Yesterday the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released a new paper advocating a more resilient Australia. Societal and economic resilience is a topic we've tackled before here at The Interpreter, and it is very encouraging to see it get such systematic treatment from ASPI. Let's hope it kicks along a national debate, and that Ric Smith's homeland security review makes resilience a real priority.

The ASPI paper focuses deliberately on the broad topic of Australia's ability to cope with and recover from all kinds of disasters, not just man-made ones like a major terrorist attack. More...

So Vladimir Putin plans to reintroduce the display of heavy weapons into Russia's traditional Victory Day parade. But perhaps to an even greater extent than in the old Soviet days, these parades, designed to show off military might, actually disguise the weaknesses of Russia's armed forces. So when you see the inevitable pictures of tanks trundling through Red Square, keep in mind that Russia's military remains in a parlous state, and is no threat to anyone beyond Russia's near abroad (it's nuclear forces aside, which are still absurdly large). 

And now for the real reason to write a post about the Victory Day parade: an excuse to link to this.

Regular readers will know I'm something of an enthusiast for what might be called the 'new security agenda'. I'm sympathetic to the idea that we face a number of serious non-military security threats in our future, and that the era of state-on-state conflict may be passing. I also believe that terrorism, in its present form, has been over-rated as a security threat, but that it could metastatize into a far more serious problem.

And yet, columns like this effort from Paul Dibb yesterday, about the need to maintain conventional military capabilities against state-based threats, give me pause*. In part, that's because 'new security' advocates tend to sound a little too sure of themselves when they put their arguments for the decline in 'conventional' war between developed states. More...

This Jane's Intelligence Review exclusive featuring satellite images of a new Chinese underground submarine base is behind a firewall, so I haven't been able to read the whole thing yet. But given the kind of expertise Jane's boasts, I assume their analysis is more sober than that offered by the UK Telegraph. This claim is particularly laughable:

Military analysts believe that China’s substantial build up of its forces is gaining pace but has remained hidden from the world in the build-up to the Olympics.

Keep in mind, this comes in a piece describing the discovery of a new submarine base using open-source satellite imagery. More...

Paul Dibb sets out in today’s Sydney Morning Herald to depict a clash of views on Australia’s strategic outlook, pitting Foreign Minister Stephen Smith against the Director-General of the Office of National Assessments, Peter Varghese. The Minister is portrayed as elevating the importance of non-traditional security challenges like climate change; the head of Australia’s peak strategic analysis agency as focusing on the risks from competition among powerful states. Professor Dibb concludes that the latter view is right, the former is wrong, and Australia must not 'allow our advanced conventional warfighting capabilities to be sacrificed on the altar of the trendy, so-called new security agenda'.

There is both less and more to this than meets the eye. Professor Dibb’s article quotes from a public speech on Australia’s future strategic environment, given by Mr Varghese last December. I encourage readers to make up their own minds by reading the speech in full (pdf). But first, run through this alternative set of equally selective quotes, which could provide the basis for a rather different (though similarly one-sided) interpretation of a very comprehensive presentation: More...

Mike Steketee might be a bit annoyed at his sub-editor today. Steketee has written a perfectly reasonable column about why the last government's anti-terror laws went too far, but the piece is headlined 'Real terror is found in legislation', which suggests a rather more radical perspective (about how our government is the real terrorist) than the piece offers. Steketee doesn't argue that there is no terrorist threat. He simply makes the  point that governments cannot protect us from terrorism at all times in all places, and when they try, they just end up eroding our liberties.

Guest blogger: Raoul Heinrichs, the 2007 Lowy Institute Thawley Scholar, is on a research placement at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

The New America Foundation recently hosted an event here in Washington, moderated by the Arms Control Wonk himself, Jeffrey Lewis, on the nuclear dimension of Sino-US relations. The presenters, Darryl Press and Keir Lieber, have published a number of provocative articles on the topic (see here, here and here). Boiled down, their observations are predicated on the idea that the US has either achieved or is fast approaching nuclear primacy, a condition in which Washington could be very confident in its ability to destroy China’s intercontinental range strategic nuclear forces in a pre-emptive first strike. According to Press and Lieber, the strategic implications of American nuclear supremacy are a double-edged sword. More...

I hope that The Australian's Cameron Stewart is right, and that Joel Fitzgibbon won't use the air power review report, due to land on his desk today, to make a definitive announcement about the Joint Strike Fighter. Stewart reports that Fitzgibbon will keep his options open until next year. As I wrote yesterday for Crikey (you need a subscription to read the whole thing):

...any decision on future air combat capability should be delayed until after the White Paper is published.

Defence is continuously developing its capabilities, and it is unrealistic to expect that it would all be put on hold until the new White Paper is published. But JSF is not just any defence contract: the fleet is expected to cost $16 billion. And unlike the Super Hornet, we haven’t yet signed contracts for the JSF that it would be financially ruinous to back out of. So what’s the harm in waiting until we make a conscious decision about whether we even need this type or size of fleet? More...

Following up the post from last Thurday previewing the release of a video apparently showing construction of a North Korean-designed reactor in Syria, here's some interesting reading.

• You can watch the US government video here, and here's a transcript of the briefing that accompanied its release.
• Arms Control Wonk has technical analysis of the reactor, based on the new information. 
• Steve Clemons at The Washington Note asks 'Why would Syria do this?'
• William Arkin says Israel's strike against the facility was a bad idea.

The Australian is reporting that the air power review report due to land on Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's desk later this week will recommend Australia proceed with the purchase of up to 100 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to replace the RAAF's F/A-18 Hornets. Patrick Walters' report says the recommendation will 'fundamentally shape' the upcoming Defence White Paper, which does rather support my argument that this review should have taken place after the White Paper was published. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

The US media is reporting that the CIA will later today release video evidence of North Koreans helping to build a Syrian nuclear reactor. Israel bombed the site last year. This Washington Post report has a summary of what's actually in the video, while the New York Times piece focuses more on the political implications, including some anonymous quotes that suggest the State Department's chief negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, is on the nose with his bosses, Secretary Rice and President Bush.

Although this video will add new drama to the issue, the US has believed for some time that Pyongyang was assisting Damascus in the nuclear field, so the video may not add anything substantially new. Still, the power of a 'caught red handed' video might just tip the Washington balance in favour of those who say North Korea is not to be trusted and that the Six-Party Talks are a fools errand.

But that's just the Washington view. Goodness knows how Pyongyang will react.

UPDATE: Useful background in this CFR interview with Clinton Administration arms control official Gary Samore.

Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review has responded to my post of yesterday. I suspect we're actually in furious agreement here, in that we both feel there has been too much emphasis on military solutions to political problems. My point was just that this emphasis is not surprising and may even continue, given that recent military failures have not been too catastrophic by historical standards, and that there have been a few successes as well. Note also that I meant 'military force' in the broadest sense, to include peacekeeping, though Grunstein seems to be talking more narrowly about what Pentagon types now call 'kinetic' operations.

Another reason to suspect that military activism will continue is that so many countries seem to be preparing for it. More...

World Politics Review’s Judah Grunstein makes an argument I’ve been toying with on this blog, about the excessive militarization of national security policy. But the case for reducing the profile of the military in foreign policy is perhaps a bit tougher than Grunstein allows. His argument against the excessive militarisation of foreign policy is built on the evidence from the Bush Administration's wars:

The outcomes in both Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that military power remains a blunt instrument, with unpredictable and costly consequences. Even given the narrowest and most clearly defined missions, it rarely achieves unassailable outcomes...The problem is not so much that we haven't given (the military) what it needs to accomplish the task, although that is certainly the case, but that we've asked it to do too much to begin with. More...

Rodger Shanahan says Defence spending on counter-terrorism (CT) is relatively modest, and that new spending after 9/11 went mostly toward raising another Tactical Assault Group* and an Incident Response Regiment. He doesn't mention helicopters, but the Howard Government bought more of those as well, in part to support SAS CT capability.

Rodger says 'few would argue' with the continued relevance of these capabilities. Well, count me among the few. More...

Sam's suggestion that counter-terrorism money from the ‘hard power’ Defence budget be reallocated to the ‘soft power’ DFAT budget because they reaped too much reward from the Howard Government’s focus on military solutions to the terrorist threat is a bit on the simplistic side.

While there was an immediate injection of funds to boost counter-terrorist capabilities (largely in Special Forces capabilities such as an East Coast Tactical Assault Group and an Incident Response Regiment), few could argue that they are not relevant today. More...

While the issue of Pacific labour mobility has gained traction with the election of the new Labor Government and was also featured at the 2020 Summit, another related but separate issue is the recruitment of Pacific Islanders into the Australian Defence Force. The issue was first raised last year by Hugh White and Anthony Bergin, and got a run again last weekend in a Hamish McDonald piece in the SMH.

As with all grand schemes, the flaws in the argument rest in the details. More...

A reader writes: 

Am I the only one who's concerned defence issues didn’t seem rate to rate at all in the discussion on Australia’s place in the world — that out of 13 working groups in that session, empowering and protecting women got special attention but one of the largest outlays of government expenditure didn’t? In a year where the Government is developing a new Defence White Paper, and with all the public consultation that are going to take place, its seems a bit weird that the 2020 Summit didn't take the opportunity to say what the White Paper should consider. Even discussing the utility of armed force and the how, when and why of military intervention would have been useful discussions to have.

Weird, maybe, but understandable. More...

Two interesting and related developments on Israel's strategic future in recent days: first, the US has agreed to connect Israel to its ballistic missile early warning network. Israel already has probably the most comprehensive missile defence system of any country in the world, but when it comes to shooting down high-speed ballistic missiles being fired from potentially just a few hundred kilometres away, fast and reliable data is crucial, so this agreement should help secure Israel further against missile threats.

Second, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made the blunt declaration that Iran 'will not have nuclear capability'. Israel's policy of supporting international efforts to halt Tehran's nuclear program has not changed, but this statement does again suggest Israel will take unilateral action should those efforts fail. More...

If you've just discovered The Interpreter thanks to this short interview I did with AAP, the blog post you are looking for — questioning proposals for the Government to have new powers to monitor email — is here. But I treat the concept of resiliency in counter-terrorism policy in slightly more detail here and here. More...

Chris Skinner writes to us about defence policy, with my response below:

I think your naiveté is breathtaking in declaring ‘...what if things go really well in the region over the next decade?’ as a basis for any sort of policy development, let alone that of national security! Where have you been over the last few decades? The reality of national security is that prudent investment is made to deal with possible risks arising, and not only to deal with such eventualities but also to influence their likelihood. The projection of powerful capabilities actually discourages a putative adversary from adventurism and provides a basis for serious negotiations of treaties and agreements. Weakness has never been a basis for satisfactory foreign policy. More...