Anthony Albanese shines on NATO and Ukraine, but Defence a shambles
Australia’s commitment to Ukraine is useful but much less than it seems.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit was good for global security and Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, did well diplomatically, being at least broadly influential in getting NATO to rebuke China and to increase its concern with the Indo-Pacific. But underneath the surface there are big problems, especially for Australia.
There is something dreadfully depressing about Canberra’s deployment of one E-7A Wedgetail aircraft for six months and the provision of 30 more Bushmasters for Ukraine. For these show that really nothing has changed in our defence policy, nor is it likely to.
But first the good news.
NATO has done a lot better than expected in Ukraine. This summit paved the way for the imminent membership of Sweden. It corralled new financial and military commitments for Ukraine. It assured Kyiv of eventual NATO membership, though it didn’t provide a time line or road map. And it rebuked China.
Oh, and NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg rightly laughed off the uncouth and ignorant abuse from Paul Keating, who had, with Donald Trump-like statesmanship, labelled Stoltenberg “a supreme fool” and NATO itself as “poisonous”, for which Keating was rightly applauded in Beijing.
Getting Sweden in required NATO diplomacy to overcome recalcitrance from Turkey and to a lesser extent Hungary. Vladimir Putin launched his vicious and illegal war in Ukraine because, he claimed, he didn’t want NATO on Russia’s borders and thought Ukraine was about to join NATO.
In fact, before Russia’s invasion there was no prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, as US President Joe Biden had made clear. Now, Ukraine is likely to join eventually, once the war with Russia is over.
Meanwhile, Finland has joined NATO. Finland has a long land border with Russia. It fought brutal military engagements with the Soviet Union during World War II. Its independence was compromised as a result. Finlandisation was once a term connoting a nation that had formal independence but was subject to policy veto by an intimidating neighbour. Finland has broken free from Finlandisation.
Similarly, Sweden was the model of armed neutrality. Now, it has thrown in its lot with NATO. Sweden’s armed forces are designed to resist and hurt invading Russian forces.
Putin brought all these catastrophic reverses on himself.
That Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan withdrew his objections to Swedish membership and resumed closer co-operation with Washington may be the first big international indicator of Putin’s weakened position following the abortive rebellion led by Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was bitterly disappointed that neither conditions nor time line were provided for Ukraine to join NATO once the fighting with Russia was over. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace chided Zelensky for not showing enough gratitude to Western nations. The Ukrainians need to be careful how they manage relations with donors. Long-term dependency almost always breeds resentment on both sides.
France’s Emmanuel Macron succeeded in blocking NATO from opening a liaison office in Tokyo. But more important is the growing NATO recognition that the intimate Beijing-Moscow de facto alliance effectively merges the European and Indo-Pacific theatres.
The NATO declaration was strikingly explicit on Beijing: “The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” NATO criticised Beijing for its support of Moscow, participation in Russian lies, aggressive cyber attacks, and rapid nuclear weapons build-up.
NATO’s concern for Asia mirrors Albanese’s promise to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. Both NATO’s commitment to Asia and Australia’s commitment to Ukraine are useful but are less than they seem, much less than the headlines.
Asian democracies that are allies of the US, such as Japan and Australia, are helping Ukraine and NATO resist Russia. NATO democracies, also allies of the US, are helping deal with China in Asia. This is useful but shouldn’t be overstated. In a war over Taiwan, no European nation would send military forces to help the US or Australia. But, as Ukraine demonstrates, even non-lethal assistance can be decisive.
NATO is weaker than it should be because so many of its members are not making the 2 per cent of gross national product minimum spend on defence that NATO rules require. NATO still relies overwhelmingly on the US. A number of NATO members did make substantial commitments to Ukraine at this summit. Remarkably, France will send Kyiv long-range missiles. Germany will send more tanks, armoured vehicles and Patriot missiles in a package worth €700m ($1.1bn).
But the US is not responding as quickly as it needs to. Washington has decided to provide controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine because, as Biden admitted, it’s running low on more conventional ammunition such as 155mm shells. China has a bigger navy than the US. In most war games involving Taiwan, the US needs at least 1200 long-range anti-ship missiles but has only a few hundred in stock. It’s ramping up military production, but slowly.
The entire industrial base of the Western alliance cannot supply one nation for war.
What about Australia?
The Albanese government is doing just as well as the Morrison government did on defence. There’s no partisan point against Labor here. But it’s not doing any better than the Morrison government either. That means it’s manifestly not doing enough.
It’s important not to fall for silly conservative cliches about Albanese. Like John Howard, he’s widely underestimated. He is the leading politician of his generation, one of only four Labor leaders since World War II (with Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd) to win majority government from opposition. He did this in a time of fragmenting and declining major party vote share. Then, remarkably, he won a seat from the opposition in a by-election. On defence, he’s no Julia Gillard, cutting defence spending to the bone. Nor is he a Whitlam, endangering the US alliance with wild, irresponsible behaviour and rhetoric.
In retail politics, Albanese has mastered defence. As recently as April 2021, the Liberals led Labor as the party the public thought would handle national security and defence best by 42 per cent to 19 per cent. Now, according to Resolve Political Monitor in the Nine newspapers, the two parties are equal on 32 per cent.
This is a staggering reversal of a longstanding pattern and reflects the Coalition’s weak, confused performance during its decade in office. That legacy of promising much and delivering almost nothing has crippled the Liberals in opposition. They haven’t laid a glove on Labor on defence because their own record means they have no corporate credibility, even though in Peter Dutton as leader and Andrew Hastie as defence spokesman they have their two most credentialed politicians in national security.
This may seem a harsh judgment on Morrison, who after all initiated the AUKUS deal. But while nuclear-powered submarines are vastly superior to conventional submarines, we won’t have a fleet of them for decades. It was the absolute failure of the Morrison government to do anything about defence capabilities in the near term that destroyed its credibility. In defence it was all announcement and no delivery, all hat and no cattle. Sadly, the Albanese government is shaping up similarly.
The Morrison government decided that having made the AUKUS breakthrough it didn’t need to do anything else of consequence to build a defence force for the next 10 or 15 years.
This was a terrible decision and left us completely naked should the Americans ever decide they have better things to do with their blood and treasure than defend us.
The Albanese government has now made essentially the same decision. Morrison produced the AUKUS breakthrough, then did nothing else. Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles produced a brilliant scheme for getting nuclear-powered submarines quickly.
This involves having US and British nuclear subs visiting more frequently, then a two-step process. We first acquire Virginia-class submarines of our own from the US starting in the early 2030s. After that we transition to a new joint British Australian nuclear-powered boat in the early 2040s. There are still a million ways this could go wrong and there’s a serious chance we won’t get the subs. Still, it’s a good program and design, but we have no plan B, nothing in reserve and nothing much in the meantime.
Having worked out its nuclear subs scheme, Canberra apparently thinks there’s nothing more to do, thus once more leaving us virtually defenceless over the next 15 years.
Albanese resembles a masterful, traditional Coalition prime minister, adept at the old Coalition art form of using strong rhetoric, tiny deployments and distant plans far beyond the forward estimates to convince the public Australia is doing great things when really we are doing almost nothing.
The Australian contribution to Ukraine is archetypal because it’s almost completely meaningless. The government claims it has committed $890m to Ukraine, with $710m of that in military aid.
These figures are ropey and absurd, almost randomly fictitious.
These vast sums – $890m – even have some Australians complaining we are giving too much to the Ukrainians. But no sums of money remotely like this have actually changed hands.
The government valued the last aid package to Ukraine at $110m. It consisted mainly of armoured vehicles built at the time of the Vietnam War that we regarded as so useless, indeed so dangerous, we didn’t even deploy them in Iraq or Afghanistan. Whatever they were once worth, they are virtually worthless now. It also consisted of a large quantity of ammunition we no longer use. It would have cost the military to dispose of the ammunition. Giving it away to Ukraine probably saved money. The only substantial expense in that pile of old junk was transporting it to Poland.
Now, the government says it’s spending $100m on 30 Bushmasters. But the Bushmasters cost about $2m each to make. Somehow or other the government is allegedly spending a whopping $40m on transporting the vehicles to Ukraine and spare parts. You think? Not only that, the Bushmasters are coming from a big stock of surplus vehicles sitting untouched as we have more than we can use in our very small military.
Then the $710m presumably includes the cost of deploying one Wedgetail aircraft, with 100 support personnel to Germany for six months. (Though getting any straight information from Defence or the government on money is like running blindfolded through a maze with your feet bound.)
Defence would be happy to make its contribution to Ukraine mainly in deployments, especially to somewhere nice like Germany, because deployments are funded on a no-win/no-loss basis.
The idea behind this is that Defence would be spending some money on the troops and equipment involved anyway, so the Finance Department supplements the additional cost involved in being overseas. Defence then doesn’t lose money.
The government is ostentatiously not replenishing any equipment or non-deployment money it spends on Ukraine, so the Defence budget bears the cost. But, as we can see, this cost is all but negligible, certainly not $710m.
The Ukrainians are genuinely fighting for all our freedom. If Russia prevails there, it will menace more of Europe and Beijing will be mightily emboldened over Taiwan. We are a wealthy nation and could make a reasonable but serious contribution in Ukraine. Instead we play accounting tricks.
The Wedgetail itself is a formidable, hi-tech bit of kit. You can call it a spy plane or a surveillance plane. It’s best described as a battle command plane. It sweeps up huge amounts of information from vast distances and directs and co-ordinates sea, land and air components of battle.
The Ukrainians have been effective partly because the Americans have given them real-time targeting information, from satellites, high-altitude drones and nearby radar. There is no suggestion at all that our Wedgetail will be used for this purpose, though theoretically any surveillance or radar equipment could be used for that.
Our Wedgetail fleet of six aircraft is a perfect symbol of the modern Australian Defence Force. It’s hi-tech, small in number, unsupported by sufficient logistics to be deployed in conflict by us, but can slot perfectly into a big American or, in this case, NATO, operation. Thus our ADF is not designed to defend Australia or have any independent strategic effect but simply to allow us to bid for supplemental niche roles in US operations. The Americans find this modestly useful, we get some alliance brownie points and we avoid ever thinking seriously about our own strategic circumstances beyond hoping the Americans will always look after us.
So Albanese resembles a traditional conservative prime minister. He is sound, genuinely sound, on strategic direction and rhetoric, he talks up our extremely modest efforts so the public thinks we are making a major push on defence, and on the distant horizon, far beyond the forward estimates, there are grand plans.
Meanwhile, our small, undergunned defence force still doesn’t have a single armed drone, still has only a tiny inventory of long-range missiles of any kind, has only three modern warships (the air warfare destroyers) and is drowning in reviews. It has perfected paralysis by review. People as strategically dumb as Keating think, or at least pretend to think, this is militarism, whereas it’s just the grand tradition of not taking our own defence seriously.
Our weakness is a microcosm of Western weakness, but with a twist. For Australian defence policy is like a waterfall. It’s always moving, but it’s always the same.
More Coverage
Delusions of Albonomics
It might be the Prime Minister’s last stand, but taxpayers be warned: the big spending era will roll on.
Any high school history teacher could tell Trump why tariffs don’t work
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an American satire and the characters are fictitious. But the film’s warning on what doesn’t make America great is very real.