Posted on 06/03/2003 6:05:17 AM PDT by ONA-ASIS
THE DEFENCE MATRIX (Australia)
Australia's national defence strategy, outlined just over two years ago, has been rendered obsolete by the rapidly changing nature of war. A special investigation by Max Walsh and Fred Brenchley reveals that the lessons of the war in Iraq demand a revolution in defence policy.
When modern wars are fought on television, image can be everything. And the recent war in Iraq contained many of them. From the convoys of tanks racing across the desert towards Baghdad, through to the high-tech weaponry and symbolic toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein, the conflict showed just how rapidly the nature of war has changed.
But tanks and statues aside, Defence Minister Robert Hill came away from his recent trip to the Middle East with a far more lasting and powerful impression. Hill and his defence chief, General Peter Cosgrove, were taken on a tour of the United States Central Command base in Qatar. There, Hill saw "banks of men and women sitting in front of laptops taking in masses of information and, within hours and usually shorter, turning it into instructions to the fighting elements of the force".
This is how armed conflict in the 21st century will be fought. The scene at CentCom confirmed, rather than revealed, to Hill just how quickly the nature of war has changed. But what he does not stress is this: war has changed to a much greater extent, and with much greater consequences, than has been reflected so far in Australian defence thinking.
The national defence strategy, outlined to federal parliament in a white paper just 30 months ago, has been effectively rendered obsolete by the changes to the strategic environment. However, that white paper, along with its multi-billion-dollar equipment-acquisition program, remains the official formulation of Australia's defence strategy.
While some of the lessons from the engagement in Iraq were reflected in the defence spending decisions announced by Treasurer Peter Costello in the budget – including a special operations command to supplement existing special forces and funds for new equipment including unmanned air vehicles – they do not capture the magnitude of the revolution required in defence policy.
Some may argue it has already begun. The Bulletin has learnt that Australia has moved to broaden its direct ties with the global United States military machine, and has begun working on a common battlefield communications system for troops from both countries.
Cosgrove has also won a significant victory, managing to have several of his senior officers appointed to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and the headquarters of US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, which covers the Middle East region.
In Melbourne last week, high-level strategic talks between Australia and the US covered issues such as electronic warfare, co-operation on the concept of a new style of combat ship, missile defence and infra-red systems. In electronic warfare, Australia lacks bombs guided by global positioning system satellites – one of the obvious necessities demonstrated by Iraq – along with heavy-lift helicopters.
US military officials say the key is not common equipment but the ability of the two militaries to communicate across battlefields. Both are working hard to ensure that new electronic signalling enabling individual soldiers to communicate back to command is compatible. "The commander then has US and Australian signals coming in, and can communicate back," one US official says.
On staff swaps alone, Australia has military people not only at US Pacific Command in Honolulu, Hawaii, but also at Central Command in Florida and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another six are at Buckley, Colorado, the receiving station for global satellites and land bases – including Pine Gap – on alert for missile attacks.
The US military has devised a scenario that if the American president had to be alerted about a missile attack, it might be that an Australian makes the crucial call to Northern Command, where an on-duty Canadian officer would in turn ring the White House.
Australia is telling the US that it would like to be an interlocking piece of the entire force, but not with a stand-alone area of responsibility, such as the British had in southern Iraq. This is probably because Australia is publicly limiting itself to "niche" contributions. But it raises sensitive political and defence issues regarding Australian forces fighting under US leadership.
The White Paper that currently dominates our defence planning reflects a traditional approach to defence policy championed by military brass and endorsed by a succession of defence ministers over the past 25 years. But it was overtaken by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terrorism.
The paper argues that the first priority must be to defend Australia against direct attack. To this end, it advocates the pursuit of a maritime strategy; that is, defending the sea-air gap to our north by naval and air forces.
This approach is a modest evolution of the 1986 Dibb report commissioned from a respected academic by then- defence minister Kim Beazley. But the concept of a Fortress Australia approach to defence policy has been around since its predecessor model – forward defence – was bruised and battered by Vietnam.
The question now is whether the government and the armed forces, both of which have a considerable institutional investment in the White Paper and its consequences, are prepared to initiate radical reforms.
At present, a Maginot Line syndrome is in operation. After World War I, France vowed to defend its geographical integrity from another German invasion. To this end, the French built the Maginot Line, a network of forts and blockhouses as an impregnable obstacle to invasions. Despite its cost, the line was enormously popular with the electorate, who believed in it. But when the Germans invaded, they simply detoured through Belgium and the rapidity of their advance overwhelmed the French, who believed the Maginot Line would at least cause a costly delay in any invasion. The analogy with our defence strategy is not that we face an invasion, but that we are prepared to fight the last war, not the next. And the next war could not only involve conventional terrorism, but a ballistic missile attack from a rogue state such as North Korea.
What was apparent in 1986, when the Dibb report was adopted, had become all the more obvious in 2000. Namely, that the prospects of Australia becoming involved in a state versus state conflict involving a potential invasion and takeover of the country were negligible in the foreseeable future.
Ignoring the remote political risk, the only country capable of providing such a threat in logistical terms is the US. The Indonesian navy is hard-pressed to police the pirates who operate in its seas. China does not possess a navy capable of undertaking such a venture.
With echoes of Maginot, however, the Dibb report and subsequent White Paper received a warm reception in Canberra both from politicians and the armed forces. There is a powerful political imperative for governments to be proactive on defence and the concept of a Fortress Australia protected by a moat, controlled by state-of-the-art naval and air forces, is an emotional and marketable scenario.
As long as no alternative to that style of threat existed, it suited the armed forces – or at least the navy and air force – to have a defence strategy that underwrote a continuous upgrading of resources.
East Timor should have been a reality check for defence thinking because it exposed the serious shortcomings in Australia's strategic approach. At the least, it should have underlined the obvious: that Australia does not have a gap to its north; instead, it has an extensive, increasingly unstable archipelago. The military demands most likely to arise involve boots on the ground, not the deployment of air and sea power.
Scandalously, at the most basic level our soldiers did not have the equipment to put their boots on the ground in East Timor. Camouflage suits, night-vision goggles and water-purification plants had to be borrowed from the Americans.
And as Alan Dupont, of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, points out, there were also serious flaws in the structure and strategy of our forces. "It is not generally appreciated what a near-run thing East Timor was for our $14bn defence force," he says.
The White Paper acknowledges that in the air-sea gap strategy there is a "vital and central role for land forces" but, Dupont says, "there has been no serious attempt to flesh out this new role or articulate in convincing fashion how the ADF's repeated overseas deployments are consistent with a defensive maritime strategy. And there is little sign of willingness to make changes to a force structure that is more heavily reliant on expensive sea and air assets that cannot be easily adapted to contingencies other than the defence of Australia, despite claims to the contrary."
Dupont is one of a growing band of defence specialists pointing out the growing disconnection between official strategic thinking, as reflected in the White Paper, and the environment in which our defence forces are being deployed.
They have found in Hill someone who might normally be regarded as an unlikely champion. Softly spoken and mild of manner, Hill is an oddity in a political arena dominated by inflated egos, overassertive behaviour and vaulting ambition. He looks to be the easiest of ministerial captures for a department notorious for its record of success in this area.
For a while, this too looked to be the case. Hill's diffident persona is more than a touch deceptive, as he demonstrated last June in a thoughtful paper to the defence and strategic studies course at the Australian Defence College. In his explanation of defence strategy, Hill quietly began rewriting the White Paper.
He cited the deployment in recent times of Australian ground troops in East Timor, Bougainville, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and the Persian Gulf, often in coalition. He pointed also to the expansion of naval and air force activities in areas such as the interception of illegal migrants that might in the past have been regarded as unorthodox.
"The geographical spread of these deployments highlights what might be called the globalisation of security," he said. "Now, more than ever before, security is indivisible. Threats transcend borders and cannot be met by any one country acting alone. For Australia, it demonstrates again that defence of Australia and its interests does not stop at the edge of the air-sea gap. It probably never made sense to conceptualise our security interests as a series of diminishing concentric circles around our coastline, but it certainly does not do so now." (This reference was a crack at the Dibb report, which illustrated its case with just such a map displaying diminishing concentric circles).
Hill spoke of a "fundamental change" to the notion that Australia's security responsibilities were confined to our own region. This, he said, placed a "premium on our assets and our doctrine" and demanded a "capability-based rather than a threat-based approach to planning".
He indicated to his audience that this revised view of Australia's defence strategy would be recognised in the strategic review that the government is committed to publishing annually. As it turned out, his submission to cabinet ran into trouble. It was knocked back twice and the final product mirrored the competing political forces that are still seeking to shape defence policy.
The 2003 strategy document spoke of the need for a rebalancing of capabilities and priorities, for more flexible and mobile forces in the light of global terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But it also asserted that "the principles set out in the defence White Paper remain sound and that the rebalancing of capability and expenditure that will be necessary would not fundamentally alter the size, structure and role of the Defence Force".
As noted by Paul Dibb, deputy secretary of the Department of Defence before moving across to the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University: if the government wanted to pursue both courses – changing capabilities and priorities while holding intact commitments set out in the 2000 White Paper – it would "have to stop pretending that Australia's defence can be done on only 1.9% of GDP".
Defence spending has been edged up to 2% of GDP in the latest federal budget, but it is not only a matter of dollars. As long as the White Paper remains the official policy, its preoccupation with the air-sea gap will dominate defence strategy and spending.
In the game of politics, it may be possible to run public and private agendas, but not when it comes to communications between the elected government and the public sector.
That's why you have a White Paper.
The paper needs revisiting because the emergence of a growing global threat in the form of terrorism has changed not only the focus of our defence but also how our limited defence resources need to be restructured to deal with this. Not only have the lessons of Iraq strengthened the hand of what might be called the Robert Hill school of defence policy, so, too, have further terrorist incidents.
The most important lesson of Iraq was that it confirmed what was already self-evident: the overwhelming superiority of American military power. Of itself this has brought about a revolution in warfare. US military domination has been built and will be maintained by its technological advantage.
Warfare has moved from the industrial to the information age. There is no way, in terms of economic management, that we can run an independent Fortress Australia approach and at the same time commit ourselves to sustaining a 21st-century US-Australian alliance. The Iraq war found Australia off the pace in technological terms and we are scrambling to catch up. We have little option.
What is dubbed "network-centric warfare" is redefining the basic sources of combat power. US defence analyst David Potts, in his book The Big Issue – Command and Combat in the Information Age, puts it this way: "Manoeuvre, mass, surprise, firepower and logistics have for centuries been the coins of the military realm. Surprise remains a key asset. But in the information age, information is transforming both the concepts of mass and manoeuvre, redefining firepower, and greatly simplifying logistics. Information can, in effect, be directly substituted in the 'manufacture' of each of these capabilities.
"The massing of forces is being transformed into a massing of effects (without the physical movement). Manoeuvre is less and less about being able to get a sizeable amount of men and material somewhere in a hurry, and more and more about either being prepositioned correctly or being able to have small groups move successfully on a non-linear battlefield.
"The mass previously associated with firepower is being increasingly replaced with precision, made possible by information. Logistics have been greatly simplified by the demassing of the force and by increasingly current and complete information." All of these elements were on display in Iraq. Shock and awe was all about effect. Zapping by precision-guided munitions contributed both to the effect and the efficiency with which the war was pursued.
While unarmed air vehicles provided low-cost eyes in the sky, special forces – including Australia's Special Air Service – were able to operate in small, highly mobile groups behind enemy lines. In network-centric warfare, using digital communications, such operations are said to swarm together like sharks or hyenas to attack specific targets then disperse.
The Iraqi forces, following the orthodoxy of the pre-information age, massed troops and weapons to create easy targets. When it came to logistics, the dash to Baghdad employed logistical support techniques enabled by computer-driven information and systems similar to those perfected by the likes of US retailer WalMart. As a result, the coalition forces achieved a rapid victory with minimal casualties.
However, as Hill found, the nerve centre of the entire operation was the corps of young men and women manning laptop computers at command headquarters.
The 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz first applied the expression "fog of war" to the importance of communications on the battlefield. While network-centric war has not lifted the fog entirely, it has done so to a degree that has radically changed the nature of conventional war.
While the ability to conduct network-centric warfare provides a powerful deterrent, it does not eliminate the causes of conflicts that will increasingly be pursued by asymmetric initiatives in which maximum damage can be inflicted on military and civilian targets with minimum outlays in manpower and resources. The use of weapons of mass destruction poses a particular threat.
In such circumstances, an Australian strategic stance that defines the defence of the homeland in terms of an air-sea gap, with its multi-billion-dollar expenditure on purpose-designed ships and aircraft, looks like our version of the Maginot Line.
Fighting the wrong war in the wrong place.
Most European armies can provide well trained, led and equipped troops, but they are few in number. What all these armies have in common is the lack of logistical support. It is logistics that make an army truly professional and battle worthy. Most Euro armies are nothing more than overarmed police forces with no reach. Most cannot even go to a training exercise for more than a couple of days-they don't have the basic life support for even those type of operations.
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