Australian Military Strategy

None of those commitments required a distinctive Australian military strategy. Instead, our forces simply complied with the overall approach of our senior partner. Even in Vietnam, where the Australian Army had its own area of responsibility and developed its own operational methods (regarded by many as superior to the Americans’), any achievements were irrelevant to the ultimate outcome.

The disaster of Vietnam was one of the catalysts for the development of Australia’s only independent military strategy.

Titled The Defence of Australia 1987 (DoA87), that policy document shifted the Australian Defence Force’s operational focus from participation as a follower in distant wars, to taking responsibility as a leader by shaping developments in our immediate region. Specifically, DoA87 charged the ADF with controlling events in Australia’s vast north and north-western approaches.

In contrast to the dependent mentality of the preceding eighty years, DoA87 provided the foundations of a proactive, sovereign military strategy.
In the event, the extent to which it was ever implemented is debatable. For obvious reasons it was popular with the Air Force and the Navy; for equally obvious reasons, it was unpopular with the Army. What is not debatable is that in practice, Australia’s long-standing operational ‘model’ (it can’t be called a strategy) was soon reasserted, in the form of deploying the ADF to expeditionary wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan as a junior partner.

As its title indicates, the current Defence White Paper, Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century (2009), contains echoes of DoA87. It remains to be seen whether it suffers the same fate. The early signs are not promising. Notwithstanding the paper’s explicit emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, both major political parties have enthusiastically confirmed their commitment to the (almost certainly unwinnable) invasion of Afghanistan.

Two points need to be made regarding this dependent model of military employment. The first is that for forty years – in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – it has failed politically, socially, and militarily. The second is that in the global village of the 21st century, it has become ethically unacceptable.

Simply put, the era has gone in which predominantly white, predominantly European, predominantly Christian armies could stampede around the world invading countries their governments either don’t like or want to change. Australia needs a defence strategy that recognises those realities, and that reflects the changing nature of international relations in the 21st century.

That strategy should be based on the superseding importance of controlling events, and of protecting our people, values, environment, neighbours and allies, in Australia’s area of primary interest, namely, the Asia-Pacific.

Drawing on the ADF’s key advantages of high quality people, advanced technology, and the ability to plan and act with decision superiority and precision, from a distance, the strategy of ‘control and protect’ reflects how we want to operate, rather than how our potential enemies might want us to operate, or how we might be compelled to operate in token remote expeditionary operations.

In order to translate the strategy into action, the ADF should be organised, equipped, and trained to conduct four campaigns, as follows:

• Comprehension. The ISR-based (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) comprehension campaign must be Australia’s primary military activity, and it must be conducted 24/7, 365 days a year. By understanding what is happening in our region we can: shape events in our best interests; deter unacceptable behaviour; and, if necessary, respond with calibrated force.
• Control. The ADF must be capable of controlling Australia’s maritime (air and sea) approaches.
• Coercion. The ability to coerce is an essential element of any comprehensive military posture. Methods might include long-range precision strike, cyberwar, and psychological techniques.
• Stabilisation/Intervention. Defence forces play a vital role in legitimate, internationally-sanctioned stabilisation operations in failed states; in post-disaster humanitarian missions; and the like.

Based on the four campaigns of Comprehension, Control, Coercion, and Stabilisation/Intervention, ‘Control and Protect’ rejects the repeated mistakes of the past, and acknowledges that the global environment in which Australians now live is dramatically different from that of the past. It is a strategy for the 21st century. And by no means least, it would represent the values of a mature, confident and independent nation.