an earlier era, is now unsuitable. There is too much emphasis on forces structured for traditional concepts of middle and great power conventional warfare, and not enough for patrol and surveillance, intelligence and regional support. In particular we tend to over-invest in capabilities for coalition war.

We must have such capabilities, but we need to be realistic. We cannot influence the outcome of large-scale conflicts involving the United States. No coalition war that we have joined would have gone differently if we had not. Our contributions are necessarily symbolic and declaratory, showing our willingness to support an ally.

We can do this, however, with less investment than we have been making. The Defence Force should not be expected, as under Howard, to maintain not one but two coalition operations in separated theatres - Afghanistan and Iraq. We should maintain forces adequate to deploy with the US in one distant coalition campaign, not two.

It falls to the new Rudd Government to determine the next stage of Australian security policy development. Everybody knows that it has to find significant savings and efficiency gains in the Federal public sector to help minimise any inflationary pressures generated by the cost of its electoral bidding war with the former government during the 2007 campaign. This alone would allow one to predict tough times ahead for the Department of Defence, but of course there’s more.

I have gone on at considerable length in several forums (including this one) over the years about Defence’s astonishing capacity for wasting enormous sums of public money, and I don’t intend to rehash any of that here. Suffice it to say that while Defence by no means gets every major acquisition wrong, when it does mess up it often does so big time.

It’s encouraging to detect in statements from the new Government, and also in comments from several of the more perceptive media, a tendency to take as a fact the need to do something really significant to put an end to Defence’s unconscionable behaviour pattern, which has persisted literally for decades.

The Rudd Government has comparatively little inherited political baggage on this issue: on the contrary, it will be able to do most of the finger-pointing, at least for now, especially because the Coalition’s current Leader, Dr Nelson, was until their defeat Minister for Defence and thus an easy target on this issue. Nelson made his present position worse by the extraordinary decision to acquire so-called Super Hornet fighters from the US at a cool $6.6 billion as a stopgap just in case the Americans continue to fall behind with their Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), to which the Tories have shackled us with chains of gold. The new Defence Minister (Mr Fitzgibbon) probably had little option but to reluctantly proceed with the deal as he has done.

So there are both budgetary and political incentives for the new Government to demand significantly higher standards from Defence. An additional incentive is that, if such standards are achieved, they will provide a degree of protection against future acquisition disasters, taking some pressure of the Government’s forward spending projections.

Moreover, along with a needed reshaping of force structure priorities to bring them more into accord with foreseeable strategic conditions, improved standards in defence management will, if sustained, free-up resources long-term for needed capabilities.

To miss the present opportunity for a fundamental readjustment of Australian security priorities will be to condemn us to increasing irrelevance and even impotence. What use will our expensive force of Abrams tanks be in the event of a climatic disaster? How useful will an Air Warfare Destroyer fully equipped with a US “missile defense” suite prove when we are trying to police our maritime approaches?

A shift in emphasis is required. There is time and opportunity; neither will last.