How to defend AustraliaYou don’t have to be as pessimisticas I am about the future of American power in Asia to start seriously thinkingabout what we should do if it falters. You only have to accept that we can nolonger simply assume that America will, 20 or 30 years from now, be there toprevent any major power from attacking us, or defend us if it did.
That means we should consider, moreseriously than we ever have before, whether we can defend ourselves from amajor power—like China, or a much stronger Indonesia—without relying onAmerica.
Most people assume that we can’t, butwe have never really explored the question seriously, because we haven’t neededto. Now we do, and that poses a new and unfamiliar challenge to Australiandefence policy. It has never been very hard for Australia to afford forcesadequate to defend ourselves against a weak middle power like Indonesia hasbeen, or to undertake modest stabilisation operations and make smallcontributions to US-led coalition operations. That means we haven’t had to maketough choices about the kinds of forces we need.
But defending ourselves independentlyagainst a major Asian power like China is a very different matter. It is themost ambitious and demanding strategic objective we have contemplated for ourforces since World War II. If it is possible at all it would stretch ourresources to the limit. We must therefore be much more stringent in decidingwhat capabilities to invest in, which means our force planning needs to be muchmore rigorous than it has been for many decades.
My new book, How to defendAustralia, suggests how we might do that, and where it might lead us. Istart with the obvious but nonetheless elusive principle that we cannot decidewhat forces we need until we have identified what we want them to be able todo—in other words, until we have defined our core strategic objectives.
I think the well-established‘concentric circles’ model of strategic interests remains the best basis fordoing this. Hence I propose that our core strategic objectives, in descendingorder of priority, should be to defend the continent and the islands closest toit independently from direct attack by a major Asian power; to contributesubstantially to the collective defence of maritime Southeast Asia, especiallyIndonesia; and to contribute more modestly to the preservation of a balance ofpower in the wider region.
The next step is to decide what kindsof operations could most cost-effectively achieve those strategic objectives—inother words, develop a military strategy—to guide our force planning. This isan essential step, but not one that we have done very well hitherto. The key todoing it better is that phrase ‘most cost-effectively’. It’s easy to list thekinds of operations we could undertake in pursuit of our strategic objectives,but we need to go further and decide which ones would be most cost-effective;that is what we must do if we are to achieve our objectives as cheaply aspossible.
A glance at a map affirms that ourbest operational options are going to be maritime, but to identify what kindsof maritime operations we should prioritise we need to think carefully aboutthe nature of maritime warfare over the decades to come. I argue that enduringtechnological and operational factors make maritime control very hard toachieve against major adversaries, and maritime denial relatively easy.
I also argue that, thanks to thegeography of our country and our region, we can achieve our core strategicobjectives without needing to achieve maritime control. Hence maritime denialoperations are much more cost-effective for us than maritime control. We canand should adopt a military strategy of maritime denial.
This has important implications. Itmeans we do not attempt to protect our sea lines of communication by defendingour own ships, but only by being able to attack the shipping of others. It alsomeans we forego the option of projecting land or air power by sea against majoradversaries. These are important limitations, but they must be balanced againstthe blunt reality that no matter how much we spend, Australia has little or nochance of achieving operationally significant degrees of maritime controlagainst capable maritime forces in the decades to come.
These conclusions have big anddisconcerting implications for our force design. Clearly, we must give priorityto the capabilities that can most cost-effectively achieve the operationaloutcomes which can most cost-effectively deliver our core strategic objectives.In the book I spell out what that means in some detail. There are some verytough and unpopular choices to be made.
A strategy of maritime denial meansmuch assigning lower priority to major surface warships and amphibious assaultforces, and much higher priority to anti-shipping surveillance and strike. Itmeans a limited role for the army beyond the continent, a much bigger submarineforce, and a bigger fleet of fighter aircraft. It poses immense challenges forsupport, sustainment and access to technology. And it raises the question ofwhether we might need to consider building nuclear forces in the future, and ifso what kind of forces they might be.
Andfinally, of course, there is the question of cost. I offer a very broadestimate that we would need to spend 3.5% of GDP—4% with nuclear weapons—to buildand maintain the forces which we would need to achieve the strategic objectivesI have proposed over the decades ahead. That is the price of being able todefend ourselves independently if, or when, we can no longer rely on America aswe have done for so long. So it may not be true that we can’t defend ourselveswithout America, but it would cost a lot. We just have to decide whether itwould cost too much.
Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. He was the principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper
Book review: Hugh White’sHow to Defend Australiahttps://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/book-review-hugh-white-s-how-defend-australiaI'm buying a copy of this book this weekend.
Raider
