Imperfect protection

Hugh White has spent the better part of his career specialising in Australia’s defence policy and military force structure.

RAAF F/A-18s and F-35A Joint Strike Fighters over Stockton Beach, NSW.

Hugh White has spent the better part of his career specialising in Australia’s defence policy and military force structure. He has served as a ministerial adviser to Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley. He has been deputy secretary of defence for strategy. He was principal author of the 2000 defence white paper. He ought, therefore, to be well-placed to write a book on how to defend this country. This is especially so given he has also been director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, recently expanded into a most impressive think tank under Peter Jennings, and of the Australian National University’s Strategic & Defence Studies Centre.

He has written a string of recent long essays on the changing balance of power in Asia: The China Choice, Power Shift and Without America. As such, his new book, How to Defend Australia, surely marks the culmination of his life’s work as a strategic theorist and policy wonk.

It comes with glowing endorsements. Gareth Evans, our foreign minister a generation ago and now ANU chancellor, says it’s ‘‘a comprehensive and compelling wake-up call’’. Beazley says it’s ‘‘a serious work from a serious patriot that requires close reading’’. That last phrase is apt. This is, indeed, a book that ‘‘requires close reading”. Allan Gyngell dubs it a book that ‘‘sets the terms for an unavoidable national debate: the Australia choice’’. Karen Middleton praises it as ‘‘a cool-headed look at who might threaten Australia and what we need to do about it’’. Michael Wesley goes so far as to declare White exhibits ‘‘a determination to ask the questions that others don’t dare or haven’t thought to ask’’.

How to Defend Australia is divided into four parts: “Thinking about war”, “Defining the task”, “Designing the force” and “Making it happen”. White’s major premise is that the era of American hegemony in East Asia and the western Pacific is ending and that China will become the hegemonic power in Asia. He infers that we cannot depend on the US alliance for our security and will need to develop much greater capacities to defend ourselves. He ponders what such capacities would need to be, what they would mean for our force structure, how much they would cost and whether we would be willing as a nation to bear such a cost.

These are all matters worth pondering. The greatest merit of White’s book is that he doesn’t shrink from pondering them.

He lays out his case limpidly, in a lucid and highly readable form. He presents his reasoning in such a manner that there will doubtless be many who will find his arguments persuasive, at any one of several different levels: that we cannot depend on the US alliance; that we must develop a far more robust defence capability; or that we shouldn’t bother because it is all far too expensive and would prove provocative and self-destructive if we tried it.

However, White’s argument is seriously flawed at every point. He writes of China from the basis of a superficial understanding of its history, economy, force structure and politics. He makes no attempt to demonstrate that it will become the region’s hegemonic power in a near time frame based on an extrapolation of perceived recent trends. He at no point examines the viability of US bases and forces in South Korea, Japan, Guam or, for that matter, Australia. Nor does he look at the possibility of Asian states (including India and Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore) working in coalition against the ambitions of China. He signally omits to look at the prospective role of the US as an offshore balancer against a strong China. He seems to see the US as more or less evaporating militarily because China has attained middle-­income status economically and fortified a few artificial islets in the South China Sea.

But this is just the beginning. Even if one were to grant his major premises regarding China and the US, his prescription for a fortress Australia, arming itself not with 100 but with 200 F-35 Joint Striker Fighters and not with a dozen but with three dozen long-range submarines, while drastically cutting back its surface ships and its army and perhaps acquiring nuclear weapons, is strategically absurd. It assumes that the danger Australia faces is full-scale invasion by China (or perhaps India or Indonesia) and that it would, in such a case, be left to fend for itself. On no serious geopolitical reckoning is this plausible.

His force structure prescriptions are fearfully wide of the mark. They also presuppose that a US from which we had detached ourselves would still sell us advanced platforms. He fails to discuss what we would do with 200 F-35s and 36 long-range submarines as China expanded but did not invade Australia.

He seems oddly oblivious to the fact that Australia’s interests are rooted in a global order of trade and international stability, which our modest military forces, with our allies, are committed to defending. Should China push for hegemony, those interests may be jeopardised. If so, only coalitions might constrain the revisionist giant. It would seek to pinch and coerce us from a distance, not by setting up an arc of bases in the archipelago at the risk of igniting World War III and then sending massive forces to conquer and occupy us.

Those who, like White, question the future of the US alliance might like to check Vince Scappatura’s little book, The US Lobby and Australian Defence Policy (Monash University Publishing, 205pp, $39.99), which grew out of his recent PhD. He is just starting out and has a bee in his bonnet about US influence here, the Australian American Leadership Dialogue and neoliberalism. We can allow him time to get perspective, but this first book will, in the interim, add its modest weight to the chorus calling for this country to distance itself from Washington, as Malcolm Fraser did before he died and as Paul Keating has been doing.

A far more bracing and thought-provoking book is Sean McFate’s, Goliath: Why the West Doesn’t Win Wars and What We Need to Do About It (Michael Joseph, 336pp, $29.99). McFate fires a broadside at the whole Western way of war and insists that we (starting with the US) need to rethink our strategies and force structures if we are to rise to emerging challenges. He pours scorn on the F-35 and new aircraft carriers and attaches far more attention to political warfare, asymmetric warfare and the long game.

Defence Force chief Angus Campbell made this very point in his dinner speech at an ASPI conference on future war convened in Canberra last month. McFate’s book reads like a punchier version of Philip Bobbitt’s classics The Shield of Achilles (2002) and Terror and Consent (2008), and should reach a wide readership.

Its flaw is the obverse of the greatest flaw in White’s book: he goes too far in denigrating the utility of conventional military force and deterrence. But his 10 rules for 21st-century war and his crisp, if not altogether logically consistent, arguments have as much to offer here as in the West more generally. If you read any of these three books, make it his.

Paul Monk is a former head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation. He is the author of 10 books, including Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas. Hugh White will launch How to Defend Australia at the State Library of Victoria on July 17.

How To Defend Australia

By Hugh White. Latrobe University Press, 336pp, $34.99