We have teased out some issues which will effect the future of the ADF, including force posture, force structure, maritime strategy, and the need to preserve human skills as the ADF ends operations in our region and Afghanistan. Jeffrey Grey provided a particularly timely reminder that the human capital of the armed forces is more than the sum total of the wages bill. Of course, the state of defence funding has featured prominently, as too has the impact of technology on the ADF. As technology and complex systems become more important in Australia's defence than the actions of individual soldiers, surely much of the way Australians think about our defence force and defence planning will also need to change.

A renewed focus on the importance of defence diplomacy as a way to shape and smooth regional tensions and draw out opportunities for cooperation was illustrated in posts on the thorny issue of  future Australian involvement with the military in Myanmar, an issue under close consideration in Canberra.

But, disappointingly, we've not been as successful as hoped in eliciting views from the wider Australian community on how they think about Australia's defence challenges. The public conversation on Australia's strategic and defence policy still takes place among a small group, very well known to each other. It remains difficult to persuade business or community leaders to engage on the issues that preoccupy the strategic mafia, often due to fears about their 'uninformed' perspective. Albert Palazzo forcefully reminded us that public discussion on the future of war is not normal in Australia. We have been fortunate to have had thoughtful contributions from a few authors within Defence, each expressing personal opinions of course.

In closing, let me thank the Department of Defence for partnering in this venture. We have discussed strategic and defence issues on The Interpreter for several years. We often receive private feedback from defence warriors and bureaucrats alike. This is the first time we have received financial and intellectual support from the Department to explore these important issues. Responsibility for comments in this series of course remain with the authors.

The market for defence ideas is growing rapidly in Australia. Twitter and Facebook are opening up forums for the military, their families, and the wider defence community. Our friends at ASPI are doing a great job growing their blog The Strategist, the Kokoda Foundation is working hard to foster networks between young strategic leaders, and ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre is developing the thinking of the next generation of leaders in the military.

But the national public conversation on strategic and defence issues is yet to fully tap into the immense talent pool within the services and defence bureaucracy. I hope that is soon to come.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

So two questions arise. First, how seriously do we need to take such high-end threats to our trade? They used to be a major issue in bygone times, and they loom large in classic conceptions of naval strategy which remain very influential today. But that was based on the experiences of an era of 'national' trade, when it made strategic sense for European powers to attack one another's colonial traffic.

It is now a very long time since trade worked that way and the globalisation of the past few decades has pushed us further from that model still. This is a big topic, but let me just baldly assert that economic interdependence makes threats to trade from substantial maritime powers extremely unlikely except in a general war in which all trade would be massively dislocated. Short of such a war, for example, who would gain from attacking Australia's overseas trade, or anyone else's, and who would lose?

If I'm wrong, how could we best respond to such attacks? No conceivable Australian force structure would allow us to protect even a tiny fraction of Australia's trade from attack by a substantial naval power. But any adversary would be in the same position. His trade would be just as vulnerable to our attacks as we would be to his. So our best defence is attack. That means we should invest in sea denial to protect our trade, not sea control.

Second, and very briefly, James says we will need sea control to mount and sustain a sea denial campaign. He may well be right. I'm not sure that sea denial against a major adversary is achievable for Australia; support and replenishment for our forces is one of the key question marks. If sea control is in fact unachievable for Australia against a major Asian power operating in our maritime approaches, then Australia may prove to be undefendable against such an adversary.

 I'm not arguing that sea control would not be nice to have, but before we invest in it we need to know that the aim is achievable. If it's not, we need to ask what can be achieved without it. My point about sea denial is that it's better than nothing and I suspect that is the alternative.

Finally, the underlying point about this debate goes to the way we think about designing our forces. We cannot make robust decisions about what kind of ADF we need unless we get the clearest possible idea of what exactly it needs to be able to do, and what exactly is the best, most cost-effective, way to do it. I think it is important that Navy does much more to explain in specific operational terms what the capabilities it wants to acquire will be able to do, where and against whom, and then explain how that serves Australia's strategic objectives cost-effectively. 

 Photo Lauren Black/ADF.

For example, where I think we still differ fundamentally is that I cannot accept a Defence of Australia construct (DoA; long asserted to be the basic mission of the ADF) which is simply based on territorial defence. It would imply that the country is in both economic and military terms self-sufficient and self-sustaining on land. It fails to understand that our nation is a system of systems and that there are interdependencies which need to be managed. Some of those interdependencies are maritime and have direct implications for military capability.

The construct of denial which Hugh advances as the mechanism for facing down a capable adversary posits an air campaign based on our northern airfields and a subsurface campaign whose basing will depend very much on the endurance of the boats selected. Both campaigns will require resources to sustain them. Most particularly, the air campaign will require very large amounts of fuel, even before other material needs are factored in. If the movement of that fuel to the north cannot be protected, then the campaign will end very quickly indeed. Much of that fuel will have to come by ship and those ships need protection.

Let me be very clear at this point that I am not advocating a particular tactic or tactics to achieve that protection. What I am saying is that the defence of sea transport (and thus a degree of sea control) is fundamental to the Defence of Australia. DoA is (and I agree with Peter Leahy) a very unlikely scenario indeed, but it is the one on which we base our force structure. It is also one that Hugh White himself has repeatedly endorsed. If I can turn some of his words back on him, those who suggest a purely land sustained DoA construct 'have to assure us that it is going to work and explain how'. Remember: if there's no fuel, there can be no strikes at the adversary.

I can envisage very few contingencies in which Australia will not be operating in a coalition; our efforts at sea control for supply will almost certainly be as part of a collective. But I believe that, in our future environment, while such coalitions will be very much maritime in nature, they won't necessarily be simple US-Australia combinations. Discussion too often defaults to that as the most likely option. I think the years ahead will see much more integration with our neighbours.

Where I am in full agreement with Hugh is on the need to engage more closely with Indonesia and to continue the development of our relationships in every way we can. Furthermore, when we consider our future force and where we can make a difference, we need to consider what we should be able to bring to a regional coalition. Strategic weight in a South East Asian context is not the same thing as strategic weight in North East Asia and Australia really can make a difference.

Finally, I share Hugh's (and much of the readership's) concerns over the affordability of a sufficiently capable force structure. But I would point out that advanced capabilities can have a quality all their own, even in the low intensity contingencies Hugh mentions. Over-match is often the best way to ensure that a second class opponent has no way of achieving first class results. There are always limits to what you can have as a military force, but in the Australian situation, I think that the arguments for supporting all three Services remain compelling.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

A couple of quick examples can be seen in the war game's findings around 'adaptive capability development' and 'technology hugging'.

Adaptive capability development refers to a group's ability to acquire, re-purpose or build combat capability during the course of a conflict. While the war games took place in 2025, tangible examples of this ability can be seen in recent conflicts. These include the large scale production of improvised explosive devices in Iraq, the Tamil Tigers' ability to develop air power and submarines, the Libyan rebels' impressive workshops that have churned out a wide variety of DIY weapons (see video above), and Hezbollah's ongoing technology duel with Israel.

'Technology hugging' allows non-state actors to leverage public infrastructure that is difficult to disrupt for either technical or public interest reasons. The Taliban's recent use of GPS and Google maps to plan attacks and their use of Facebook for intelligence and targeting as well as the much discussed use of social media during the Arab Spring provide simple examples. The fact that combatants would have constant communication capability through radio, mobile phones, VoIP and email was such an implicit assumption in the war game that it didn't even rate a mention.

The Australian Army has been ahead of the curve in identifying trends and military concepts like those described above – the Army's Future Land Operating Concept provides an excellent basis for undertaking operations in the future. The key question, however, is whether Army will be given the opportunity to actually implement that concept in a meaningful manner. Strong concepts and excellent training will likely not be sufficient for dealing with technologically advanced, irregular adversaries.

There are two problems with imposing a 'boom-or-bust' cycle on the armed forces. The first is the loss of capabilities that drastic reductions bring directly and inevitably in their wake. 'Planned' reductions — in the sense that these are managed on a rational basis with a clear understanding of their likely impact — are rarely anything of the sort. Once lost, capabilities are difficult and expensive to reacquire assuming, of course, that the strategic situation allows us the luxury of time to do so.

Equipment is part of capability but it is not a synonym for it. As James Goldrick has pointed out on The Interpreter, 'the sort of "train spotting" which sometimes accompanies discussions about equipment and platforms, particularly jet fighters' adds nothing very much to consideration of the defence options we face and must choose between.

The second deleterious effect is largely unquantifiable but all too apparent to observers, at least in hindsight. The human capital of the armed forces is more than the sum total of the wages bill. Savage cuts in personnel numbers of the kind likely to be imposed on the army, the most manpower-intensive of the three services, degrades not simply our capacity to do things but our knowledge and understanding of how to do things. The economic historian George Peden has noted that the original Ten Year Rule was not intended 'to hamper the development of ideas' in the interwar British Army, but a climate of relentless resource deprivation had precisely that effect not only on the services but upon industry as well, which when war came in 1939 was simply not able to meet the requirements for expanded production with the rapidity that decision-makers in the 1920s had assumed.

Nor do those outside the services really appreciate just how complex human military systems are, nor how long it takes to acquire real capacity in them. In reflecting on the first 18 months of the First World War the British Official Historian, Brigadier Sir James Edmonds, noted the real lesson of the war: raising and fielding effective infantry battalions was the task of months, but effective Staffs were the product of years, and it was inexperienced and deficient staff work that explained many of the operational difficulties and disasters encountered in the course of that year, and beyond.

Australian defence policy is too often the victim of bad national habits of mind, and of too many cosy assumptions uncritically acquired. Australians are not natural soldiers (any more than anyone else), and the ability to train, command, plan and administer in war is learned and taught, something which takes time.

There are two words that ought to be sufficient to deter attempts to erode further the already badly-diminished resource base of the ADF: East Timor. To understand their full import, it is first necessary to dispense with the self-congratulatory rhetoric which accompanies public consideration of the operations in late 1999 and recognise just how near-run a thing INTERFET was, and that responsibility for that parlous state of affairs lay firmly in the squeezing of service budgets and 'peace dividend' assumptions prevalent in the 1980s and for most of the 1990s.

Photo by Flickr user Son of Groucho.

The first of many Thais to graduate from Australian military training was Saiyud Kerdphol in 1959, who became Thai Supreme Commander and the architect of Thailand's successful counter-insurgency campaign in the 1970s and early 1980s. Thailand's Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn attended the Royal Military College in the 1970s, as did Surajit Shinawatra, a relative of the current Thai Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Shinawatra did his officer training in Australia in 1961 but died on operations in Thailand; his name is engraved on the Officer Cadet School Honour Roll in the grounds of Duntroon.

In recent decades, Australian military engagement with Thailand has spanned a range of activities including Joint Australia-Thailand Defence Coordination Committee meetings, high level reciprocal visits, navy-to-navy talks and exercises, and air force, special forces and peacekeeping exercises.

When Australia was desperate for an ASEAN partner to deploy into East Timor during the crisis in September 1999, Thailand was the first country to volunteer. General Peter Cosgrove's deputy in East Timor, General Songkitti Jaggabatra, went on to become the Royal Thai Armed Forces Chief of Defence Forces. His successor in East Timor and UNTAET Commander, General Boonsrang Niumpradit, also filled the chair as Thailand's CDF.

Since then, bilateral activities have continued, but with Australia distracted by wars in the Middle East, and Thailand facing its own domestic political and security challenges, insufficient attention has been paid to this important bilateral military relationship. Even so, seven Thai students are at the Australian Defence Force Academy with others at the Defence College at Weston Creek. The growing alumni network provides a convenient and useful connection with a wide range of influential military officers.

The Royal Thai Marine Corps is one of the best marine forces in South East Asia; it relies largely on US equipment and training, which makes it a useful partner to help Australia incorporate the new amphibious ships into the ADF's repertoire.

Australian planners and policy makers need to recognise that working with marine forces such as Thailand's to test and refine Australia's emerging capability will enhance regional cooperation at the same time. One way to achieve this would be to join Cobra Gold, the jointly led US-Thailand annual military exercise, which has an amphibious flavour though it also focuses on developing and testing regional humanitarian assistance and disaster relief capabilities. Australian regional security partners such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia already participate in this exercise. 

The Thais have no interest in mustering overt international support for their insurgency in the southernmost Malay Muslim-dominated provinces but they welcome ongoing training opportunities that ensure common professional standards as well as generating personal links that foster trust, respect and mutual understanding. Such training has helped enhance professional standards and reduce the incidence of damaging human rights violations in the insurgency affected southern provinces.

With further defence budget cuts in the offing, the danger is that short-sighted budget priorities will preclude reinvestment in such important regional relationships. It is to be hoped that the importance and utility of engaging with partners like Thailand will be seen as self evident.

Photo by Flickr user Jessica Eriksson.

PS: I note that our current Chief of Navy, whatever his presumably substantial merits, seems to have been everywhere but submarines, according to his bio on Wikipedia.

PPS: My glance at Vice Admiral Grigg's CV on Wikipedia caused it to occur to me that Australia's sea denial currently consists in practice of Operation Resolute, which includes border protection and anti-poaching tasks, undertaken it appears by frigates (Grigg's bio) and patrol boats (Navy website) and for which I assume submarines are not particularly useful.

As with any new initiatives seeking funding, and particularly in light of current fiscal restraints, decision makers need to understand and agree on the benefits to be realised from an investment. And given the rate of technological change and the number of system vulnerabilities discovered every day, the ADF's cyber capabilities, defensive and offensive, will require dedicated and constant attention. This will be difficult to achieve and sustain if the ADF has not fully defined what it means by cyber warfare and how it will be used to serve Australia's interests.

There are several definitions of cyber warfare, one of which was provided earlier this year by Defence Signals Directorate's (DSD) Deputy Director of Cyber and Information Security Mike Burgess in a speech to the Old Crows Association. He defined cyber warfare as 'an act...intended to degrade, destroy or deny computer accesses and systems' and added 'a true act of cyber warfare would have to be potentially lethal, instrumental and political'. 

Clarke and Knake's definition is also worth looking at: 'Actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.'

Information stored on computers has become a key national asset and an element of our national power. Our ability to create information, store it, secure it, analyse it and harness it to make decisions has to be a strategic objective for the ADF that transcends the traditional boundaries of strategic and national security.

The ADF's ability to respond to cyber security events has matured since the 2009 launch of DSD's Cyber Security Operations Centre, which is Australia's senior cyber security agency, tasked with identifying and responding to cyber threats of national importance. However, cyber security is just one of a quartet of capabilities required to conduct cyber warfare.

The first of these three other capabilities is the ability to conduct offensive cyber attacks or counter-attacks with the intention of damaging, disrupting or gaining unauthorised access to another state's civilian and/or military computer systems, information networks and critical infrastructure. 

The second is to develop a strong cyber deterrence posture to discourage an enemy from attacking by denying them success or punishing them in kind. Thirdly, there are also the obvious strategic and national security benefits from being able conduct all forms of strategic and day-to-day business operations even when under sustained cyber attack through steadfast cyber-resilience.

If the ADF decides it still wants to pursue its cyber warfare ambitions in light of its analysis of Australia's strategic environment, there are some challenges to overcome. The first is cyclical in nature. To achieve cyber-deterrence by denying an enemy success with their cyber attacks requires strong perimeter defences and a high degree of resilience.

Deterrence by punishing an enemy requires the ADF to make the enemy believe it can conduct retaliatory cyber-attacks that will cause similar or greater levels of return damage. If you prescribe to the notion that to spend your time focused solely on defending yourself in wartime means you'll likely lose the war, then cyber resilience must mean more than just being able to defend yourself to maintain the status quo. Effective cyber resilience means the ADF will have the ability to not only absorb an enemy's cyber-attacks and continue to operate critical systems, but also to have the ability to conduct offensive cyber attacks to reduce the number of attacks against critical ADF and Australian information systems.

A second challenge is the misalignment between the actions required of Defence in cyber warfare, principally by DSD, versus DSD's prescribed functions as codified in the Intelligence Services Act 2001. Depending on the interpretation of the law, this could leave non-uniformed DSD personnel subject to prosecution under Part 10.7 of the Crimes Act 1995 and or Division 476 of the Cyber Crimes Act 2001.

The international principles of war apply only to uniformed personnel and not civilians, who make up a substantial portion of DSD's resources. This could make non-uniformed personnel targets for retaliation and liable for prosecution under international law. These legal complexities could hamper Defence's ability to recruit the personnel required to undertake cyber operations. 

Defining a business case and developing doctrinal guidance for Australia's strategic cyber capabilities before the next White Paper is crucial. In an increasingly tight fiscal environment, it is very difficult to justify capability investment decisions regarding the financial, human and technological resources required for developing, sustaining and continually enhancing the ADF's cyber capabilities when you haven't yet defined what you need the money for.

Photo by Flickr user Pixelsior.

Firstly, consider the long history of strategic mistakes that have been made by highly educated militaries in the past. There have been extraordinary technical developments over the past decade – how can we be certain our commanders will always draw the correct conclusions about the way the new equipment should be used. The obvious example is the way the professional French army disastrously failed to comprehend how their (better) tanks should have been used in 1940.

The second reason not to dismiss White's critique lightly is his intimate acquaintance with the Australian political process. Force structure is not developed in isolation by the military. Money is needed to fund all the capability options and to maintain their edge. The current evidence from Canberra is that no politician, of either political party, is ready to fund even the inadequate capability the forces have at the moment. Dreaming of an ideal conflict, where we'll have just the platforms we require for a swift, decisive victory is no substitute for accepting that the strident demands for expenditure restraint aren't likely to end at any time soon.

It's difficult to believe that, in a decade's time, we'll still possess the margin of military superiority that Goldrick believes we have at the moment.

They were right, but didn't take into account the genuine intention of the Tatmadaw leaders to reposition the country as a more liberal, market-oriented and more democratic state that was genuinely interested in fostering greater links with the rest of ASEAN and the world, and in so doing, reducing Burma's dependence on its northern neighbour, China, and fostering economic growth and development. The result has been a series of reform initiatives the pace of which has left critics and many commentators and government policy formulators floundering.

In Australia's case, there have been a number of initiatives in response, most visibly the recent visit to Myanmar by Foreign Minister Bob Carr.

Even so, there remains considerable reluctance to proactively engage in the area of defence cooperation.

To date, Australia's Defence Cooperation Program (DCP) has not been extended to Myanmar and no decision has been made even to establish a defence attaché office in the country on a permanent basis. (The United States has maintained one there for years and even a number of European countries – which are much further from Myanmar than Australia –are weighing up their options to return.)

Elsewhere in ASEAN, the DCP has helped foster a network of relatively liberal minded and well placed senior military officers who are well disposed towards Australia. For little cost, the DCP has been a remarkably effective tool for enhancing regional security ties across South East Asia and the Pacific, further cementing regional security and stability, and fostering a constructive view of the place of armed forces in democratic societies. Myanmar stands as the glaring exception.

At the moment, the defence attaché in Thailand is cross-accredited to Myanmar and visits periodically. But not being based in Myanmar, he is severely constrained in terms of insights, access and engagement.

Access to senior military figures is key to better understanding and to influencing their thinking. Insights into the thinking of senior Tatmadaw officers are critical to deciding what can be done to foster relations and reinforce the trends towards reform, democratisation and enhancement of security and stability; this includes arrangements with ethnic and armed separatist groups on the country's periphery.

To generate constructive engagement a permanently posted defence attaché needs to be established in Myanmar. Further, prompt action is required to engage the Tatmadaw, offering them placements on courses aimed at furthering their understanding of the place of armed forces in civil society and the international laws of armed conflict.

Delegations could be encouraged to visit Australian military training and education institutions, providing opportunities for discrete and respectful engagement to encourage fresh thinking in a constructive way without being culturally-insensitive or patronising (a sure way on ensuring they don’t pay any attention). Placements on Australian courses could be offered, much as they are for other ASEAN countries at the Australian Defence Force Academy and Staff College in Canberra. 

The time for action and innovative thinking is now.  

Photo by Flickr user eGuide Travel.

My position is that we will most probably not be able to achieve sea control against a major or even middling Asian power and that ultimately sea denial is enough for our most important strategic needs. James argues that we need sea control and that we can get it.

First we need to clarify the context. Sea control is easy when no one is seriously trying to take it away from you, so James is right to suggest that we can and do achieve it in normal peacetime conditions, or against adversaries that lack substantial maritime forces of their own. But these circumstances are not relevant to the choices we have to make about the ADF's more advanced maritime capabilities, because we do not need those capabilities to achieve sea control in peacetime or low level stabilisation missions. Our investment in maritime forces is driven by the demands of operations against highly capable adversaries. That is what we need to focus on.

The second question then is what can we sensibly expect to achieve against such adversaries over the next few decades? My pessimism about our ability to achieve sea control is based on what seems to me to be the profound asymmetry between the resources needed for sea control and sea denial. James is more optimistic.

A blog post is not the place to explore our differences in detail, so let me just pose to James some simple questions:

Looking ahead 10 years, would the capabilities we are now planning provide sufficient levels of sea control – from our own efforts, without relying on the US – for an Australian government to, for example, dispatch Australia's new amphibious ships full of troops through waters which China was actively trying to deny to us? 

Would doubling the scale of our forces make any significant difference?

 Likewise could any conceivable Australian force structure provide the sea control required to protect Australia coastal shipping, or convoy Australia's international trade, against a determined major power adversary?

If there is a fair chance that the answer to these questions is no, then it is unwise to spend such a large share of Australia's defence budget on capabilities which only make sense if the answer is yes.  Complex though the issues might be, advocates of sea control have to assure us that it is going to work and explain how.

And what if a country of Australia's strategic weight cannot achieve sea control against a major power? My argument is that sea denial still does a great deal for us. It would allow us to prevent even a major power projecting force against us or our neighbours and allow us to retaliate in kind for attacks against our shipping. It might not be as good as sea control, but it's a lot better than nothing and it is likely to be all we can achieve. As things stand we are building a navy which will not be capable of doing either.    

Photo by Flickr user Capt. Tim.

What are strategic probabilities in our region that we can reasonably bet on? For example, there is a high probability that the ANZUS alliance will remain the lynchpin in Australian defence policy, with future Australian operations supported and enabled by the US, and Australia acting as a junior partner in US-led operations. Similarly, it is probable that military capabilities in Asia will continue to grow, and long-standing political and territorial rivalries will endure, creating opportunities for escalation and incendiary behaviour.

 On the other hand what are the strategic possibilities? These include war in the South China Sea or on the Korean Peninsula (either of which could potentially draw in Australia); the relative decline of Australian-US power in Asia as SE Asian states grow in population, economy, military capability, and influence; or conversely, the economic stagnation of China as the basis for unchallenged US supremacy in the Asia Pacific region for the foreseeable future.

Then there are the strategic surprises; the gamechangers. These generally have global implications, think the collapse of the USSR, or 9/11. My colleague and I have outlined the potential rise of unsanctioned non-state cyber actors (UNCAs) as a flashpoint for state-based warfare – a phenomenon that could present a strategic surprise for Defence planners.

If the strategic environment tells us what the ADF should look like, what it should be able to do and what kind of operations it is likely to engage in, how then, might we structure a force that reflects our predictions about the future strategic environment based on their level of certainty?

As Jim Molan rightly points out, what the ADF should be and do as defined by the strategic environment means little if the government chooses not to invest accordingly. By prioritising capabilities (and defence spending) based on the level of strategic risk they mitigate, we can reduce at least some of the uncertainty in Defence planning.

 Photo by SXC user pbase.

To be fair to those who attempt to understand Australia's strategic situation, much of the debate and many statements on defence policy have been simplistic. For example, too much of the public justification for the Air Warfare Destroyers (now known as the Hobart class of guided missile destroyers), which White criticises, has been couched in terms of their ability to protect amphibious operations and not enough about what they and the remainder of the Navy's surface forces can contribute to a whole range of other maritime operations and contingencies.

 Furthermore, not enough has been said about the symbiotic relationship that will apply between the destroyers, the Navy's other ships and the new Wedgetail aerial early warning and control aircraft, or between all of them and the JORN over the horizon radar system, which White espouses, or with other remote sensors and platforms such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the projected P8 maritime patrol aircraft.

It is also not clear from White's discussion, how submarines and conventionally powered boats depend on intelligence and targeting data from the greater system to be truly effective.

Perhaps what is most needed in Australia's defence debate is more attention to and acknowledgment of the fundamental complexity of the issues at stake. Neither 'big hands on small maps' nor the sort of 'train spotting' which sometimes accompanies discussions about equipment and platforms, particularly jet fighters, really help.

Photo ABIS Richard Cordell/RAN.

During an initial conversation with ASPI's Mark Thomson, I proposed that for every conflict over the past 100 to 200 years, one could quantify the timing and severity of the battle and other germane variables (e.g. the participants). This would then supply one with a hard 'time-series' of data on both the incidence and impact of wars.

Trying to predict individual conflagrations decades down the track is near impossible. I suggested we could, however, use this time-series of data to project the 'probability distribution' of conflicts Australia prospectively faces over the next, say, 25 years.
 
In today's AFR column, I argue: 'Defence spending is about provisioning against adverse contingencies. Private insurers don't try to anticipate specific natural disasters. They take as much long-term data as they can access and, with conservative calibrations, employ it to describe the expected frequency and severity of crises.'
 
There are well-documented simulation methods defence researchers could use, which randomly 'draw' from a historical time-series to project future paths over any given period. These exercises are repeated thousands of times to get a multiplicity of potential trajectories, which allow one to build up a realistic distribution of outcomes.

ASPI's Thomson explained to me that the University of Michigan had, in fact, done exactly what I proposed in the first part of the exercise outlined above, with its 200 year Correlates of War database. This contains granular information on every intra-, inter- and non-state conflict since 1816.

But to date, defence researchers have not done much, if any, forecasting using this data. Instead of quantitative analysis, we get subjective historical investigations of discrete conflicts and supposedly expert verbiage on what might unfold.

In a 2012 paper, Swiss academic Thomas Chadefaux concludes:

'Unfortunately, the prediction of war has been the subject of surprisingly little interest in the literature, in marked difference to a wide range of fields, from finance to geology, which devote much of their attention to the prediction of extraordinary – black swan – events such as financial crises or earthquakes.'

So I have three ideas for the defence community to consider.

First, more research needs to be done on forecasting the distribution of military risks Australians face. This is well within the capabilities of universities and defence. By disclosing the true empirical probability of war, policymakers might also attenuate the tendency of younger generations to under-value defence insurance by extrapolating out from their own peaceful, albeit brief, existence.

Think-tanks could sponsor competitions on the subject. They could, for instance, leverage off innovative yet inexpensive global research platforms such as Kaggle, which are increasingly used by top companies for research and development. A small, say, $20,000, prize could be offered to the team that produces the best conflict forecasting model using historical data. Kaggle explains:

'Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems – the world's best data scientists then compete to produce the best [predictive] solutions … The competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.'

A second idea is to evaluate 'aggregations' of expert opinions. That is, to capitalise on the 'wisdom of crowds'. Research has shown that the 'average' forecast is often more powerful than the individual estimates. In the US, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has sponsored a four-year competition for statisticians and computer scientists to extract predictive political signals from public opinion.

Stakeholders could run quarterly surveys of hundreds of experts asking them to quantify the risk of wars and regime change. The explanatory power of these benchmarks could then be appraised over time and used to contextualise individual predictions.

There are many precedents for this in financial markets. Surveys of manufacturing activity, business and consumer confidence, and economist forecasts all offer statistically useful insights.

A third idea is the construction of research-based 'risk indices' that provide early warning signals of dislocations emerging.

Dr Chadefaux created a real-time risk index via weekly analysis of online news media for language that has been historically associated with conflicts. He finds this measure is able to anticipate 70 per cent of large-scale wars with few false positives.

It sounds like something we should be doing.

Photo of US Marines in 1943 by Flickr user Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections.

It is worth asking the people of Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory how much of their supplies arrive by sea and whether there are many alternatives in the wet season. Are they to be sacrificed in a 'sea denial' only strategy for the defence of Australia? How many air movements would be required to substitute for the sea transportation that moves more than 44,000 tons of cargo annually from Darwin to other parts of the Territory?

The relative statistics of Australian trade by volume show the other aspect of the nation's sea dependence. In 2009-10 more than a billion tonnes of cargo moved across Australia's wharves.  It is only the low volume, very high value cargoes that can and do go by air; the energy costs are otherwise unacceptable.

Sea dependence exists in other activities. Although this has rarely been made clear to the public, the coalition campaign in Afghanistan has been sustained by surface transport, much more than it has by air. The vast majority of supplies needed for the land forces in the country have gone by sea to the nearest convenient (and safe) ports and then overland into theatre.

Finally, the assertions about the difficulties of sea control fail to recognise that such control may be limited in both time and space to the absolute minimum required to defend what it is essential to defend. It could be just a single ship with its cargo. This is where the historical narrative within White's article goes astray because what was possible in previous eras before the torpedo, the mine, the submarine and the aircraft was command of the sea: an absolute condition in which the stronger power had the ability to do what it willed. Even this was rarely achieved and weaker powers often found other ways to contest the maritime environment.

Maritime strategists have long accepted that the sea is a permanently contested domain. Such recognition has not stopped us using it. In doing so, we have to take risks and accept losses; this is a reality nearly a century old and one that naval forces accept as part of their operational doctrine.

In part three the importance of recognising complexity.

Photo by Flickr user fdnx.

In other words, the requirement for sea control is not necessarily or just about projecting military power, it is also about sustaining an economy by getting vital supplies to where they are needed: into, out of and around a country as well as allowing the movement of both exports and imports for trade and profit. In other words, sea control has a domestic aspect as well as being about our survival.

Even if we consider a defence of Australia scenario alone, this fixation on sea denial, which is central to White's thesis, fails. If Australia's general dependence upon the movement of shipping for exports and imports for trade purposes were to be discounted – and it cannot – the nation's substantial dependence upon imported petroleum, to name only one commodity, is still something that has to be borne in mind.

The fuel and lubricants that Australia cannot produce or refine come by sea. Nearly 38 million tonnes did so in 2009-10 and the imports of refined products will only increase, given the decision to close Sydney's Kurnell oil refinery.

Furthermore, the use of an airborne anti-ship campaign posited by White, as at least part of the sea denial defence of Australia, will have to be based on airfields in our north. For the rate of effort required by aircraft to do the job, the substantial amounts of fuel required will have to get to the north largely by sea, just as they have to go by sea, along with a vast range of other materials, for the normal commercial and civil activities of Australia's northern ports, cities, towns and settlements.

Thus, even if we were waiting for some aggressor to invade, we will still need to achieve the degree of sea control necessary to supply our northern outposts. Not to mention our cities in the south.

In part 2, why Australia can't abandon the sea.

 Photo LSIS Helen Frank/RAN.

The report, by an Australian brigadier investigating the death of a teenager and civilian injuries in Oruzgan province during a patrol of Australian and Afghan troops in November 2010, found it was highly unlikely that Australian troops caused the casualties, but was unable to say who did: either the ANA or insurgents who had fired on the patrol.

As yesterday's post revealed, what the inquiry does say is that there was confusion over who was in charge of the patrol – Afghans or Australians – and over what the ANA's rules of engagement were.

The Afghans appeared not to have any standard operating procedures and, if they did have rules of engagement designed to avoid civilian casualties, the Australians didn't know what those Afghan rules were.

While the report has suffered at the hands of zealous censors, a close reading raises the suspicion that the ANA's use of weapons that day was undisciplined and uncontrolled. This, it seems, is what creates the moral risk for foreign forces which have clear rules of engagement and well-practiced battlefield procedures, while serving with the ANA who appear to have neither.

A civilian trying to decipher this report needs to navigate rivers of black ink, but it is implied that the Australians struggled to control the ANA's fire and that the ANA's behavior risked creating 'a significant element of "reputational risk" for the ADF'.

The 'reputational risk' isn't explained in the public version of the report, but it warns the risk will be greater as the ANA increasingly takes charge. It says: 'As the ANA progressively take the lead, the ability of ADF members to influence their mentored ANA forces will be diminished, and the prospect of actions/outcomes that are not always consistent with the ADF's approach, will increase.'

Of course its relationship with the ANA isn't the only 'reputational risk' facing the ADF in Afghanistan. It has, after all, overcome the misgivings of some of its officers to nurture a close alliance with the notorious local strongman and now Oruzgan police chief Matiullah Khan (pictured above), on the grounds that he is a reliable 'security partner'.

By the time Matiullah or the ANA finally take the lead, most of the ADF will have gone, taking with them what little Australian scrutiny and interest there is in Afghanistan.

Photo by FLTLT Michael McGirr/ADF.

Despite the promiscuous use of censor's ink, the report reveals previously unacknowledged risks in the army's mentoring task in Afghanistan. It predates the spate of murders by Afghan troops of their foreign mentors that has compounded the danger.

The civilian casualties were inflicted when an Australian-Afghan patrol was attacked by insurgents on 2 November, 2010. Locals blamed 'foreign' troops for killing the teenager as he tended a garden. It's likely Afghan soldiers also blamed Australians, but this was censored when the report was released last month, almost two years after the incident and 16 months after the report was submitted to the then chief of joint operations, Lieutenant General Mark Evans.

The report finds it highly unlikely that the civilians were shot by Australians, only one of whom, a private, used his weapon, firing three shots at an armed insurgent. The inquiry was unable to determine if the Afghan National Army or insurgents were to blame, but it's clear that ANA troops fired until the same private ordered them to stop. It appears he wasn't the only low-ranking Australian solider to take a leadership role.

The fact that junior Australian soldiers gave orders to Afghan troops raises a basic issue: who's in charge when Australians go on patrol with Afghans?

In this incident, it appears no one was; or, rather, that several people were. The patrol was initially commanded by an ANA sergeant, then an ANA lieutenant turned up and took charge. Yet the Afghans were out-ranked by the senior Australian present, a captain, who had ultimate control of  'all of the assets'. Just what these assets were is redacted.

The report finds leadership 'confusion' did not contribute to the civilian casualties. But it warns:

Uncertainty in this area leaves room for confusion during contact which is obviously undesirable. There should be no doubt in the minds of ADF (and ANA) members in regard to command status within a patrol.

If there was confusion over who was in command, there was also uncertainty over the rules under which the ANA fought, or if they had any rules at all. While the report found the Australians adhered to their rules of engagement, they did not know what rules the Afghan were following. Nor was the inquiry able to obtain copies of any relevant ANA rules.

The report makes nine recommendations, all partly or wholly redacted. What's not censored is the unsurprising recommendation that leadership be sorted out before troops go out on patrol.

The ADF says all the recommendations have been implemented. Maybe, but this report shows that the mentoring program was still beset by dangerous ambiguity two years after it began.

Visiting Afghanistan this week, Defence Minister Stephen Smith issued another statement declaring the program is making progress and the ANA are on track to take the lead sometime over the next 12-18 months. On the basis of this report, that's when things really could get nasty.

In part 2: other issues raised by the report, including the risk to the ADF's reputation in serving alongside the ANA.

Photo by Spc. Nevada Jack Smith/ADF.

Second, space is a profoundly 'dual use' environment in which military and broader national security interests compete with civilian and commercial activities as a matter of course. Defence approaches to space must take account of the interests and concerns of a broader constituency that have current and vital interests in secure and assured access to space-based services and data.

Third, some parts of the space environment, especially the low Earth orbits (LEO) where many Earth observation satellites are located, are increasingly contested and congested. There is an urgent need to develop a much better understanding of the location of space objects (including working satellites and space debris) to avoid collisions, which only create more debris. The radio spectrum, including frequencies favoured by satellite operators, is under increasing pressure as the world rapidly transitions to one of ubiquitous mobility in which demand for bandwidth is rising exponentially.

The 2009 White Paper, unlike any of its predecessors, placed considerable emphasis on the importance of space to the Australian Defence Force. It proposed:

• To establish a cadre of space specialists in Defence;
• To allocate priority to the development of a space situational awareness capability (SSA) in Defence, which is happening through JP3029;
• To work toward the acquisition of a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite at some point in the future; and
• To keep an eye on developments that could indicate that other nations were developing space weapons.

Since the  2009 White Paper was published, Australia and the US, and Australia and the UK have agreed to work together to strengthen SSA capabilities globally. Defence has also undertaken innovative approaches to the acquisition of satellite communications capability by investing in the US Wideband Global System (WGS) and, more recently, by buying a so-called 'hosted payload' which is to be launched on a commercial communications satellite.

Three parts of Defence have prime carriage for space matters:

• Strategy Division is the keeper of the Australian-US relationship at the heart of which are jointly operated US-Australian ground stations in Australia;
• DSTO, helped by the intelligence community, maintains in-country understanding of technology developments in space in order to reduce the possibility of strategic surprise; and
• RAAF because the Chief of Air Force is the designated capability manager for space in Defence.

The Implications for White Paper 2013

Given this background, what might the 2013 White Paper say about space? The following five points are proposed:

1. Note developments since 2009 and commit to their continuance with special attention to building stronger links with civil space interests in Australia;
2. Place the interests and responsibilities that Defence has with respect to space firmly in the context of the forthcoming national space policy, in particular recognising the dual use nature of space of which defence equities are an important but not the only part;
3. Affirm Australia's commitment to the establishment of internationally agreed confidence building measures, such as a 'space code of conduct', in order to strengthen space as a safe environment for those who seek to launch and operate satellites, noting that non-spacefaring nations are also beneficiaries because of their dependence on systems such as GPS.
4. Determine to accelerate the development of a cadre of space specialists in Defence with some specific, modest investments including support for capacity building initiatives in Australia's universities and the broader research community;
5. Continue to maintain a watching brief on technologies and programs that could identify when space weapons are being developed so Australia may counter these developments through diplomacy whilst also assessing their impacts, if they were to be developed and used, on the fighting ability of the ADF.

In summary, the 2009 White Paper recognised space as a domain of warfare about which Australia knew little and needed to know more – quickly. Significant steps have been taken since then, however, there is more to be done and there is a time imperative. This leads to the conclusion that the 2013 White Paper should plan to accelerate the acquisition of space understanding in Defence, primarily through building human capacity in the first instance.

Picture by Flickr user blaster219.

Australia's strategic interests are more focused than our national security interests, they inform other policy choices, and therefore allow the government to determine relevant cost-effective capability priorities. This is important because these decisions provide the foundations for strategic objectives: what the government requires the Australian Defence Force to be able to do using armed force to protect those interests.

Of fundamental importance is strategic risk. Effective defence policy aligns the core elements of objectives, capabilities and cost in a way that offers a transparent and sustainable balance between an analysis of perceived strategic risk and threats, and the investment in resources required to outweigh them. Therefore, capability should focus primarily on those risks to our security from the use of armed force by our adversaries.

It is in matching this policy with strategic circumstances that we encounter a tyranny of dissonance between the theory and the practical. That is to say, a disjunction between strategic theory and military reality. This theme is not without precedent, there is a trend for new or cost-cutting governments to portray to the public that Australia faces new threats, but then reassure them the force built to deal with the old risks will meet the new.

To resolve this, Australia requires a new white paper nested within a National Security Strategy framework that identifies which of the wider national security objectives will be strategic; those for which armed force will be a principal policy instrument. India's foreign and strategic policy document, Nonalignment 2.0, is an example of such a framework. It contains a clear strategic objective: emergence as a maritime power.

Consequently, the key to the NSS it to first acknowledge that Australia faces many kinds of threat to its national security, of which military threats are only one, and second, that while armed force will support the response to most of these threats, it will also have a leading role in some specific and highly demanding circumstances. These circumstances are the correct focus of defence policy. Furthermore, it seems strange that Australia seeks influence with a United Nations Security Council position and yet we are unable to provide a more detailed national security strategy than that of the National Security Statement, released in 2007.

It follows, then, that the government has to decide on the strategic challenges it wants the Australian Defence Force to be able to meet and then design the appropriate force structure. This means making the harder choices about the kinds of forces we need.

The balanced force requires review and transformation into the focused force: focused on capabilities that can achieve our strategic objectives most cost effectively. The shape of Australia's future force structure must maximise Australia's strategic weight for every dollar spent, that is, policy alignment of objectives, capabilities and funding.

Australia is facing one of the greatest strategic challenges in our history and, as US strategic primacy in our region fades, Australia must aspire to build the strategic weight of a middle power and shape how the region evolves in line with our interests. Moreover, we need to align our national strategic objectives and clearly identify our military strategic objectives. For the Australian Defence Force, a fundamental transformation is required, to that of a focused force to meet this intent. 

Finally, this must be done in a manner so as to minimise the risk or intensity of strategic competition between major powers and retain a balanced US interest in the region. Our Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, confronts the same conundrum: to serve Australia's abiding interest in US power while accommodating China's growing prerogatives.

We need to initiate policy now to shape our own immediate strategic circumstances. 

Photo by Flickr user expertinfantry.

• How much should be spent on defence (implying structure, materiel types and numbers) should be decided by the strategic environment.
• When it is spent should be decided by the relationship between the time a threat is likely to materialise (warning time) and the time it takes to develop defence capability (defence preparation time).
• How much is actually spent is decided by governments after considering all priorities and how much risk is acceptable.

In a period of strategic uncertainty it is necessary to take the emphasis off the materiel inputs to defence (ship, planes, tanks and personnel), decide on a defence output, and to stay away from fanciful contingencies adopted to justify a particular level of funding. In uncertainty, the focus must be on what defence can do in a generic, conceptual way, not on what defence has. Here is an example of a defence output.

But Sam's question betrays one of the really big problems the commentariat faces in contributing to the defence debate. Consider his last para:

The answer to this dilemma (strategic uncertainty), it is sometimes argued, is just to give up on prediction altogether and develop a 'balanced force', one which can respond to all sorts of unknowable contingencies. But that's not a neutral choice. A jack-of-all-trades Defence Force will be master of none.

Strategic uncertainty does not mean giving up on prediction at all. If it is accepted that a balanced force is part of the answer to strategic uncertainty, predictions based on informed judgment will determine how balanced the force must be, how fast the strategic environment will change, and the conceptual, generic nature of the unknowable contingencies.

A balanced force, if it is derived from the demands of the strategic environment and shaped by judgments or predictions on warning time moderated by knowledge of how long it takes to develop defence capability, will be a capable force. The aim of such a force will be to give realistic options to government, one of which might be to commit to small wars with relatively little warning, or to expand if necessary to handle larger contingencies.

Now suppose that we go through the methodology above and come up with the balanced force that is appropriate to meet the demands of the strategic environment, but the government decides it cannot fund it. That does not negate the need for a balanced force structure derived from the uncertain strategic environment, it merely gives guidance as to how to manage the sub-optimal force structure that government underfunding forces on the nation. Underfunding can make a sub-optimal 'balanced' force look quite strange, but there can still be logic.

If a balanced force of a certain size and shape is needed yet all parts of it cannot be funded, that also does not justify a force structure disproportionately based around narrow capabilities such as subs or fighter aircraft. The strategic environment determines what is needed, and government decides what it can afford. A great failing of current thinking is the erroneous belief that what government decides it can afford determines what the force should be.

But the most important point to make about Sam's last para is that it seems to imply that underfunding is inevitable. The way a force becomes incapable of doing anything well is by irrational underfunding, and the result is an unbalanced force.

Force 2030 was a balanced force, never perfect, but based on the then current demands of an uncertain strategic environment. It was never a force designed to fight a land-based Asian power in the defence of Australia. But it would have been a great core from which to expand should this have been necessary, or to provide forces to lesser contingencies.

The Government has decided not to fund it, but strategic environment has become even more uncertain since 2009. It is not likely to become more certain or less threatening to match Australia's politically determined funding level.

Photo by Flickr user pyo.

But as General Hurley explained recently, it is no longer acceptable to use the bad apples excuse to explain misbehaviour. This has been the rationalisation that senior leadership, serving and retired, have rolled out over the last 40 years.

Only recently the Sexual Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has released phase 2 of her Review into the Treatment of Women in the Australian Defence Force. The wide-ranging inquiry reported on a male-dominated culture where women's career progress is 'significantly impaired by career obstacles, poor understanding of women's needs and sometimes poor behaviour'. Elizabeth Broderick is reported as saying:

To be a strong force into the future and a first-class employer with a first-class reputation, the ADF must address the problem of a shrinking talent pool, the significant cost of unwanted departures, the lack of diversity among leadership and the unacceptable behaviour sometimes faced by women...Increasing the representation of women and improving their pathways into leadership goes to the very heart of the sustainability and operational effectiveness of the ADF.

A key challenge the ADF faces as it modernises and keeps pace with civil society is cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is by definition a challenge to cultural sameness. An institution of 86% men, of which around 90% are Australian-born, will struggle in different ways to increase diversification. That is to be expected. And planned for.

For mine, the military justice system, and its policing and investigative capacity, sits at the heart of people issues in the ADF. As personnel of difference begin to grow within the ADF, and as women are placed in frontier occupations like the infantry, their passage must be aided by a strong military justice system. This includes associated practices such as improved complaints reporting and robust recording procedures.

An across-service, professionalised policing system with standardised operating procedures, training, resourcing and equipment constitute the basis of this direction. The ADF has neglected service policing for too long, and there are cultural mindsets that inhibit effective and collaborative policing across the services.

The White Paper must take the opportunity to reinforce the importance of people and cultural reform. The Broderick Report is an early indicator of the scope of attention required. A respectful and equitable organisational environment for women and people of diverse backgrounds might appear secondary to 'real' concerns like strategy and operational effectiveness, but they are the bedrock upon which such activities can be operationalised.

Photo by Flickr user Leonard John Matthews.

There's an obvious analytical answer. Work out the potential threats and how serious an existential threat they pose; analyse the required responses; and then allocate money and resources appropriately.

In the past these issues have effectively been resolved by the major institutions that deal with guaranteeing our security. Organisations like the ADF, police, aid agencies and DFAT have all been involved in attempting to justify their share of what might be described as the 'security budget allocation'. Similar internal bureaucratic political imperatives operate even within the larger government departments: thus the army fights for it's share of limited resources from the other services, and within the army, artillery fight for a mechanised howitzer while the infantry fight for 120mm mortars. Thus far the system's worked relatively well.

Over the past decade, however, two significant challenges have emerged to business as usual. This is the critical factor that your question brings into focus.

The first issue is the nature of the threat. This is morphing from conventional military operations and taking on radically new forms. The second is financial. Previously the Australian economy was (comparatively) so much greater. This meant that the 'hard decisions' never needed to be made because there was always enough money to go around. Now that's not the case.

Our current organisational methods of resolving strategic uncertainty would be capable of dealing with either of these shifts, individually. Taken together they require a sophisticated policy response. The formation of the National Security Committee of Cabinet was an attempt to deal with the evolving nature of the strategic threat. Unfortunately, the NSC advisors position will always remain emasculated until they receive some form of budgetary oversight, together with the ability to influence the allocation of resources.

If we accept the Chief of Army's assertion that debate is not stifled from within the ADF, then there must be some other explanation for the lack of  involvement by military officers. The explanations left to choose from are not encouraging – either ADF officers are inclined to remain disengaged, or they do not have the capacity to offer valuable strategic input. If either possibility is true, then the ADF may be carrying far more significant problems than mere censorship. It may be that what Dr Palazzo generously refers to as an internal cultural preference for 'doers over thinkers' could also be described as a combination of anti-intellectualism, institutional arrogance, and lack of strategic perspective within the ADF.

While the Chief of Army claims that there is no overt censorship burdening ADF officers, he does not comment on how organisational culture might be stifling debate. In a small military where opportunities for senior officer career progression are very limited, cultural norms are extremely powerful in controlling behaviour. Serving officers might not engage publicly because it is simply not the done thing. However, it is encouraging to hear that Lieutenant General Morrison is heartened by the amount of freedom available to him to comment publicly on military matters. It will be further encouraging to see him inspire his officers to do the same.

The economic and political sustainability of China's great experiment is looking the shakiest it has been for a decade or more. True, even if Chinese growth stalled now, its strategic heft would be formidable. But Chinese power is winning neither friends nor trust in Asia, making this a less-than-auspicious time to talk about accepting a Chinese sphere of influence. And of course a worsening of Chinese internal fragility or weakness would prompt new kinds of anxiety among the neighbours.

There is tremendous debate and confusion about whether the US can bounce back quickly and sustainably. Most important for the present analysis, there is a question over whether it can come back strategically in Asia. But with a more judicious mix of force and diplomatic coalition-building than it has managed for some time, America is still uniquely placed to influence outcomes globally and in Asia.

In India, almost all the submerged obstacles to the rise of the second Asian giant – corruption, policy paralysis, violent internal unrest — seem to be surfacing at once. Meanwhile Russia, Japan and Europe show little sign of arresting their various kinds of long-term decline.

The place of second- and third-tier players in the global order, from Brazil to South Korea, Singapore to Sweden, Vietnam to Turkey, is still in flux, as Ruchir Sharma's book Breakout Nations reminds us. In a world of uncertainty and fragility, it is worth remembering that weakness is only relative and that the staying power of stable societies and resilient smaller countries can have its own often under-rated quality.

Closer to home, Australia may be recognising a need to deepen ties with Indonesia at the very time when that country and its leadership may turn out to be as friendly to Australia as they can ever afford to get. Around the near-neighbourhood, from East Timor to the South Pacific, there is every prospect of the kind of enduring or worsening state weakness that will lead to calls for renewed Australia security intervention. A full-scale stabilisation operation in Papua New Guinea should of course remain every Australian defence planner's nightmare.

In the Middle East, as my colleague Anthony Bubalo reminds us, there are at least three potential looming security crises, one of which – an Iran confrontation or war – could involve an expectation of an Australian deployment. Even as Australia 'transitions' out of Afghanistan and supposedly joins America's eastward (and our homeward) pivot, the prospect of our forces returning to West Asia again under the banner of the alliance remains genuine.

And a security crisis in East Asia – from the Korean Peninsula to China's perilous maritime edge — remains plausible.

At a global systemic level, too, there is major change and the multiplier effect of complex interactions of trends: the new-found confidence and rising expectations of middle classes, the destabilising impact of social media, new patterns of migration, and the as-yet-uncharted impact of new kinds of manufacturing technology which could yet alter the future of the big economies.

All of this has huge potential to affect Australia's strategic environment and security interests. The fact that these interactions and impacts will be exceptionally difficult to assess does not mean our defence planners can ignore them and focus sharply on reductionist projections of US-China competition.

This leaves me with two parting judgments (and yes, I am, perhaps conveniently, about to take a holiday).

First, while striving towards the Government's promised 2013 Defence White Paper, Australia's strategic policy community would do well to leaven its reading of contending linear and prescriptive accounts of China-US competition, however bold and readable they might be, with geoeconomic and geopolitical forays that go well beyond the comfort zone of traditional security thinking. They could do worse than start with Bremmer and Sharma.

Second, while there are no easy answers about how to prepare for complex uncertainty, one thing is certain: now is a bizarre time for an Australian Government even to contemplate winding back defence and security spending.

Photo by Flickr user katieharbath.

I don't think this is a sensible course of action given that current security challenges don't call for larger or more expensive armies. Security is no longer a game of sheer numbers — it's a multifactorial game encompassing environmental, cultural, national and transnational aspects. Modern security has to manage all of these factors.

For us in Australia to follow in our ally's steps would be a costly mistake, because there is no valid reason why we should spend more on military expansion. Defence economics analyst Mark Thomson disagrees too with an increase in military spending in Australia, and his argument rests on various premises; a very important one goes that:

The expansion and modernisation of the ADF over the past decade provides an adequate base to build a force to hedge against risks that might (a) arise in the fragile states in our immediate region, (b) emerge from or arise within Southeast Asia, or (c) require a contribution to a US or UN operations further afield.

This couldn't be more spot-on. Nevertheless, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that, although I agree with Mr Thomson in that we shouldn't spend more on the ADF, I would also like to raise the following:

a. Mr. Thomson's proposition seems to only cover threats arising from outside Australia, while domestic ones are out of the equation, which can be even more dangerous. And,

b. His argument overlooks non-military risks, and there's no doubt that these will undermine nations in the years ahead.

Perhaps the single most relevant non-military threat is related to resources. Future conflicts over resources — maybe armed ones — are likely, and while it'd be interesting to elaborate more on the different kinds of resource issues that could lead to struggle in the future, unfortunately this is not the appropriate format for that analysis. Off the top of my head some of them could be: threats arising from an increase in demand of resources, or threats caused by restricted supply.

What we could definitely start doing here at home is increasing financial outlays in areas like: environmental research, renewable energy sources to decrease reliance on foreign oil, and more development programmes in poorer countries to diminish economic migration.

An increase in Australia's aid budget is a great opportunity to start off and bring more stability to the Indo-Pacific region. In summary, focusing on security purely in terms of military spending is to ignore the integral and complex picture of modern global security.