Defence Strategic Review reveals Australia aims to be more offensive in new defence philosophy
Australia will today embark on a historic and ambitious military journey to become a major strategic player in the most dangerous maritime region in the world.
Australia will today embark on a historic and ambitious military journey to become a major strategic player in the most dangerous maritime region in the world.
The decades-long multibillion-dollar plan, to be outlined in a report called National Defence, will fundamentally alter the country’s military posture, creating a more muscular Defence Force with greater reach and firepower to better deter any would-be aggressor.
It will be directed in intent, but not by name, squarely at a rising China that already has the world’s largest navy and is fast stretching its military, political and financial tentacles across the Indo-Pacific.
The report, arising from the Defence Strategic Review written by former defence minister Stephen Smith and former defence chief Angus Houston, will do more than contain a series of major equipment purchases from new, longer-range missiles to underwater mines and armed drones.
It will usher in a change in philosophy about the way Australia should be defended.
It will move away from Paul Dibb’s seminal 1986 report, Defence of Australia, which focused on the direct defence of the mainland through a strategy of denying an aggressor easy passage through the air-sea gap to Australia’s north.
Australia’s new defence philosophy will be a more offensive and less isolationist approach to military power.
It will argue that the effective defence of Australia today requires the ADF to be nastier and able to project offensive power much further from its shores, through mobile forward-deployed missiles and more firepower across the navy and the air force.
This military blueprint – if it is properly implemented – is aimed at making Beijing think twice about attacking Australian interests at home and abroad, including vital trade sea-lanes to our north.
The government will argue that this is not an act of policy aggression by Australia but rather a way for Canberra to play a more important balancing military role in the Indo-Pacific, which it says will foster regional security for all.
It will say that its new defence blueprint is a sensible and measured response to a new era of strategic competition. China won’t see it that way, however.
We can expect lots of huffing and puffing in Beijing in the days and weeks ahead.
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