We must plan now to be ready for future conflict

Peter Jennings is perfectly right to demand, as he did in The Weekend Australian,that “Australia must toughen up, and prepare for armed conflict”.

But it is not quite true that no one saw this coming. Some of us have been writing about the need to accept that Australia might have to fight a serious war since the Rudd-Gillard years did inestimable damage to the Australian military. The Coalition government since 2013 has taken limited but significant steps to create the capability.

Neither would I agree the major challenge is nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. Australia is competently prepared for the little that we might be able to do in that scenario, given our limited capability and the small reaction time that Korean events will offer.

Nuclear war on the peninsula is the most immediate challenge, but it may not be the most dangerous for Australia. Some form of protracted state-on-state conflict, whether Australia decides to participate or not, is likely to be much more challenging than the figurative flash on the horizon in north Asia.

Australia has not been militarily tested since World War II. Rather, we have deployed forces to successive wars where the government had the choice to go to war or not and how we would participate.

These have been called wars of choice where we never had to commit to actually winning.

Our tactical successes have led many Australians to blithely assume that we are adequately defended — but against what?

What if we faced a war of necessity, a fight we needed to win using what we had at the moment? To assume those days have passed is naive. To assume that we would be given much notice to prepare is dangerous.

To prepare for serious war is not militarism. Strength still deters and weakness provokes. Our aim must be to deter war by being able to win. As Jennings implies, it is time for Australia to take hard power seriously.

The Coalition government invested $200 billion in the early stages of our rearmament to buy ships, submarines, armoured vehicles, aircraft, satellites, and a plethora of systems that enable us to fight. But what war are you preparing for?

Defence is far more than the military, but in preparing for serious conflict, the military effect of defence policy is an Australian Defence Force that can deter war by being able to win. To do this and carry the people with you, government must be open about what it thinks is the war it is preparing for, what it expects that war to be like, its judgment as to when it is likely to occur and how it would intend to fight it.

I am not talking about North Korea; I am talking about protracted state-on-state warfare.

We need not discuss precisely whom the government expects to fight. It may be dangerous to do so. But this cannot be the reason to not prepare.

The likelihood of a serious war has moved from improbable to at least plausible, and a distinct enough possibility for us to prepare seriously for it. We are not buying high-end fighters, ships, submarines and armoured vehicles to deliver humanitarian aid, but despite the excellent efforts of this government, is it enough?

To many, this military build-up appears to have several confusing elements that could be easily and cheaply clarified.

There is no clear strategy as to what kind of war Australia is preparing for. Where is our policy coherence?

What is assumed to be high-level policy and strategy is not linked by an operational concept to the type of equipment being procured, the forces to be built and, most importantly, how a war will be fought. So we know the “what”, but how and where do we expect to fight?

Ships, submarines, armoured vehicles and sustainable logistics all take time. Do we have it?

Land forces are too small in capability (perhaps not so much in numbers); the navy is still short of personnel and needs its planned ships; and all lack logistics, missile stocks and equipment replacements.

We have only limited capability to really hurt an aggressor, something that China has perfected in its area denial strategy, mainly through rocketry. In how we fight, can we afford to be overly defensive?

Deficiencies in fuel reserves, missiles and replacement equipment undercut every other aspect of the build-up. How long will the force we are rebuilding need to fight?

Given the rise of opponents to the West and the relative lessening of US military power, Australia must not reject alliances but should recognise limits on US power, and move effectively to far greater levels of self-sufficiency.

The first move in recognising reality costs not one penny and can be made only by government, and that move is to determine and publicly state what kind of war Australia is preparing for, in what time frame and how we are going to fight. This can be done without naming possible enemies.

The government’s achievements in defence are enormous, but the strategic environment remains challenging. We run the risk of preparing for the last series of small wars conducted under the wing of what was once a superpower, with only a token nod towards high-level conflict.

A really smart country and government would do the thinking now — at no expense — and carry the nation with it.

Jim Molan is a senator for NSW.