Australia must hope that the final report on the defence strategic review includes strategies that embrace the lessons from those developed by both General Douglas MacArthur and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Australian review is being conducted by former defence chief Angus Houston and former Defence Minister Stephen Smith.
Australia is entering a new era of defence expenditure.
While spending will increase, Defence Minister Richard Marles has warned that the government is planning to scale back some defence projects and enhance others to maximise the use of our now limited resources.
Accordingly, we are going to need to be a lot smarter than we have been in previous decades under both Coalition and ALP governments.
The essence of the MacArthur strategies was to carefully study the capabilities, equipment and likely strategies of an opponent and then be prepared to take risks on the battlefield using that knowledge.
We are not confronted with immediate battlefield decisions, but we do need to understand the military capabilities and technologies of the countries to our north in helping us decide where we spend our defence resources.
MacArthur is best known in Australia for his Pacific strategies, but it was in Korea where the MacArthur legacy is directly impacting us today.
Back in 1950-51, he studied the strategies and equipment of China as it prepared to enter the Korean War against his forces.
But he was prevented from implementing his response by a US which did not want to risk widening the war.
Today, the world faces a threat from North Korea, arguably because the MacArthur response was not executed by the 1951 US President Truman.
When Zelensky became President of Ukraine, he was not a military person and did not have a clear understanding of the capabilities of Russia and its strategies.
But since then, he has remarkably embraced a MacArthur-style analysis of Russian equipment and its intentions.
Zelensky’s problem is that he needs the backing of many President Truman-style administrations, and he is not finding it easy.
The result may be a repeat of a different version of what happened in Korea. The equivalent of South Korea will be Poland and the Baltic States.
Australia is not involved in the battlefield, but we do need to learn from MacArthur and Zelensky and carefully analyse technical capabilities of other countries in our region.
There is no point pouring money into defence equipment systems that are being outmoded by technology developments in China and elsewhere.
Let’s start with nuclear submarines. The US is developing an ability to locate submarines from the air using a giant radar mounted in a pod under a Boeing patrol aircraft.
As a submarine travels in deep waters, it moves a lot of water and that generates a wake which is invisible from the surface to the human eye. But the US system can pick it up. The Chinese have a similar system, which may be more advanced.
Using a MacArthur style analysis we can be sure that in coming years nuclear submarines that create wake, albeit at great depth, will be detected. Modern nuclear submarines must be shaped to eliminate wake.
The British are ahead of the Americans in reshaping nuclear submarines.
I will not repeat the many Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 revelations that continue to come from the US.
But Houston and Smith need to have studied the capability of Chinese, Russian and other aircraft and compare them with the F-35.
They will not find making the comparisons easy because they have both been involved in the F-35 decision-making.
For the Houston-Smith report to have any worthwhile future relevance, it also needs to analyse the development of weapons to destroy our frigates.
I suspect modern missiles will make surface ships like frigates very vulnerable unless they develop new capabilities.
In assessing whether we should pour more money in our high-cost frigates, we need to make an assessment of future weaponry. I am not prejudging such an analysis, but it must be undertaken in this new era of restricted defence resources.
It is absurd that in the past we have not always undertaken a needs analysis to all our major defence equipment strategies.
We made repeated mistakes because we fell into the trap of succumbing to high-pressure military equipment sales people.
We did not have defence personnel with the ability to fully analyse the proposals and engineering tasks being put on the table. Very often, even where there was capability, politics became involved.
To be fair there can be one or two decades between a defence equipment order and its delivery, so a lot can happen in that time given current fast technology developments
The world is a more dangerous place and if we are going to maintain current social expenditure than we will need to be much smarter in how we spend our defence dollars. That requires a new analysis.
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