Scott Morrison is right: we need to protect ourselves

Scott Morrison in Canberra on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Terry Cunningham

This week Scott Morrison announced the most important changes to Australia’s defence policy since the end of World War II. Previous military crises in places such as Korea and Vietnam and the Confrontation with Indonesia did not place us in such grave danger as we now face in the post-pandemic Asia-Pacific region.

As the editorial in The Australian observed on Thursday: “We have arrived at a pivotal moment in history.”

The Prime Minister gave a powerful speech heralding a significant defence policy change in a much more pessimistic world.

He talked about a “poorer and more disordered” post COVID-19 world that was less benign and more unpredictable. He saw great danger in the US relationship with China that was fractious and could lead to miscalculation or even military conflict. He remarked that he saw today’s strategic situation as reflecting a more dangerous and disordered world not seen since the 1930s. Defence Minister Linda Reynolds observes that “the world we all grew up in is no more”.

Morrison stressed that Australia had to prioritise its focus on our immediate region because Australia’s sovereignty might be directly tested. We must be able to hold an adversary’s military capabilities and infrastructure at risk. And he acknowledged there was the possibility of high-intensity conflict in defence of our own interests.

The 2020 Defence Strategic Update defines three strategic priorities for the Australian Defence Force. The first priority is to shape Australia’s strategic environment to ensure that we have a stable, secure and sovereign region. The Indo-Pacific is where Australia has the greatest influence and it requires intensified commitment, including with major regional powers such as Japan, India and Indonesia.

The second priority is to deter military activities in the nearer region that are against our interests. The ADF needs stronger deterrent capabilities, including long-range strike, cyber-attack, and area-denial weapons.

The third priority is to respond with credible military force when required. This requires improving the ADF’s logistics, stockholding, fuel supplies and military bases, and acquiring strike weapons, including possibly hypersonic missiles in the future.

The government is committed to a defence build-up of military capabilities amounting to $270bn across the next decade. This compares with $195bn in the previous 2016 defence white paper. This will include long-range anti-ship missiles, new undersea surveillance capabilities and more than $7bn to be spent on space satellites — as well as major platforms such as submarines and frigates.

This is an impressive commitment, but for the fact French submarines and British frigates will not begin being delivered until the 2030s. This is not sufficient, given the bleak strategic outlook in Morrison’s speech. Australia does not have the time to wait until the 2030s. We need to give more attention to remote undersea vehicles, unmanned strike fighters and a potent sea-mine laying capability. Some of these are mentioned in the defence update document, but they need greater priority. Nevertheless, this is an impressive commitment and it should be given strong bipartisan support.

Of course, some in our community naturally will want to challenge why we should commit such huge sums of money when our economy and workforce are badly damaged by the coronavirus. Policy is always about making difficult choices between competing needs. We simply do not have the option of leaving ourselves open to nasty bullying and coercion — or worse — from any foreign power.

Philosophically, this new policy has been chiselled from the steel of geopolitical realism. It is a quite remarkable departure from the 2016 defence white paper, which lauded the rules-based order when that order was being challenged — in different ways — by China and the US. Geopolitical realism demands that we have the military capability to defend ourselves and to prevent any predatory power from dominating our military approaches, establishing military bases in our proximate region or directly threatening us.

That is the central mission of Morrison’s new defence policy: his doctrine is that — if necessary — we can hold an adversary’s forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia. This means we will have the capability to attack not only its military forces but also its infrastructure and logistic supply lines at considerable distance from Australia. It would make no sense to just wait for such an adversary by simply defending the continent.

All this demands quite remarkable shifts from previous Coalition defence policies. I well remember the days when defence minister Robert Hill ridiculed the idea of giving priority to our own geography. He thought the Middle East was more important than the defence of Australia. John Howard thought otherwise as prime minister. And even the 2016 defence white paper gave equal strategic weighting for structure priorities to the defence of Australia, a secure nearer region, and the much wider Indo-Pacific region and a rules-based global order.

But Morrison wants to ensure that our own region is front of the mind for the ADF and that it is prioritised in the decisions that are made on deployments and force structure capabilities.

I agree with Reynolds, when in a speech at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Thursday, in answer to a question about how China would see all this, she observed that our new defence policy was “not about any particular country” but in reaction to emerging worrisome military capabilities across the region.

I would observe that, in addition, our new policy of strategic denial against any potential adversary is precisely what China’s own defence posture is all about.

Paul Dibb is professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. He was the principal author of the 1987 defence white paper, which for the first time gave priority to the defence of Australia.