Alan Dupont concludes his thoughtful response to my comments on his Lowy Analysis paper, Full-Spectrum Defence: Re-thinking the Fundamentals of Australian Defence Strategy, by posing some good questions.
First, he asks, should we see irregular warfare as the dominant form of future conflict, both between and within states? The answer depends on what we mean by 'dominant'. Do we mean 'most common' or 'most serious'? Irregular warfare is likely to be the most common form of conflict in future, as it always has been in the past. What I suppose we must call 'regular warfare' – large-scale conflict between the armed forces of states – has always been much rarer, and I expect this will remain true too.
But regular warfare is more serious than irregular warfare, at least for a country like Australia. If we were Yemen or the Congo or (for much of its history) Indonesia, then irregular warfare would pose a more serious threat than regular warfare, and it would make perfect sense to design our armed forces primarily for that kind of conflict.
But we face no credible or even conceivable risk of internal insurrection, and no risk of insurrections spilling onto our territory from elsewhere on anything but the smallest scale, a scale for which police are more relevant than armed forces. And the risk of state-sponsored irregular warfare against Australia by a neighbouring state was tested at length by the 'low-level contingency' concept which was so central to our defence policy in the 1980s. I think Alan would agree with me that the closer one looked at that concept, the more improbable it seemed.
Of course the risk of Australia being involved in a regular conflict is pretty low too. But I would argue that changes in the regional strategic order mean it is not as low over coming decades as it has been since the early 1970s, and that this risk is much more serious for Australia than risks of irregular warfare. And that is why I think it should predominate in our force planning. [fold]
Second, Alan asks whether the 'force structure determinants' used in previous White Papers 'have any redeeming value'. By 'force structure determinants' Alan means the core strategic objectives which the Government decides the ADF should be built to achieve, and which therefore determine what kinds of forces we need and how much money we should spend.
I think setting these strategic objectives for the ADF does have value. Indeed I think deciding what we want our armed forces to be able to do is absolutely essential to making sensible decisions about what capabilities we need. In his paper, Alan says they are no use because governments sometimes ignore them in choosing capabilities, and often use the ADF for tasks different from the ones they identify as force structure determinants.
He is quite right about both of these, but that does not mean the idea of setting core objectives has no value. Governments do sometimes violate their own policy principles (the Howard Government did when it ordered the C-17s that Alan mentions), but the fault here might lie with government decisions rather than the principles they sometimes ignore.
More importantly, the fact that governments use the ADF for purposes other than that for which it was designed does not mean it has been designed for the wrong purposes. It often makes sense to use something for a purpose for which one would not buy it.
There is a separate question, of course, about whether the strategic objectives that have been laid down as force structure determinants in recent white papers are the right ones for Australia over coming decades. I do not think they are, because they assume that Australia's strategic risks will remain much the same in the next few decades as they have been in the last few. What objectives we should adopt instead is a question for another time.
Third, Alan asks whether I still think we should have a primarily maritime military strategy, and if so how space and cyber fit into it? The short answer to the first part is 'yes'. Most of the core strategic objectives I would set for the ADF can be achieved most cost-effectively by maritime operations, and I would focus most of our capability there.
What about cyber and space? Let's clear up a muddle here: when we talk about cyber and space as new domains of warfare, are we talking about the impact of cyber- and space-based actions on the systems that support and enable the conduct of conventional military operations in the other three domains, or are we talking about the impact of such operations on society more broadly, to achieve a direct strategic effect?
If it is the former, then clearly we need to develop our maritime forces to operate in a contested cyber and space environment, based on a sober assessment of the risks involved. This might be hard technically, but it poses no conceptual challenges to policy.
If it is the latter, the issue is much less clear. Cyber attack on national information systems is a serious potential threat, but armed force is little or no use in responding to it, so it need not shape our defence planning. Space-based attack directly on civilian populations or systems? Unless we mean such familiar problems as ballistic missiles, I'm not sure what we are talking about here. Denial of satellite services, perhaps? Whatever it is, I doubt that armed forces are going to be the answer.
Photo by Flickr user DVIDSHUB.