Team Albo lifts the pace on strengthening deterrence
Australia’s most useful contribution to regional security is to ramp up the ADF’s capabilities.
Five Saturdays after the federal election, Anthony Albanese could be forming the view that national security will be a driving feature of this term of office.
Despite the best efforts of the Morrison government, national security failed to take off as a defining election topic, but it has since shaped the travel and working rhythm of the new Prime Minister, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Albanese’s lightning visit to Tokyo to meet the leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – US President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida – and his subsequent meetings with Indonesian President Joko Widodo and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern inevitably focused on the biggest strategic challenge the Indo-Pacific has faced in decades: the rise of a determined and assertive Beijing.
The same is true for Wong’s travel in the Pacific – underpinned by a desperate effort to stave off an audacious Chinese security pact for 10 island states – and Marles’s visits to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore and since to Japan and India.
Yes, Marles met his Chinese counterpart, but the absence of any substantive reporting of the discussion likely means that Wei Fenghe pinned Marles’s ears back with a blast about Australia being at fault for everything. Wei is not a dove. He was there to deliver a message, not open a conversation.
That meeting was not a sign of an olive branch so much as it was conclusive proof that talking with Australia will do nothing to change Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s strategic plan to dominate the Indo-Pacific and his positioning to attack Taiwan as early as mid-decade.
Significantly, on Tuesday Albanese had a phone discussion with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg – hardly a frequent occurrence between the two positions. The focus was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and – Albanese’s words – Australia’s role as “the largest non-NATO contributor to the effort supporting the sovereignty of Ukraine and their struggle against the barbaric and illegal war being undertaken by Russia”.
Albanese will travel to Madrid for the NATO summit along with Ardern, Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol. Japan is proposing a summit of the four Indo-Pacific leaders on the sidelines of NATO, which is being reported in Japanese media “as an attempt to keep an assertive China in check in the Indo-Pacific after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heightened concerns about its implications for the region”.
Then there is the question of Albanese visiting Kyiv following an invitation from President Volodymyr Zelensky. When pressed on Wednesday whether he would go, Albanese again referred to taking advice but ended by saying: “And from time to time, as you’d be aware … those issues aren’t released publicly.”
Could it be that what is happening is quiet planning to enable all four Indo-Pacific leaders to visit Kyiv? That would be a remarkable gathering: two centre-right leaders, Yoon and Kishida, hardly the closest bilateral partners, and two centre-left leaders, Ardern and Albanese, who might be surprised at leading governments providing lethal combat gear to Ukraine.
The urgent travel and summitry show that together Russia and China are forcing unlikely partnerships to emerge between countries – democracies for the most part although not exclusively – that do not want to submit to totalitarian bullying. In Australia that rise of an assertive China has been clear enough to those prepared to acknowledge that unpleasant reality for at least a decade. It will be the central fact for Albanese’s time in office.
You know the strategic outlook is bad when Ardern, of all people, tells Biden at the end of May that “we are in an incredibly difficult international environment”. The sense of urgency among European and Indo-Pacific leaders is unmistakeable. It explains the energy being expended on the Quad, the AUKUS security pact between Australia, Britain and the US, trilateral Japan-Australia-US co-operation, Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and dramatic defence spending increases in Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian and Baltic countries.
This should lead Albanese to direct some urgent and fundamental thinking about Australia’s defence policy settings. While there is huge interest in what AUKUS might deliver by way of a “pathway” to nuclear propulsion for the Australian navy, the reality is that outcome is many years down the track. If former defence minister Peter Dutton is correct, it may be possible to deliver two nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy by 2030. It would be worth Albanese’s time to press Biden on that because only Biden could deliver that outcome.
Important as an early delivery would be, it will do nothing to address a more urgent need to strengthen the Australian Defence Force by mid-decade.
Xi is not working to a definite timetable for an attack on Taiwan, but what we can say with certainty is that the People’s Liberation Army is being armed at breakneck speed to achieve that goal. Chinese military activity around Taiwan, in the East and South China seas, around the Australian coast and in the South Pacific is an extended exercise to improve PLA skills and training, test the resolve of other countries and build mainland populist enthusiasm for a war. Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine will do nothing to deter Xi’s plans, other than perhaps to bring closer the moment when Beijing may calculate it has the best chance to force a Taiwanese capitulation.
Australia’s most useful contribution to keeping the region at peace is to ramp up significantly the capabilities of the ADF. The task for this decade is to strengthen deterrence. The ADF is a small but capable force, sadly undergunned in some key areas such as armed drones and longer-range missiles of all types. Our greatest strength is the alliance with the US and the capacity to form practical and effective defence partnerships with like-minded countries, particularly Japan.
During the election campaign Labor announced two policy initiatives that may help Albanese to start some urgent thinking about how to make defence stronger.
The first initiative is to hold an independently run force posture review, looking at ADF basing and how we deploy the military in the region. The last force posture review was delivered in March 2012 to Stephen Smith, the defence minister at the time. Reading the report today shows how dispiritingly little or no progress has been made in 10 years to strengthen Australia’s air bases and the navy’s presence in the north of the country, build a needed second east coast naval base and deploy our forces farther from our shores.
Step one for an Albanese force posture review should be to ask why such minimal progress has been made across a decade. Step two, more important, is to press for urgent action now.
The force posture review could be used as a lateral way of trying to shake the Defence Department out of its gridlock. The organisation has forgotten how to move quickly. Albanese will need to make some big decisions in cabinet’s national security committee. This means not waiting years for Defence advice but pressing ahead with acquisitions of drones, missiles and other weapons currently in international production.
The force posture review also needs to talk with the Americans to understand how the US military would react to an attack by China on Taiwan. Here’s a hint: it involves Australia. I begin to wonder if our defence establishment is trying to avoid that discussion.
A second Labor defence initiative is to create an Australian strategic research agency, modelled on the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is designed to accelerate the development and production of new military technology.
ASRA is intended to work with DARPA and a British counterpart to fast-track technology co-operation anticipated by AUKUS, such as hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, autonomous systems and undersea technology.
ASRA is intended to be fast, independent, innovative, disruptive and agile, so we should expect that Defence will vigorously brief the Albanese government against it. Labor should stick to its guns on this initiative. It is desperately needed and not a moment too soon given our crumbling strategic outlook.
Labor also has commissioned the Office of National Intelligence to undertake “an urgent climate risk assessment of the implications of climate change for national security”. That is undeniably important work but, much as it is a priority, governments don’t get to pick their preferred threat. Beijing’s aggression is the immediate clear and present danger and will remain that way for as long as Xi is in power.
Peter Jennings is the former executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
More Coverage
Time to say bye-bye to the wokerati’s bullying tactics
Voters have had enough of being told how to think and how to behave and want to reassert more traditional values and attitudes that served them perfectly well.
Our values give us cause for optimism amid the terror, fear
Despite all the violence and hatred, I am still optimistic about Australia.