Defence Force Structure - Looking in the wrong direction again!

Guest post by Andrew Farran

The Lowy Institute's blog, The Interpreter, is running a debate on future defence policy with particular attention to force structure. It is a polite wrestle among those representing entrenched military prerogatives and like-minded academics and bureaucrats. Very little lateral thinking is revealed in these courteous exchanges.

The starting point is the view that defence policy is again at a watershed, as in the 1970s. That may have been the case then but the opportunity was not taken to leap a generation and anticipate the 21st century when that was quite possible. There were voices then that could have provided the intellectual basis required to skip decades of wasted expenditure on large capital items that did not even accord with the agreed strategic basis at the time. That basis was that Australia was unlikely to be invaded within the next generation or two as has proven to be the case. The outlook is much the same today but the Lowy discussion regresses to the same old issues as listed by defence planners in the 1970s - how many strike aircraft, how many submarines, how many tanks, etc. to defend a country that would not be attacked - at a steady cost of some 3% of GDP.

Former deputy secretary of defence, Alan Wrigley seeks now to revive the 1970s 'core force’ concept which “would provide an expansion base of military and technical skills that would greatly reduce the time to build a more capable force as any credible threat began to emerge”. The trouble with that was it presupposed that the military skills required necessitated the acquisition of expensive platforms in numbers beyond what the strategic basis could justify. Spread across the services, as it had to do so that each service got its “fair share”, the country acquired a force structure that was over equipped for action that never took place and under equipped for the low-level but lethal campaigns (Iraq and Afghanistan) respective governments got our forces into. The exceptional campaign was East Timor for which the forces lacked critical capability, especially in logistics. 

A later defence deputy secretary, now Lowy and ANU, Hugh White, doubts that the 'core force’ concept remains a sound basis for defence planning today as it was developed in the 1970s in response to big shifts in Australia's strategic environment in the later 1960s and 1970s. As now, there had then been big shifts in Australia's external environment. But defence planning misread the implications of those shifts and the 'core force' concept was largely a rationalisation for getting what the services wanted, not what was needed. There was no "new world" for the forces.

Overlooked in their recall of the 1970s were two significant developments, neither of which fully achieved their potential. First were the reforms introduced by defence secretary Arthur Tange designed to lay down clear lines of authority as between the defence department and the services vis-à-vis the Minister, and minimise turf wars and obstructionism in these areas. The second was the Dibb Report which sought to tailor force structure to a realistic assessment of defence needs in that changing strategic environment. The Report itself was far sighted but its implementation fell foul of the very issues Tange had tried to overcome - and the 'core force’ concept was introduced to placate all parties even if it became an expensive anachronism.  

Lowy readers are being regaled with mind-numbing numbers of required submarines (12), JSF aircraft (50 or 100), legions of tanks - with little or no explanation as to the whys and what-fors.

Hugh White however (to his credit) warned that Australia is in danger of repeating the same mistakes this time around when he wrote: "There is no plan for how the ADF will be used to achieve Australia’s strategic objectives. And that is because no one has decided what our strategic objectives are. In other words we do not know what the ADF is supposed to do. That is why there is no systemic way to decide how many of anything we need. But even worse, it means there is no systemic way to decide what we need at all”. So one can safely say that the services will seek the toys they want and rationalise their wish lists under some fancy new but vacuous strategic concept.

So how in outline might a defence force structure be shaped to reflect the realities of Australia's strategic environment over the coming decades?

Given that invasion is an unlikely contingency, and given the digital revolution in military technologies (especially with guided missiles), we need to refocus and adopt a force structure that takes advantage of area denial strategies because of the relative vulnerability of attack-mode platforms.  

The potentially 'big bad wolf' in the region is of course China. The issue here is how far China might go in enforcing its resources claims in the South China Sea or, if provoked, by further claims from Taiwan for independence. The former would concern most Southeast and East Asian states, the US and Australia; the latter, the US essentially alone (or do we have some undisclosed diplomatic understanding with the US about this?). The question for Australia would be how far to go in supporting those affected parties and with what resources? Any strategic 'commitment' to a US response should surely differentiate between the respective situations and require on our part a clear choice based on the perceived 'national interest' - not just another ‘alliance insurance' premium or token deployment. 

Conflict between the US and China would have negative consequences for both. As 'rival' powers they have an extraordinary degree of inter-dependence which is likely to be on-going. What might disturb that is a political breakdown internally in China when a foreign distraction (i.e. conflict) might suit a struggling regime. The international community should encourage China to stay on track and conform with the norms of global governance. Current trends in multilateral diplomacy and international law would reinforce this endeavour.

Closer to home there is the potentially (actually) unstable arc of Melanesian and Polynesian states around our northern periphery, which may call upon interventionist forces to restore order and maintain a peace (when there is a peace to keep) - or on humanitarian grounds. Specifically there may be problems with PNG but these would more likely be in the nature of police rather than military actions (e.g. Solomon Islands). Our best expenditure has been on SAS-type forces. We may need more of these along with their requisite materiel support (helicopters, amphibious craft, etc.) where versatility and rapid response is imperative.

Surely we will not again indulge in out of area Iraq/Afghan type operations - unless it be a peace-keeping exercise unequivocally sanctioned by the UN or in support of 'civil society'. The capabilities we have developed in East Timor and Afghanistan (the one positive from the latter) could prove useful, militarily and politically, and be very much in our interests to strengthen. Safeguarding our maritime approaches will remain a primary task for which we are presently poorly equipped. At a routine level, early warning surveillance (aerial and other) and high-sea state fast patrol craft are necessities. Then, to monitor, deter and resist less benign intrusions, there is a role for light frigates and submarines (also for intelligence operations). Currently we lack the necessary equipment and skilled manpower for reliable submarine deployments but a new generation to follow the troublesome, near obsolete Collins-class vessels might rectify this deficiency in time (a generation). A role for guided-missile carrying catamarans (as being developed by China) would be interesting!

Air surveillance and deterrence is another formidable issue, because of its expense, our dependence on the overseas supply of aircraft, and the uncertainty of their availability. Will the F35 Joint Strike Fighter ever be available, and at what cost and for what purpose? This question is not being honestly addressed.

There was no reason why similar requirements, and issues, could not have been foreseen back in the 1970s. The broad geo-political trend has long been apparent. All this time Australia's physical security has not been endangered. Yet we have spent billions of dollars on capabilities that either have not been required or would not have been operational had they been. Meanwhile we have lost too many good soldiers, killed or maimed, in conflicts that have lacked credibility and acceptability to the Australian public - or can be justified in terms of protecting the national interest. 

In short we should leave out-of-area conflicts of others to them; be clever and focussed in our diplomacy; clear headed about our national interests; and develop a force structure that is relevant to those interests with more attention than previously to cost efficiencies and effectiveness (administrative and military).

About the Author

Andrew Farran, is a former diplomat (Australian) and academic (Monash University Law School). Diplomatic postings included Pakistan (including two visits to Afghanistan), Indonesia, and the UN General Assembly. He was an adviser to the Australian Government during the GATT/WTO Uruguay Round and a former vice-president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London. He is also a publicist and company director (Australia and UK).

Confident, optimistic and forward-looking?

“We are a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people”, Julia Gillard told Kerry O’Brien on the ABC’s 7.30 Report last Monday 26 July.

That is not the way we strike me these days. We have done some confident, optimistic and forward-looking things, but most of them were a long time ago: establishing universities in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1850s, building the Sydney-Melbourne railway line, universal suffrage, female suffrage, the secret ballot, the Flying Doctor Service and more recently the Snowy Mountains Scheme. None of them was ever tested with a focus group.

A contemporary example of a forward-looking project is the National Broadband Network.

But consider the following:

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people ever tolerate an election campaign of the irredeemable irrelevance of the one we are enduring at present, with both leaders evading the issues of substance and drowning us in trivia?

- Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people get itself into such a state about a tiny trickle of asylum seekers? The prevailing attitude hardly has the heroic ring of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty:

 ...”Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore....

Rather, we are the huddled masses, cringing (most of us) on the southeast corner of one of the richest and most sparsely populated countries in the world, waiting with Prime Ministerially understood anxiety for the next boat to appear over the horizon 5,000 km to the northwest.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people require to be reminded constantly by its political leadership that they are “doing it tough” but that the nanny state will ease their “cost of living pressures”? Of course there are people experiencing hardship in every country but these remarks are not addressed to them – we do very little for the genuinely poor, there are not enough votes in it. These remarks are addressed to the employed Australian middle class, the ones with houses, cars, kids and an array of consumer durables.

The notion that the employed Australian middle class is “doing it tough” is just plain laughable. Peer over the wall into the outdoor prison that is Gaza and you will see people who are doing it tough.  Go to a variety of working class neighbourhoods in the big cities of the United States, or visit a camp for Afghan refugees in Pakistan or Iran. Take a look around Calcutta or Bombay, or the slums of Manila.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people be incapable of responding to climate change, even when opinion poll after opinion poll indicates that the public regards it as an important issue that needs to be addressed?

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people be as chronically incapable of investing in the nation’s infrastructure as we seem to be?  We snivel and whine about the urban sprawl and about congestion in our major cities, but when forward-looking people proposed construction of high speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne, or even just from Sydney to Canberra in the repechage event, the forces of darkness were hell-bent on killing the idea stone dead.  The French were forward-looking when they began the development of their high speed rail network, an investment that over time has transformed the way the country lives and works. To borrow a phrase from Nike, they just did it, rather than spend 25 years talking about it.

High speed rail could have a similar transformative effect in this country, opening up realistic options for providing for the inevitable growth of the nation’s population, and killing off short-haul aviation like the busy Canberra-Sydney route. 

And did I mention that governments of all complexions have been searching for the site of a second Sydney Airport since the 1940s, and that Mascot was only ever meant to be an interim location for an international airport (see the Parliamentary Library backgrounder here; see also my December 2009 post Déjà vu on second Sydney airport. Ennui too.)? I guess we could say that the governments of the 1940s were forward-looking; they knew that we needed a new Sydney Airport. It’s just that no-one got around to building one.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people sustain over decades one of the lowest national research and development spends in the industrialised world, and ruthlessly suppress curiosity-driven research?  We regard R&D as a regrettable cost. Forward-looking people regard it as an investment. They know that not every research project will produce a patentable widget within the next twelve months, and they know that a proportion of it will not bear fruit at all.  But they know that the modern world was built upon a foundation of research, and much of the most important of it had no clear commercial return in view, just the notion that there are some things we should find out more about.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people achieve less than the OECD average expenditure on education (between the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Lithuania on the 2005 data published in a recent OECD report) and a mediocre performance on tertiary education?

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people regard the expectations of its major alliance relationship as being unexaminable, beyond discussion, even as trillion dollar budget deficits and the rise of other military and economic powers indicate that the military role of our ally must decline?

As a society I think we are looking pretty pathetic at the present time. I will begin to think we take ourselves seriously when we start to get serious about investing in education, research and development and transformative infrastructure (not just palliative care like too little too late tollways), and when we start to get serious about our changing strategic environment.

And we should remember that cannot expect others to take us more seriously than we take ourselves.

Why are we in Afghanistan?

In this morning’s edition of The Sunday Age, 11 July 2010, Prime Minister Gillard was quoted as saying, in relation to the death of yet another Australian soldier:

There will be Australians who are asking themselves in the face of this loss why as a country do we continue to pursue our mission there.

We pursue that mission because Afghanistan is a safe haven for terrorists. I believe Australia, while mourning these losses, will understand our continuing determination.

 She had better reconvene the focus groups and get a better line on Afghanistan than that one.  The fact of the matter is that, while some terrorists have had training at Afghanistan during a certain period of history, Al Qaeda can do very nicely without Afghanistan, thank you very much – they have “moved forward” into the tribal areas and the big cities of Pakistan. If we want to eliminate terror cells in our ally Pakistan, with its almost 200 million people, we have a big job ahead of us.

Afghanistan was never more than a convenient base of operations for a certain number of the world’s disparate terror groups. Carlos the Jackal didn’t need it, Osama bin Laden operated from Somalia for a time, the Lockerbie bombing was hatched in Hamburg, a number of terror episodes have emanated from the Yemen, and the bombers of the London Underground were home-grown. To the extent that Afghanistan ceases to be convenient to them the terror cells will move somewhere else. To imagine that we make progress in suppressing international terrorism by “winning” in Afghanistan is akin to imagining that one can make progress in a mice plague by killing all the mice in one room.

The fact that no-one can articulate a coherent statement of why we are in Afghanistan is an important part of the problem.  It is very difficult to plan to accomplish an objective when you do not know what the objective is.

There are no good reasons for being in Afghanistan (we went along for the ride because the Americans were going) but there are good reasons not to pull out – it is much harder to disengage than it is to refrain from going in in the first place.  The reasons to think very hard before pulling out are:

 - Management of the alliance: we did commit to this and there is a cost in alliance relationship terms in announcing that this is all too hard and we are going home.

-  There are very important ethical considerations which counsel against walking away – considerations which apply more to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as a whole rather than to any individual participant.  The lesson of our own experience in Timor in 1942, the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, and the American withdrawal from Vietnam, is that the local people who have worked with us in good faith face a very bleak prospect at the hands of the other side when we walk away. If it ever gets to the stage where US helicopters are plucking people from Kabul rooftops, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had better make sure that he is one of them.

My best reason for our staying there is to try to work towards calming the situation to the point where a sustainable solution can be negotiated between the Afghan parties themselves.  That involves making an honest statement to the peoples of the ISAF participating states that we will be there for at least another decade, and that we are going to match the military effort with a much better resourced civil program.  I don’t see either Barack Obama or Julia Gillard doing that.

War Powers Submission

With my colleagues Andrew Farran and Garry Woodard I recently lodged a submission to the current inquiry by the Senate Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee, into the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill [No. 2].

The submission has now been released by the Committee and is available to be downloaded from the Parliament House website here. It is Submission No. 21 on the list.

This was very much a joint effort and I thank my colleagues for all that they contributed to it.

For background on this issue see the earlier posts War Powers Bill, War Powers Bill: Senate Inquiry, War Powers: what the PM said, and War Powers Bill: Pre-emptive self-defence.

War Powers Bill: Pre-emptive self-defence

In War Powers Bill I described the provisions of the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill [No. 2], which was introduced into the Senate by Western Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in February 2008, and is currently the subject of an inquiry by a Senate Committee.

On the face of it the provisions of the Bill seem sound, but as the power to make war is the central issue of national security, examining the feasibility of transferring the war-making power from the Executive to the Parliament will require the undertaking of a number of thought experiments to see whether it works under all conceivable circumstances.

One issue which will require careful consideration in that regard is how any decision to undertake an act of pre-emptive self-defence might be transacted through the Parliament.

The international law concerning the right of anticipatory self-defence was built upon the issues raised by the Caroline Affair, which strained relations between the United States and the United Kingdom for five years commencing in 1837. In that year, a group of Canadian rebels, led by William Lyon Mackenzie, sought to establish a Canadian republic. After their rebellion in Upper Canada (now Ontario) failed, they fled to the United States. They took refuge on Navy Island in the Niagara River, which forms the boundary between Ontario and New York State, and declared themselves the Republic of Canada. American sympathizers supplied them with money, provisions, and arms via the steamboat SS Caroline.

On 29 December, Canadian loyalist officers commanding a party of militia crossed the border and seized the Caroline, towed her into the current, set her on fire and cast her adrift over Niagara Falls. A black American was killed in the process of seizing her.

American public opinion was outraged and there were several acts of retaliation, notably the burning of the SS Sir Robert Peel while it was in American waters, and the murder of a loyalist Canadian captain who had been involved in the incident.

The matter was finally resolved during the negotiation by United States Secretary of State Daniel Webster and U.K. Privy Counsellor Alexander Baring, 1st Lord Ashburton, of a treaty which resolved several outstanding issues concerning the United States – Canadian border (the Webster – Ashburton Treaty). In the course of their negotiations in 1842 Webster admitted that the use of force might have been justified by the necessity of self-defence, but denied that such a necessity existed. Lord Ashburton argued that the circumstances provided excuse for what was done, but apologised for the invasion of American territory.

In a note dated 24 April 1841 to the British Minister in Washington, Mr Fox, subsequently conveyed directly to Lord Ashburton, Secretary of State Daniel Webster set out the principles on which the principle of anticipatory self-defence has subsequently been established in international law:

... it will be for Her Majesty's Government to show, upon what state of facts, and what rules of national law, the destruction of the “Caroline” is to be defended. It will be for that Government to show a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation. It will be for it to show, also, that the local authorities of Canada,- even supposing the necessity of the moment authorized them to enter the territories of the United States at all,-did nothing unreasonable or excessive; since the act justified by the necessity of self-defence, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it. It must be strewn that admonition or remonstrance to the persons on board the "Caroline" was impracticable, or would have been unavailing; it must be strewn that daylight could not be waited for; that there could be no attempt at discrimination, between the innocent and the guilty; that it would not have been enough to seize and detain the vessel; but that there was a necessity, present and inevitable, for attacking her, in the darkness of the night, while moored to the shore, and while unarmed men were asleep on board, killing some, and wounding others, and then drawing her into the current, above the cataract, setting her on fire, and, careless to know whether there might not be in her the innocent with the guilty, or the living with the dead, committing her to a fate, which fills the imagination with horror. A necessity for all this, the Government of the United States cannot believe to have existed.

The Caroline Affair has been used to establish the principal of “anticipatory self-defence” in international law. The principle holds that pre-emptive action may be justified only in cases where the "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”. It is well established that to be a valid use of force in terms of self-defence under international customary law, there is a need that it be immediate, proportionate and necessary.

It is clear that the rights available under the customary law which flows from the Caroline Affair can only be invoked within very narrow confines. Defendants at Nuremberg sought to invoke them as a defence in relation to the invasions of Denmark and Norway, but the International Military Tribunal was not impressed.

Actions described as “defensive” since the Second World War, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, would be very difficult to justify under the Caroline principles, and would appear to be more in the nature of retaliation than anticipatory self-defence.

Circumstances fitting the Caroline principles would seem to arise so rarely, and when they do arise to do so with such immediacy, that they would be unlikely to present insuperable difficulties in relation to the proposed transfer of the war-making power to the Parliament. This is, nevertheless, an issue that needs to be considered.

Warfare in the 21st Century

When I was Secretary to the Department of Defence in the late 1990s we not unnaturally devoted a fair bit of time to thinking about what warfare in the 21st century might look like.

It didn’t turn out exactly as we had imagined.