Prioritisation for the ADF

• Unclear priorities for the ADF may mean you end up with a force that can neither really defend Australia nor meet other potential priorities.
• Different priorities have historically included: defending Aus from minor northern raids; defending Aus from a major invasion, as part of a US-led coalition; conducting stabilisation operations in neighbouring countries; joining US-led coalitions in distant countries.
• These all require different types of forces: eg stabilisation requires large numbers of light infantry to provide a persistent community presence, whereas high-intensity peer battles require heavy equipment. Neither force is useful in the alternate context. We have largely focused on the US-led coalition scenarios, likely to the detriment of our ability to pursue an independent strategy if needed.
• Concentric circles of interests:
  1. deny aggressor bases in close neighbours (including by keeping them stable);
  2. protect maritime SE Asia from aggression from a local or external hegemon;
  3. add our weight to efforts to prevent an aggressive great power from dominating the region.

Navy

• Sea control vs sea denial strategies are different and require different forces. US Navy is large enough to prioritise sea control; we would need to pursue a sea denial strategy in northern approaches. For that, need submarines, land-based missiles, long range air-to-surface missiles. Don’t need what we’re building, which is large air warfare destroyers (Hobart), large frigates (Future Frigate), and large patrol vessels.
• Anzac class frigates are fine for contributing to coalition piracy operations. Smaller landing ships (eg Kanimbla, Jervis Bay size) are sufficient for our neighbourhood; LHDs are only needed for putting a lot of force ashore at once. For submarines, would be better to have more but cheaper subs (eg don’t enable huge range to hunt in South China Sea).
• If you work from first principles on how many sea approaches there are, how much time each sub spends at sea vs in maintenance, etc, you find that you need more subs than we’re currently planning, and the current procurement decisions don’t seem to have been grounded in any real strategic analysis.

Army

Unclear role; should not be seen as primary plank of our defence, but has assumed a place as the central service because we continue to deploy it overseas. (Compare to Churchill’s remark on Royal Navy: either it’s big enough to stop the Germans landing, in which case we don’t need an army, or it’s not, in which case the navy needs to be bigger.) Similar story on equipment where ASLAVs and Bushmasters were probably fine for stabilisation and local patrol but are being replaced with significantly larger vehicles (Boxers) that are dubiously useful and may be harder to operate. In a navy-led defensive strategy it’s unclear why we’d need Abrams tanks.

Air Force

Probably more aligned to actual needs than other services. F-35 JSF is expensive but the only real 5th gen aircraft so does make sense to buy it. We may actually need more than the 100 planned, but numbers are hard to estimate - perhaps 100 F-35 and retain 100 Super Hornets (4.5th gen).

Nuclear weapons

If you don’t have strategic nuclear weapons, a state that does can ultimately force you into backing down. Many countries including Australia have relied on the US nuclear umbrella, but the assumption that the US would risk nuclear attack on its own cities — as it was able to convincingly project for Western Europe during the Cold War — may no longer hold. However, the costs (financial and moral) of having nuclear weapons are high, and he doesn’t actually argue that we should develop them.