ACLF 2021 – Australian defence in the 2020s

good morning everyone my name is ian henry i'm a senior lecturer in the australian national university's strategic and defence studies centre and it's my pleasure to share this morning's first session on australian defence in the 2020s i would like to open proceedings by acknowledging the traditional owners from where i join you today the gundangara people and pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging before we begin the discussion we must first address a few housekeeping matters to start i'll ask the panelists a few questions to get our conversation going and we will then open the floor to questions from the audience we do want this session to be interactive and we'll try and get through as many questions from the audience as we can if you would like to ask a question please ensure that both your camera and microphone are enabled and you can either physically rave your hand raise your hand and give me a wave or you can use the raise hand function in zoom it's hidden away under the reactions tab if you're looking for it if you can't ask a question live please do feel free to ask it in the zoom chat function it would be best practice and polite if you could before asking your question introduce yourself and your institutional affiliation i'd also like to welcome any members of the media that have joined us today and remind you that if you'd like to join the discussion on twitter or to live tweet the event please use the hashtag acl forum ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming our two panel members for this morning general angus campbell aodsc is chief of the defence force he joined the australian army in 1981 and served as a troop and squadron commander in the special air service regiment he also served as commanding officer of the 2nd battalion royal australian regiment as the deputy chief of army as the chief of army before being appointed to his current position he has also served in several civilian roles including as first assistant secretary and deputy secretary in the department of prime minister and cabinet and as the deputy deputy national security adviser natasha kasam is the director of the public opinion and foreign policy program at the lower institute in sydney she's also a fellow of the national security college's futures council and a member of the advisory board for the university of melbourne's asian law center at lowey she directs the annual loewy institute poll and researches china taiwan and australia relations she's previously served as an australian diplomat in both china and the solomon islands and was part of the team that drafted the australian government's 2017 foreign policy white paper angus natasha welcome so let's begin in july of last year the australian government released a defense strategic update which asserted that australia's strategic environment had deteriorated rapidly it especially noted that confidence in the rules-based global order was being undermined the government had previously defined the rules-based global order as a shared commitment by all countries to conduct their activities in accordance with agreed rules which evolve over time such as international law and regional security arrangements to warm us up this morning my first question is if that is the definition of the rules-based global order what should we think of as its purpose angus over to you thanks ian and thanks everybody for joining today i really appreciate being part of the forum look in terms of purpose i think it's about providing opportunity opportunity security prosperity for all in the reasonable measure of the advantages resources capacities of the nations within the order so it's a value to all and is worth preserving or evolving as a community bible that's my sentence a fair go for all in the international community if i may verbal you a little bit natasha that is a little bit of a verbal we'll work on it so the way that i think about this is the liberal order seeking to impose limits on the most powerful and that doesn't mean that it's going to be you know upheld universally it doesn't mean that the rules are going to be you know it doesn't mean everybody is going to play by those rules i think we recognize that hypocrisy and inconsistency will always be a feature of the system and geopolitics but to my mind you know the rules that we're seeking to preserve are those that are trying to manage those that imposition of power to trying to govern a system where it's not just hard power that determines you know who has influence and who doesn't i think the issue for me is that currently you know australia is seeking to promote this international order and it seeks to promote transparency on some level and i think that that is really what is it at risk at the moment you know where we think about liberal values versus authoritarian ones to me it is about prioritizing transparency uh trying to promote and gather information and gather accountability and have rules of the road even though excuse me even though they will be dismissed all the time whether it's you know the united states criticizing china for not abiding by in class when it hasn't signed it itself whether it's australia not upholding decisions from international law when it comes to charges you know these will be dismissed but the idea is that you know we'll privilege those values and that accountability above um self-interest at times and that's what makes it function and that's what makes it worth it as a pair i think those answers work really neatly together because they show even if we uh have a an agreed starting point in the definition the emphasis that certain people might place on the purpose of an order can can differ in in what might appear to be fairly slight ways but ways that are quite meaningful when when we try and operationalize it the last time we saw a regional and global order up ended and a new one created was after the 1930s and 40s when territorial aggression in both europe and asia created the possibility of fascist countries amassing sufficient power to dominate the world itself but since the advent of nuclear weapons we have not seen territorial aggression and conquest on such a scale the most significant evolution of order since 1945 that is the order evolution that occurred after the end of the cold war was not the result of military aggression and conquest later this morning in his keynote speech treasurer josh freidenberg will assess that china's combination of economic weight global integration and assertiveness poses new and significant challenges for many countries around the world and this got me wondering what do you see as the primary challenges to the rules-based global order today are they military economic diplomatic some weighted combination of all three and are these challenges as severe as those that were encountered in the 1930s and 40s angus do you want to go first again and then we'll switch to natasha for next time indeed i think the the greatest challenge is actually the idea of consequential challenge to the order and then it's applied by those who wish to do so by a wide range of the tools and instruments that are available to them and in a manner not necessarily to collapse but rather to beneficially evolve or or change the order in a way preferred in the manner that natasha mentioned that power and the community are always in tension in any order and so we see a challenge to reset the order to a different perspective from from great powers from the balance of great powers that we have at the moment to a different perspective and i think it's the idea that is the most challenging uh issue at play yeah i think that's a really interesting way of thinking about it i i think about recent speeches from the prime minister and the foreign minister and they talk about what you know australia's national interests are and i think say you know supporting open societies sovereign capability um economic growth and oh demonstrating that liberal democracies work right so if we kind of summarize that to my mind i think what the australian government see as their kind of key challenges you know reading between the lines are china and covered um and you know i would add on the global challenges part climate change but we'll put that aside to now so on on that question of china i think the ideas as general campbell says is really important um and what our challenge is not necessarily you know it's not either or it's not responding to the order or the military but what we're seeing is that the ways in which i think the order is being disrupted at present are not just military but they are around institutions and rules you know i think one of the most explicit ways that the order has been disrupted recently is economic coercion right and we're you know very familiar with that here in australia but also you know some of those values and norms in the multilateral system the ideas of the way these systems work and the best way in which they can function i think that's been some of the clearest the clearest disruption and i think for a country like australia one of the one of the clearest challenges like i said before i think that you know australia preserving the order and the liberal values within it or some version of that you know i think we accept that it's not going to be the same um it is about i think providing some level of accountability in the system and i think that works well for australia and so our challenges very much i think managing china's influence on that system and i do think it's not necessarily in a military way the issue then is that for many of our partners in the region um i think their greatest challenge is about military aggression you know maybe it's it's vietnam or it's taiwan it's india and so um you know balancing i think australia's efforts to resist or adapt however you want to describe it to orders of the system but also recognizing what are the key challenges for our for our partners um you know it becomes a very complicated task for australia to manage excellent we've i think really gone down the rabbit hole now of order and we've touched upon several things that no no no precisely what i what i'd hoped for and we will um touch on the non-military aspects a little bit later um but natasha the 2020 defense strategy strategic update warned that the risk of high intensity conflict in asia had increased and the document was specifically intended and this is i'm quoting from the document here to signal australia's ability and willingness to project military power and deter actions against our interests aside from direct attacks against australia and australian assets in the region and attacks against the territory or assets of our allies what kinds of military action do you think that the australian defense force should be designed to deter so this is this is you know such a good question and um general campbell will have you know a very clear sense of what that should be but you know from my perspective one of the issues in australia i think is that we often jump to that high intensity conflict as um you know the greatest risk and threat and as to what we're preparing for and i think that so many decisions at this point in australia are not actually about that there you know there are so many stages in the escalation cycle before there that we should be seeking to look at and to deter in many ways so you know one example of that that i think is really clear is when you have chinese military aggression in the taiwan strait the response from the united states is not you know yes it is to sell more hardware to taiwan in part so in part that's a military response but actually the vast majority of the response is about high-level visits and parliamentary exchanges and economic um and uh economic relationship building and those kinds of responses and so to me it it comes down to the idea that the imposition of costs in today's world is not just about military threats right there are there's this whole range of razor and threats that include economic coercion that include cyber that include informational operations and so we really need to be thinking about that very broad way in which you can be imposing costs now and how we wish to respond to those costs and the you know the role of the defence force in particular and some of those things i think is really interesting because you know again we tend to jump to that high-intensity military conflict but of course defense does such a broad range of uh roles in our region you know but sorry just lost anything um whether it's hater whether it's you know cooperating with other partners and is you know a really good example of a functioning institution that can demonstrate how some of these values play out in our region and also really well place to listen to what the region wants from australia which i think is a really key question as we go forward in this and from my perspective i just offer the theory first which won't surprise anybody the australian defense force is designed as a unique capability to fight our nation's wars to impose our will in circumstances where national interest is at play and it's always going to be designed that way and its most challenging potential adversary will be another state so that high intensity construct will be the design basis and it will be designed with a with an eye to the question of uh how uh might we apply military power to our vital national interests in a sustained and uh most determined fashion how might we apply in different forms our military power to other levels or other forms of interest of of the government's direction so they have a defence force designed but as natasha mentioned it has so many other tasks on a day-to-day basis the application of the defence force that you've now designed theoretically spans from private assist and humanitarian assistance disaster relief to support capacity building engagement in our region to major exercising preparedness and the potential for high-intensity conflict i think we've got to remain a force that can operate across a wide bandwidth of actual circumstance but always design from that perspective of high-intensity warfighting state-on-state events none of which are done exclusively by the military and all of which are much more greatly empowered by things like our economic our diplomatic our political and just our presentation of the ideas that australia is and represents all of that is the context within which a military instrument is is applied and i think it has to remain that way it's the only way a nation of our relative size and capacity can generate sufficient aggregated power and apply it with others to achieve effects that we want in the international system both excellent answers i have a question which i think is is fairly closely related to some of the things that you both touched upon towards the end of your your comments and when i think about how australia's public planning documents like white papers and the like have conceptualized australia's response to instances where the rules-based global order is challenged i think it is very often the importance of military capabilities and the possibility of a military response that are emphasized and i was wondering whether both of you might offer a little bit more comment on the balance of capabilities or of instruments that australia can use should we be thinking more perhaps in terms of diplomatic efforts to evolve the current order in a way that reduces the likelihood of conflict or tension rather than thinking of the order that something sort of must be defended by military force in every way at almost every kind of instance natasha well i'm not sure that i would consider our response currently to be an order that must be defended with military capability in every instance i think australia does probably rely more on those other labors on on diplomacy and other efforts um [Music] but again i think my kind of my way of framing this is that we have to think of you know high-end military conflict as the kind of worst possible scenario and while we prepare for that in all the ways that general campbell spoke about we have to um you know recognize that all the other levers are there to avoid going in that direction and so you know nobody here is going to be surprised to hear me say that i think we underfund our diplomacy and we undefined foreign aid and all sorts of things but um i don't think it is you know an either or scenario i don't think it's at the expense of that kind of military capability and i think we also shouldn't undersell um the extent to which australia's kind of defense diplomacy is really effective and um if you look for example at the low institute's asian power index uh which you know measures power in all sorts of different ways but one of the things that australia does incredibly well at is our defense networks um and so it is you know to me about harnessing all of those different elements of national power and being able to um you know avoid war that avoid avoid war in um pursuit of our national interest and all of the things that you know we hear our leaders talking about now in favor of freedom and so on uh you know i'm very much of uh like-minded natasha in that regard i think that we need a wide range of policy tools available to us and as a nation the challenge is how to apportion resource so that they are in a degree of effective balance and also integration so you don't see one part of our system operating in isolation from others now in every cycle or period of circumstance there will be a different resource mix emerge but if i looked across my community of colleagues in canberra i think we would all legitimately say there is need for more in a range of areas across the board but you can't have more it's not a free lunch and we also are trying to preserve an australia that is a society and community that we wish to live in because of the resources government applies in other areas so it's both a very important but complex art to get that balance right we are in a challenging environment and issues that are economic uh security uh diplomatic and so forth they are all at play in an integrated sense to generate australia in the world and i think every government faces the challenge of working out how to do that and that challenge continues today thanks to both of you so i'll pivot a little bit no pun intenders and we'll talk about the quad so there are some non-government proponents of the quad that there is the quadrilateral security dialogue consisting of the united states india japan and australia and some suggest that it could serve as a balancing coalition or a military alliance perhaps formed against china but when we look at the official proclamations from each of the four quad countries these tend to focus more on the idea of regional order being free and open so far though when we look at the i guess order maintenance or order upholding initiatives that the quad has launched and i'm thinking here of things like covert 19 vaccine provision there has been perhaps not sustained or extremely cautious support from other countries in the region and i'm wondering whether the twin possibilities for the court that is this balancing coalition idea and an order upholding coalition idea work against each other does the quarter's potential as an anti-china military coalition deter other states in asia from supporting its order focused initiatives and thus does this sort of uh the possibility of this dual function actually reduce the chord's usefulness in bolstering a free and open regional order angus thanks it's a topic of much conversation across the national security community in the region and you're you're right to raise it i'm very much of a view that the quad in the variety of ways that it it is expressed mostly in policy diplomatic and non-military aspects and not formally inaudible the broad range of areas of both activity and potentiality they're quite early in the developments of this thing we call the quad and i think the most important part of its progressive development is to demonstrate value adding to this indo-pacific community and yes in that i those ideas of free and open community but people in our region are right to ask what is this thing called the quad and how is it lifting improving uh adding to security to community to a sense of stability that's where i think we need to focus and not be too pers too prescriptive let it evolve and that maturity will be seen to be its benefit to the wider system yeah i think it's really interesting to think about that kind of twin purpose dynamic um it seems to me that there are you know people that say the quad as an anti-china military grouping you know is going to fail but then are often also the ones saying well it's not a military alliance so what is the value of it anyway you know i feel like you could end up in these kind of dual criticisms um i think that i should also acknowledge up front that i was a quad skeptic and perhaps i'm recently converted um so you know i think that so far you know as uh general campbell says it's been quite effective in that kind of flexibility and it is still quite early um i there's been the i think this is another example where we often jump to that worst case scenario you know is it's not a military alliance these aren't you know these countries are not going to support each other in a war so what is the point but what i do think is effective is that it is a coalition that is making the area more challenging for china i think that it's you know i think it was in the framing paper that it said it hasn't been capable of um addressing that rise of china and you know i i would say that this is this is a case of building deterrence over a longer time horizon you know of course if there was a an example of military aggression in the region tomorrow by china you know that would be very much tested but i do think this is building deterrence over a longer time horizon and when countries in the region look at the quad i think that there is kind of cautious support actually um there's you know the idea of working with different partners the idea that it is actually coming at the highest levels even the caution around the military aspect i think is appealing you know you look at malabar for example and the lengths to which we their quad partners have gone to disassociate the quad from malabar i think shows that they are um very aware of how this is perceived in the region um and then i think the uh that issue of kind of the democratic values and the way that's projected into the region i think there is also um some concern about that but um when you have india led by someone like modi and you know there has been distinct illiberalism at that point i think that also kind of uh counter-intuitively provides some level of reassurance in the region in terms that that this is not going to be imposing values on them this is not going to be imposing war on them it is i think just another um coalition that is serving to try to balance in a contested area and i think that is generally welcomed even if there is some conflict in those principles and could i add the very fact that everyone's talking about it means it it is making a difference in the in the dynamic of the region and i think that's a good thing okay i'll give the audience a few minutes heads up that this is the last question i have prepared and therefore i expect to start the q a at the end of this if you'd like to get your your thorny questions for the panelists ready thanks to a declassified document from 2020 we now know that under president trump the u.s was determined to maintain diplomatic economic and military pre-eminence in asia that's the declassified indo-pacific strategy report that i'm referring to but during the trump administration australian leaders pointedly declined to endorse the idea of great power competition between china on one side and the us and its allies on the other my question is can the rules-based global order exist without u.s preeminence in these three fields and is it actually possible that washington's goal to maintain preeminence in the diplomatic economic and military spheres might be more ambitious than the more modest order maintenance goals of u.s allies natasha there's been a real interesting mix of language around the way the us uh is presenting itself in the region the idea of primacy and preeminence to me seems largely important for u.s domestic political purposes i i don't know how important that is to australia into the region maybe that's controversial but i don't think we need to measure primacy but we need to we i think from australia and the region's perspective we want australia to be a large and important power here i think our challenge is actually having the united states more involved here in an economic sense and not just a security sense um but when we you know think about the united states view of our region and our view of our region i think in that longer timeframe we have to understand that not only is u.s primacy not realistic that's not just actually about china right if we think of india in 20 years time indonesia in 30 years time we're going to have economic powerhouses with huge militaries that are resident powers in our region as opposed to the u.s projecting into the region so when we think about the u.s role here i think you know what australia is essentially aiming for is a balance of power and where china's military and other power is counterbalanced with a host of other significant parts i think that's okay but what i also think is shifting [Music] i think it's clear to see what's shifting in the united states perception more recently of this is you could almost describe it as a multilateralized or mini lateralized version of us leadership you know look at the endless frontiers act to look at the way the us is emphasizing working with south korea and taiwan on technological competition you know as much as our government is very much enthusiastic about the us role in our region you can see the ships really explicitly right we've gone from you know the the white paper was a balance favorable to our interest a balance favorable of freedom and now a world order that favors freedom but it is it is a balance that we seek and i think um you know even if even if it's not kind of said out loud i think that that's quite clear just one thing i really quickly wanted to say about this though is i think there's also an interesting dynamic for australia to pay attention to in terms of that undercurrent of kind of isolationism and back and backlash in the united states that has been i think a part of the foreign policy establishment at a low level for some time um but i think is getting a little more traction now a little more funding now and afghanistan helps that as well and so um i think that's just another thing for australia to be conscious of that the reach of that that kind of isolationism strand of thinking i think has been limited by china's aggression and that has kind of served to balance that out to some extent but um yeah i think we should be encouraging of the larger us role in the region i think the region wants that as well but i think the challenge right now is actually to translate the security interest into more of an economic role and ian i note that every new administration looks to reconsider a broad range of policy settings so i don't presume what the biden administration will settle upon as a statement of america's position but the economics the demography it all drives to a united states uh deeply engaged in the indo-pacific and in particular in east asia and there is clearly elements of both structural competition but also cooperation between the united states and china i completely agree with natasha the region wants the united states fully engaged in all aspects of its capacity and powers in our region that has historically been a very good thing for australia and i think it has the potential to continue to be that for the wider region it will be interesting to see of course the the great question of how the competitive nature of the u.s china relationship evolves over time and how perhaps they settle into understanding that competition and managing it and then the question of preeminence or balance and i should i think that's a question that both are seeking to play and we need to see how that unfolds to a degree and see also the desire of the wider region to be able to continue to engage with both nations and to gain the benefits from both nations so this is a it's going to be a very complex place to live in and it is going to be that that central focal point of of the world into the future a fascinating time for people to be dealing in uh strategic policy issues in australia it certainly is and that's a fitting note to end on i think thank you to everyone who has attended this morning traditionally the uh the 7 30 sessions at any conference around the world aren't always uh the ones that have immense turnout but i think we've had an excellent discussion this morning with both the panelists angus and natasha and as well uh quite a few really thought-provoking questions from the audience so ladies and gentlemen please uh join with me in congratulating our two panelists and thanking them for their participation this morning and thank you as well for all of your involvement with the q a and the next session starts at 9am i hope you enjoy the rest of the forum thanks very much you

Channel: ANU TV

Views: 6

Rating: 0 out of 5

Keywords: ANU, The ANU, Education, Australia, Research, Policy, Academic, University, The Australian National University, Higher education, degree, study, university student

Id: q75kCsuG0_U

Length: 56min 27sec (3387 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021