Defence is lost in fog of strategic failure and a lack of imagination

Australian Army soldiers from 3rd Combat Engineer Regiment during a combat course in Missouri, US.

While I’m wary of joining the chorus of defence commentators yelling at clouds, our government has boxed itself into a corner. We must spend more on defence, but creeping suppression of informed public debate coupled with dire cost-of-living realities make this an unlikely option for Anthony Albanese.

Australia’s defence and foreign policy is entrenched in short-term domestic political considerations, devoid of strategic imagination. The idea of nearing an “inflection point” in international security is routinely trotted out but misses the fact that Australia passed said point long ago.

Perhaps the Cold War never ended, it just mutated and incorporated multipolar elements.

There are two sets of external changes shaping Australia’s defence problem. First, new groupings of states are emerging – with some firepower to boot – that prioritise different values to us. On values we share – say, the continued survival of the state – they are often interpreted differently. Australia might look to the multilateral rules-based order to shore up support for our right to exist. Another state might view this order as a legacy system that is not willing to facilitate the transfer of power to rising states. Problems ensue.

It is getting harder to tackle these problems thanks to the second set of changes influencing Australian security. There are new approaches to navigating the international system. Where “alliances” and “shared interests” are central to Australia’s international engagement, the new grouping of powers has normalised a sense of transactional statecraft in international relations. Security ties are not infused with a liberal-west dose of morality. Interests are king.

Government has failed to grasp at a strategic level these two sets of changes. Lazy conceptual frameworks have been tabled without adequate funds to deliver. Capabilities required yesterday are earmarked for two decades’ time. Word soup statements of “unprecedented unpredictability” feature heavily, disingenuously attempting to engage Australians. We know the international environment has always been unpredictable, to a point, and contestation has never not been a feature of international security.

In a word, Australia is lost. Lost in reviews, lost in rhetoric, and lost to a government fixated on complicating a rather straightforward problem set. Australia is unprepared and unserious about our position in the emerging international strategic environment.

We must be willing to have this discussion publicly. Government needs to come to the party and rapidly enhance its appetite for risk. Canberra should rediscover the agility of a relatively smart population and urgently craft a sustainable defence footing for the nation. This requires a strategic culture overhaul, which must come from the top. We can’t do all the things, and a realistic plan for the defence of Australia need not be gold-plated. Of course, the inability of government to articulate in basic terms our vital national interests, will continue to stupefy our debate. Where is our national discourse on the “costs” of Australian prosperity and security? Where is the funding for foresight analysis of strategic trends – sure, China is a challenge, but what of India?

I offer the tale of Australia’s Bangladesh strategy. We continue to pump millions of dollars of humanitarian aid each year into Bangladesh. Yet, by the end of this year, two of the four planned units at Bangladesh’s Rooppur nuclear power station will be operational. Nuclear power will continue to lift Bangladesh towards prosperity – its economy has just become the second-largest in South Asia.

Richard Marles

Breaking ground in 2017 and built by Russia, China stepped in to provide sanctioned fuses for the plant. Then, in late 2023, Bangladesh settled the final payments to Russia in Chinese yuan. The point is, Australia has a surface-level grasp of the intricate regional relationships on our doorstep. This continues to undercut adequate manoeuvring of our international political environment. We must know our environment if we want to prosper and compete within it.

Australia is part of a group of states, in a club, of minority power in the international system. Humbling ourselves to accept this strategic reality will allow for hard but necessary discussion of our plan to adequately defend Australia. Australia has a middle-power ego on a small-power budget. Canberra must be creative.

A sense of strategic culture can’t reside in the halls of departments – nor can it remain a job of government. National security is every Australian citizen’s duty. Education therefore becomes paramount: as the saying goes, “if one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable”. If we don’t know what we are competing for, and why, how can we possible begin to chart success?

The Albanese government’s legacy may well be that it failed to discern between the concepts of intent and capability. Intent is the thing that can change overnight. Capability, not so much. From platitudes to policy, our strategic narrative is narrowly fixed in terms of intent. It is time to focus on capability – or at least craft a viable concept of a plan to do so.

Dr Elizabeth Buchanan is an expert associate of the ANU National Security College.