Australian official thought regarding the defence of Australia has been more independently minded than is portrayed by certain academics and commentators who, often not possessing a deep understanding of the history of Australian strategy, have tended to assume that we have lacked the national confidence to think and act for ourselves.
These critics typically portray Australia as a security ‘client’, either of the British Empire or of the United States, which suffers a ‘fear of abandonment’ by a great and powerful protector.
Since the 1880s, Australian governments have grappled with the problem of how best to defend Australia against potential adversaries, where others might not be able, or willing, to arrive in force to save the day.
The Defence Strategic Review of 2023 and the National Defence Strategy (NDS) of 2026 sit within this long tradition of independent Australian thinking.
This is not to say that Australian governments have always turned such aspirations into effective strategies, plans and budgets. Too often they have not.
It has usually taken the storm of war to shake us out of strategic complacency.
Before the 1950s, the principal objects of defence concern were great powers that might one day launch attacks on our territory, and also disrupt our access to the sea. At various times, we were concerned about Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and communist China.
During the 1960s, another object of defence concern loomed into view, as we began to focus on Indonesia as a possible military threat. That focus has continued to this day, even if it is often unspoken.
Since the 1960s, defence policy has sought to hedge against the rise of the only proximate regional power that might one day be able to threaten Australia militarily – namely, a very different Indonesia, one that had perhaps turned down the path of military dictatorship or Islamist theocracy. Faced with such a threat, Australia would need a heavier force that could independently deter and, if necessary, defeat an attack by an aggressive and militarily capable Indonesia.
Today, the probability of this occurring is close to zero. Were Indonesia to begin to go down this path, we would detect such a change. We would have at least 10 years’ worth of strategic warning. This would afford us the time to build the heavier force that we would need in order to be able to defend ourselves independently, without having to rely on foreign combat forces.
Over this time, but only systematically expressed for the first time in the Hawke government’s 1987 Defence White Paper, our policy has been that Australia should maintain a base ‘force-in-being’, which could be expanded over time, as required.
Australia would seek to be ‘self-reliant’ in defence terms – that is, be able to conduct combat operations independently in the defence of our territory, sea-air approaches and maritime access, where combat support from allies might not be forthcoming, at least initially.
Defence self-reliance does not mean that we would seek to develop independently every conceivable element of military power, something that would be beyond our economic and industrial base. Today, we are still heavily reliant on the US for key military enablers, such as space-based intelligence and surveillance systems; to operate key platforms such as the F-35 Lightning; and, of course, for the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS.
This policy seeks to take maximum advantage of the abiding features of Australia’s geography, which affords us advantages, in the form of the expanse of northern Australia; long sea-air approaches; and the great archipelagic barrier that extends from Sumatra to Fiji, which any attacking force would have to navigate in order to attack Australia.
In official thinking, there is a long line of continuity that extends back to colonial times. Before Federation, colonial leaders started to think seriously about the independent defence of Australia, especially after the establishment of an Imperial German colony in New Guinea in 1884.
Defence was a centrepiece of Henry Parkes’ arguments for Federation, including in his Tenterfield address of 1889. Imperial Japan’s rise, and long-term concerns about China, dominated defence discourse at the time of Federation, and in the decade thereafter. While governments of the time were imperialist in outlook, they were clear-eyed about the requirement not to rely on Britain for our local defence.
Alfred Deakin translated this disposition into a campaign to build Australian sea power, which saw the acquisition of the battle cruiser HMAS Australia in 1913. In 1919, Billy Hughes aggressively pursued Australian interests at the Paris Peace Conference, arguing for the creation of an Australian empire in the Pacific, largely for defence purposes.
In the 1920s and ’30s, independent thinking was set aside for a time, when Australia unwisely accepted the Singapore strategy, which sought to deter aggression by Imperial Japan through the establishment of a major fleet base for the Royal Navy in Singapore. Even then, voices were raised against Australia becoming a security client of Britain, especially by the army and the Labor opposition, led by John Curtin.
The Singapore strategy failed. We learned the hard way that we had to do more for ourselves, even against a great power like Imperial Japan, against whom Australia should have been able to hold out in 1942 and 1943, until help arrived.
After World War II, we were at risk of once again becoming a security client, with the overly rapid demobilisation of the significant force that had been built over 1942 to 1945, and with the signing of the ANZUS agreement in 1951. Not that the treaty itself was a problem. It was a sensible precaution in the Cold War. The problem was it was not accompanied by the same independence of thought about local defence that had been evident in earlier times.
It was the US that shocked us into action, when in 1963 John F. Kennedy made clear to Robert Menzies there were limits on the ANZUS guarantee, which did not give Australia a blank cheque of US support in a potential confrontation with Indonesia.
Menzies got the message. He announced the outcome of a defence review in May 1963, which placed greater emphasis on the requirement for Australia to undertake independent operations in its own defence.
There is a story to be told at another time about why it then took a quarter of a century for this aspiration to be turned into concrete policy, strategy, and funding – something that was finally achieved in the 1987 Defence White Paper, thanks to Kim Beazley.
Today, the government’s defence policy sits within this tradition. It seeks to make tailored investments in a base force-in-being, which is funded at around 2 percent of GDP, using the traditional definition of how much is spent on defence as a proportion of GDP. Most of the new money for Defence that was announced in the NDS of 2026 is skewed towards the latter part of the decade to 2035–36, and most of the significant new capabilities are not due to arrive until the mid-2030s.
The most recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The cost of Defence, sets this out honestly and clearly, in ways that puncture the government’s propaganda.
As a hedge against a regional power over the medium term to 2036, NDS 2026 is, broadly speaking, the right strategy, with its decade-long focus on recapitalising the navy, reorienting the army to focus on operating in the littoral environment to our north, sustaining a small but potent air force, and developing a credible strike capability.
Today’s problem is, however, a different one. NDS 2026 does not seek to rapidly build a heavier force that could defend us against an attack before 2030 by a great power in a major war. That should be the immediate focus of policy.
There is a plausible prospect of such a war in the Pacific occurring, possibly as early as next year.
As the government itself says, we are facing a more dangerous world now. Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles often says that we are today facing the most threatening strategic environment since the end of World War II. He does not say that the danger lies 10 years hence.
By that logic, we have to solve a more immediate defence problem. However, there is nothing in current policy to suggest that we are undertaking an urgent and expansive mobilisation of the Australian Defence Force or that we are preparing our economy and population for war.
Today, the classical model of hedging over time no longer applies, as it once did. Were a major war to break out in the Pacific between the US and China in the next few years, there is a credible prospect that Australia would be attacked by China, which would seek to disrupt and deny the use of our territory by US forces.
As I have written before, we do not have a decade to expand the force-in-being in the time that might be available.
To deal with this challenge, we needed to change course 10 to 15 years ago. Had the policy of the government of prime minister Kevin Rudd, as set out in the 2009 Defence White Paper, been pursued, we would now possess a heavier force that could more independently hold out against Chinese attacks for long enough to make a real difference in a Pacific war.
As it is, we are now in the humiliating position of being a basing provider for US combat forces and uncomfortably reliant on the US for our own defence in a major war, which we should be able to largely undertake with our own combat forces.
Today, a new model is needed that combines the classical hedging approach with a more immediate focus on rapidly building the heavier force that we would need in the event of a Pacific war.
In terms of military geostrategy, this would mean extending our ability to operate against People’s Liberation Army forces at distance, further north and west – that is, well into the South China Sea, the Central Pacific, and the eastern Indian Ocean.
We would have to fight further out to maintain maritime access, defending long sea lines to north Asia, the US, and across the entire Indian Ocean.
Having not built the heavier force that we need today, NDS 2026 is the right strategy for the wrong era. The time for hedging has run out. Even if we assume that there is only a 10 percent chance of a Pacific war before 2030, we now need urgently to:
—Improve national resilience and civil defence by bringing the community and the private sector into a genuine national defence strategy (for starters, we should revive the War Book of the 1950s, and rapidly enhance the protection of critical infrastructure).
—Make clear to China that in the regrettable event of war, we would support our treaty ally, the United States. With the latter, we should insist on being taken into a deeper level of confidence when it comes to US war plans, and we should plan to fight as part of a US-led combined coalition force in any such war – while insisting that we would lead on our own local defence.
—Boost the combat readiness of the ADF, insofar as we can, over months and not years.
The classical model still has its place. We should continue to build a force over a decade as a hedge. That, however, is not the problem that we need to solve today. Were a Pacific war to break out in 2027, or soon thereafter, it would be one of the most forecast strategic events in modern history. It would not be a case of sleepwalking into a catastrophe. We are putting ourself in a position of peril with eyes wide open.
At the royal commission that would inevitably follow such a war – assuming we had not been defeated and forced to accept unfavourable terms, whereby such inquiries might not be possible without permission from a new overlord – the prime minister, other ministers, and their senior officials could not plead ignorance, or that they had not been advised, or that there had been no warning. They would be held collectively and individually responsible for our lack of war preparedness, when all of the warning signs had been flashing for 20 years, with increasing intensity in recent years.
The publication later this year of a declassified history of Australian strategic policy (which will cover the period from 1976 to 2020), which is being prepared for the Department of Defence, would be a key exhibit for any future inquiry, as would be the cabinet papers regarding the 2009 Defence White Paper that will be released in 2029.
Governments make mistakes. Being unprepared for a foreseeable war is the worst of them, as the record would show.
One could write the terms of reference now.
This article originally appeared in The Australian.
