New defence doctrine for a challenging strategic era

Australia wants regional stability and constructive engagement with China. But as Defence Minister Peter Dutton has made clear, our strategic circumstances warrant a more proactive defence approach. Without much fanfare or another white paper, Mr Dutton and the Morrison government are resetting and updating Australia’s defence priorities, embracing the concept of asymmetric warfare by promising to invest more in long-range strike missiles, drones and boosting our defensive cyber capability.

At next week’s Australia-US Ministerial talks in Washington, Mr Dutton and Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne will meet their US counterparts, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Australia will be pushing for greater access to US missile technology and more defence industry co-operation. This could involve the transfer of intellectual property that would allow Australia to manufacture US-designed missiles, mainly for our own use but also as part of the US supply chain. As Mr Dutton told a closed Australian Chamber of Commerce meeting this week, the 70-year-old ANZUS alliance has become more important than ever in countering Beijing’s “increasingly coercive” behaviour. He did not mince words: “We must invigorate new energy into defence thinking and preparedness so we are poised and ready for any eventuality.”

On Wednesday, Beijing doubled down on its war of words against Australia. After China launched trade bans on more than $20bn worth of Australian exports and allowing waves of cyber attacks, its foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin claimed Australia was guilty of (unspecified) “bullying acts”. Mr Wang made that ridiculous claim as he rejected Josh Frydenberg’s cogent argument that in a new era of strategic competition, China had subjected Australia to economic coercion.

China is also stepping up its aggressive posture in international waters. But Australia is correct in refusing to be cowed by a new Chinese regulation demanding that all vessels entering its disputed “territorial waters” notify Chinese authorities of their presence. Australian Defence Force craft would not alter their behaviour in the international waters of the South China Sea, Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie told Ben Packham.

In terms of creating a deterrent against potential aggressors, it makes sense, as Greg Sheridan wrote on Wednesday, that Australia wants to partner with the US in the kind of military equipment that could impose heavy costs on Chinese aggression without putting Australia’s valuable ships and aircraft at risk. Mr Dutton, Sheridan wrote, increasingly will invest in “long-range strike weapons, offensive and defensive cyber, and area denial systems”, as well as “capabilities which can be produced in bulk, more quickly and cheaply, and where their loss would be more tolerable, without significantly impacting our force posture”.

On Thursday, Packham reports that regulatory hurdles and the West’s determination to fight ethically have prevented the Australian Defence Force from obtaining cheap, autonomous and swarming drones, which Mr Dutton says the nation needs. The ADF has no armed drones, which are being embraced by countries such as China and Russia. Armed drones can allow smaller forces to defeat well-armed adversaries, which would make them ideal for a smaller fighting force such as the ADF. But Travis Reddy of DefendTex, a weapons research and development company and manufacturer, said it was hard to get approval from Australian authorities to test and develop combat drones or allow the ADF to train with them.

That dilemma must be sorted out by government and the ADF with a view to geo-strategic tensions and Australia’s vulnerabilities.