To remake Australia’s defence force: Hugh White

so what why has Australia spent the last couple of decades building the wrong Australian Defense Force well because we've had the wrong conception of our strategic objectives I think it's fair to say that we've inherited from the 1970s and 1980s the idea that our defence force should be designed for the self-reliant defence of Australia against a small not very capable regional power Indonesia and that on top of that we won't be able to do a little bit of regional stabilisation these Timor Solomon Islands sort of stuff and do a bit to support the United States in operations faraway Iraq Afghanistan that sort of thing and then on top of that we've laid we've overlaid a fourth imperative and that is the idea we should be able increasingly to support the United States in a major power conflict in Asia and that's led us to some more ideas so there's a wide range of different things we've been trying to make a Defence Force to do and if you look at the big investments you look at where them the major money is gone a great deal of it has gone into that last one that is building the capacity for the ADF to get back into the traditional business of projecting major land forces overseas to support our allies in a major conflict and I don't think that's a viable military strategy for Australia because I don't think we're going to be able to achieve the sea control and I don't think our land forces are big enough to have any strategic impact so I think we need to rethink our military strategy focus the focus that overwhelmingly on maritime denial both of our own approaches and the approaches to our neighbours and that would drive us towards a very different kind of floor structure bigger in some areas much smaller in others if you start that trend from the 2000 defense white paper that you wrote for John Howard the question is can why - what is your Mia culpa am i BL Cal Burnett something I have thought about quite a lot is not to have pushed harder for a bigger adaptation of the fourth structure we did start in in 2002 acknowledged that the constructs which had served us so well in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s the the narrow focus on the defense of Australia was a sufficient basis for just for defining Australia strategic objectives and therefore through that what our forces needed to be able to do but in the 2000 white paper we began to broaden that out by defining Australia strategic interests and objectives more broadly and we did that quite explicitly and that people often now call the concentric circles hierarchy that's 2001 paper was where that first emerged and my conception a conception of strategic objectives that I set out in the book are very much modeled on that conception I think I still think that's basically the right way to think about it but what I didn't realize then and I feel a bit guilty about this was how quickly Chinese power would rise how quickly America's capacity to respond would erode partly thanks to 9/11 and all of that sort of stuff and therefore how fast we should be moving not just to expand our capacity to support the United States in a conflict with China but to expand our capacity to defend Australia independently if that failed and and you know I think we just I underestimated how fast things were going to change my only consolation is that I think most other people in Australia have underestimated that much more and many of them are still under arrest one of the things that you abandoned is the overall commitment to Australia's expeditionary culture to do our part to maintain the global balance you're saying Australia should no longer be thinking in terms of the global balance we should be thinking only in terms of the balance we can bring to the indo-pacific yes look I don't think Australia's ever made since at least since the Second World War and I do believe in since the first world war as Australia ever made a significant contribution to the global balance and in particular after Vietnam we stepped back from that yes the rhetoric that governments have used to describe to the Australian public what we've been doing in the Middle East at various has had has has used the phrases like the global balance or the global values and so on but the reality is that the key motive there for that has been to burnish a credentials as a strong US ally in order to reinforce our confidence in u.s. willingness to support us in our part of the world so I don't think we're really stepping back from much there I think we're more abandoning a bit of rhetoric that has as fast as used by day the headline version of your suggested force structure is sink the navy start again shrink the army double the Air Force yes unpack the headline right well they the the Navy is in some ways the most startling because I if you if you move to a strategy of maritime denial if you step back from the idea that we're going to be focusing on projecting power by sea then you don't need to begin fibia ships and nor do you need the the big very expensive major surface combatants the air warfare destroyers in the future frigates which are bought at the same which are being bought now whose only really cool role is to defend the amphibious ships so you just don't need them in a strategy of maritime to know you do have and need submarines and you need a lot more of them because submarines are when you get beyond the range of land-based air power submarines are by far in a way the most cost-effective way to find and sink an adversary's ships and the more of them you have the better now my argument in the book is for 24 or 32 submarines that's a very big fleet twice the size of what we're now planning four times the size of what we got at the moment but then again we shouldn't be surprised that we need a different force structure in an era where we're asking our defense course to do something very different from what's done before and and I have an argument in the book as to why you need so many submarines it's to do with how many boats you need in the inventory in order to sustain six or eight submarines on upon in service in the operational areas after a long transit and it's a big number but that's the way our geography takes us in the army a very difficult question Australians for the reasons we've discussed in other sessions have got a very deep emotional attachment to the army but in an era in which we cannot competently expect to be able to achieve the sea control required to deploy the army as an expeditionary force it makes no sense to build an army for high-level expeditionary operations we will need and should have the capacity to deploy our army for stabilization operations particularly our immediate neighbourhood but on those operations the sea space is not contested against any major or even substantial middle power we must expect the sea space to be contested so the Army's role in those situations is at home on the continent now there is an argument that you need quite a big army at home on the continent in order to raise the level of forces that an adversary would need to deploy if they're going to seize and holds a proportion of the carpet let alone all of it and I have some sympathy for that but when I asked myself what what is the most cost effective way for Australia to respond to a lodgment on the continent we do just have to face the challenge that a very big continent with a very poor infrastructure across much of it makes it very hard for us to deploy significant land forces quickly enough to meet a lodgment and I therefore think the best way to do that is more inclined to use just to see us using air and missile forces to attack a lodgment rather than to use ground forces in a traditional but your in pointing is essentially an Australian army that couldn't really go anywhere but Australia that's right not not for high-level operations and and that's a very it's an uncomfortable conclusion to reach but I just make the point that the only reason we've been able to deploy around the overseas so often in our history is that our great and powerful friends have always been the globally dominant maritime power and if that's not true anymore then an army which is designed for expeditionary operations which can't get off shore because it can't because it's security at sea can't be guaranteed is not know me that's going to be any use to us leaving aside the question as to whether the army when it gets there it's got to be big enough to do anything yours arguing that the sort of defense force you're talking about is going to need a doubling of the budget going towards three and a half to four percent after fourth they're all the arguments that in fact what you're just describing you couldn't get it for that it costs even more than that and but it comes I think in a way to a very interesting argument you make and people I think of misunderstanding this the argument that Australia might decide not to do you might decide not to spend the money because it's an awful lot of money but it's an interesting thought that rather than stepping up to spending huge amounts of the budget that you decide to go in another direction what sort of Australia decides not to embrace that sort of fortress Australia big spend on its on its Navy and at Air Force well it's an Australia that decides that the risks that it faces in future the risk of American leadership collapsing and the risk if that happens that China turns out to be not a soft and cuddly benign regional hegemon but a threatening regional hegemon or that Indonesia does it turns out to be when it's the fourth biggest economy in the world and easy to get on with neighbor well that India doesn't become a problem other words in Australia that believes that our geographical situation and the trend of global and regional events means that the risk to us of facing a significant military challenge in the next say 50 years is not high enough to justify spending three and a half or four percent of GDP now that would that that would be a perfectly legitimate judgment to make but a legitimate this depends on how you make that that future risk assessment now that's incredibly hard to do we we have no reliable way of predicting these future things and indeed you could say in some ways that a judgment on Australia's future defense spending is a gamble on the future of the international order if if if we end up with a regional order in Asia in which the United States is playing a much smaller role in which China becomes the dominant power in East Asia in which it chooses to it to exercise its power in an assertive or even aggressive way then three and a half percent of GDP will look like a bit of a bargain if on the other hand we end up with a nazar in which I turn out to be wrong America continues to dominate Asia the way it has in the past China accepts America's leadership the Indians stay in their box then three and a half percent will look like a waste of money we can't know that what we have but we have to make a decision now so we have to make a prudent judgment about about future trends and in the book I I don't actually come down and say we should spend 3.5% of GDP I say that we should consider very carefully where we are because one thing is for sure if a bad outcome happens then the 2 percent of GDP we're spending particularly the way we're spending it now will not leave us with military options to look after ourselves why the course ends up with a very different Australia that thinks about itself very differently whether it doubles the defense budget or decides it's not going to do that what sort of Australia is that well it's in Australia which you might say has finally come out from under the protective shield of Western global dominance you know the country the society that was superimposed on this continent in January of 1788 was entirely based on the proposition of British global maritime preponderance that's why they were here and it was a British maritime power and extraordinary British economy behind it which had thanks to the Industrial Revolution by a bit of a fluke become the world's biggest economy that may Britain powerful enough to discover occupy develop populate and defend the society that was superimposed on this continent and then when British power collapsed American power more or less magically took its place now Australians have got used to thinking that that being protected by an anglo-saxon power with whom we've all of those you know well-rehearsed phrases we get in every osman communicator shared history culture values tradition language etc we just take it for granted that that we will always have a very close alliance relationship with the country which is the world's biggest economy the world's primary maritime power the strongest strategic power in Asia and committed to our defense because that's been true for 200 and something 30 years but actually it's a bit of a historical fluke so for the first time in our history since European settlement we are facing the idea of making our way in in Asia which is not made safe for us by Western power because the rise of China is the end of the era of Western dominance which began with the Industrial Revolution it's as big as that you won't thank you

Channel: ASPICanberra

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Keywords: aspi, hugh white

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Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019