Putin’s forces might not progress far beyond the Dnieper River. And yet the invasion will reshape the world in which the next Australian government operates.
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Tag: Defence and security
Ethics and war: the Ukrainian tragedy
Russia’s President Putin rightly bears the greatest moral and legal opprobrium for the appalling death toll, atrocities, and destruction in Ukraine. But once the war reaches its conclusion, retrospectively the contribution of others will come under closer scrutiny.
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Habitual bipartisanship is toxic to good defence policy
In Australia, bipartisanship over defence has mutated into a democratic pathology. A courageous new Defence minister committed to transparency and participatory democracy is required.
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More than an acronym: AUKUS must be an election issue in 2022
When the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines are delivered, they will be expensive white elephants. And this strategically unsupportable and inordinately expensive project will distort defence policy for a generation.
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Why the West must tread carefully in assessing China
To either over-emphasise or understate the challenge presented by China is perilous. So Is Paul Dibb right to suggest that the West is failing to see China’s weakness, much as it failed to understand the weakness of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s?
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Magical thinking: nuclear submarines and Australia’s Maginot Line of the imagination
The prospect of nuclear powered submarines has generated a lot of magical thinking in defence and strategic policy circles. But the incontrovertible fact is that submarines that don’t exist cannot either defend or deter.
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Is ASPI advocating outsourcing defence policy to the gun-runners?
Is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute advocating that Defence policy should be outsourced to weapon system manufacturers? Commercial organisations responsible to shareholders, often foreign interests, should not be responsible for identifying and pursuing Australia’s national interest.
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Australia’s strategic conundrum – is America declining?
The key judgement Australian decision-makers need to confront concerns the sustainability of the United States’ great power status. Is America reaching a tipping point; an inflexion point where the upward great power trajectory it has been on for over a century is reversed?
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The NATO communique highlights Europe’s strategic concern: Russia
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison might have gone to Europe with the Indo-Pacific region “is the epicentre of renewed strategic competition” mantra on his lips, but the NATO communique reflects the reality that it is Russia, not China, that fills Europe’s strategic horizon.
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Warriors, war and Mike Pezzullo’s ANZAC Day message
What are the ‘drums of war’ that senior Australian public servant, Michael Pezzullo, can hear? His words have been understood as echoing anti-China warmongering found among some commentators and hinting strongly at the current hysteria around Taiwan. So how did the Australian government deal with a senior public servant stepping into the political limelight in this way?
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What should Australia want from a Biden National Security Strategy?
If President Biden produces a National Security Strategy in 2021, Australia should hope for a major shift away from that of President Trump. But not an uncritical return to the 2015 version of President Obama. If stability and a workable international system are the outcomes the Biden Administration seeks, then three deeply interwoven issues need to be given serious attention: leadership, democracy, and sovereignty.
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No power in the Lowy Asia Power Index 2020
The Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index 2020 is a substantial undertaking that purports to map “out the existing distribution of power as it stands today, and tracks shifts in the balance of power over time” by ranking “26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment”. However, a misunderstanding of the concept of power, and some underlying subjectivity and biases, undermines its usefulness.
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Today’s risks and the history of war: recognising the unknowable
Is a great power war in prospect? The study of war provides insights into the preconditions for conflict and an awareness of the unpredictable nature of war. It shows that great power wars can be as unpredictable as they are transformational. The winners are hidden from sight at the inception, and the losers risk everything. If Australian leaders assume they could come out unscathed on the winning side of an East Asian war they are taking a huge gamble on behalf of Australian citizens.
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Australian strategic policy: why we need a robust public debate
Only a select group of voices is heard most often and most loudly on the subject of Australia’s strategic policy. This creates a false sense of certainty around what is a speculative and inexact policy area. The policy choices, and the connection between strategic policy and force structure, deserve to be intensively examined and validated through public debate – not least of all because the opportunity cost of defence investment is huge.
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AUSMIN 2020: confirmation of Australia’s abandonment of strategic autonomy?
Australians should not take comfort from recent government statements around the Australia-US Ministerial Consultations – claims that Australia makes its own decisions, its own judgments, in the Australian national interest, in order to uphold Australia’s security, prosperity and values. Reassuring words are the slippery province of diplomacy. Strategic policy is founded in force structure and force posture.
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The rationale for Australia’s 2020 Force Structure Plan: A 2040 war?
There is a mismatch between the urgent need to respond to the supposed recent deterioration in Australia’s strategic circumstances, and the timeframe for investments proposed in Australia’s recently-released 2020 Force Structure Plan. Bringing capabilities into the ADF inventory within the next 20 years doesn’t seem to be the priority for government, despite the apparent deterioration in the strategic environment.
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A replay of the 1930s: Fact or fearmongering?
The Australian Prime Minister compares the current strategic environment to “the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s”. If he believes current global circumstances are comparable to those that preceded the Second World War, the response in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update is inadequate. If he doesn’t, his references amount to fear-mongering.
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Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update: no talk of war here
There is little to quarrel with in Hugh White’s assessment of the uncertainties in East Asia. His counsel to the government on the way forward for strategic policy, on the other hand, is less satisfactory.
To embark on a major expansion of Australia’s military forces is not the way to protect Australia.
Rising powers: grand strategies, balance of power and Australia
Grand strategies are the territory of great powers, while other states see their strategic independence incorporated into another state’s grand strategy. The comfort that Australia embraced while enclosed in an American grand strategy can’t last, and hard choices lie ahead. In the shifting power balance, Australia will need to recover its autonomy.
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Australia’s strategic quandary: political leadership and the abandonment of strategy
Australia’s strategic quandary emerges from its status as an ally to a great power. If it abrogates its responsibility to set national policy aims by joining in a coalition in which one great power antagonist determines the goals of the war it cannot claim to have a strategy. It cannot claim to be linking Australia’s national priorities to the military actions. Its fate would be in the hands of its great power ally.
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