Policy Discussion Paper - Australia Defence Association

Latest ADA Commentary

ADA National Office:

General Enquiries

Feedback to the ADA

Defender

Advertising in Defender

Media Liaison

(02) 6231-4444

+61-2-6231-4444

PO Box 320
Erindale Centre
ACT 2903
Australia

If you have something to say about national security you can also tell these prominent people

Believe it or not, the term 'defence' is not defined in Australian legislation nor is any agreed definition used in the formal or informal discourse in the Australian defence community. The Commonwealth Constitution gives the Federal government power to provide for "the naval and military defence of the Commonwealth" and the Oxford Dictionary defines 'defence' as "resistance against attack". Section 4 of the Defence Act 1903 does not define the term but does define 'war' as "...any invasion or apprehended invasion of, or attack or apprehended attack on, Australia by an enemy or armed force."

The question of definition is important because there is no real agreement in the wider Australian community about the justification for a defence capability or even the need for one. Yet it is for the protection of the Australian community that we have a defence capability and it is the community that pays for it. For most Australians, defence means protection against an invasion of some kind by any adversary. Yet Australia has never, not even in 1942, been seriously threatened with invasion. That has not prevented Australian governments committing military forces to large scale operations usually with the support and even at the instigation of the Australian community.

The notion of defending against invasion implicitly defines Australia in territorial terms. It assumes that Australia is not threatened until an adversary's forces gain a lodgement on Australian soil. This narrow definition led the official publication Australia's Strategic Policy 1997 to state that: Defeating attacks against Australia's territory is our core force structure priority. But this is clearly an inadequate concept for the security of the Australian community and, in recent years, successive governments have attempted to define the defence mission in more comprehensive ways. The Defence mission is said to be: To prevent or defeat the use of armed force against our country or its interests. Interestingly, this is a more negative concept than that espoused, for example, in the same statement in Defence Annual Report 1995-1996 when the mission was said to be: To promote the Security of Australia, and to Protect its People and its Interests.

Regardless of the meaning of either statement, both incorporate the concept that defence involves the protection not merely of territory but of interests, a concept the Australia Defence Association has been propounding since the mid 1970s. Despite the official acceptance of the concept of defending interests, the failure to convey to the wider community a sense of what is meant by defence means that the defence against invasion notion is well entrenched in the community as is also the notion of proceeding to a defence policy only in the light of an identifiable threat. The negative concept of 'prevention' compared with the more positive notion of 'promotion' encourages the short-sighted view that defence preparedness should respond only to an identified threat.

The problem with threat-based defence policies is that by the time agreement is reached upon the existence and nature of any threat, it is far too late to defend against it. We should have learned that lesson in the late 1930s and, at least in the defence community, that is so. It is not so in the wider community, especially among those who seek a larger percentage of the community's resources for their preferred social spending programs. For them, raising the glib claim of 'no threat' allows calls for diverting resources away from defence. As the contrast between the two quoted mission statements above shows, there is no agreement even within the defence community about its task. However, it is seen as a reactionary mission, one which responds to developments in our strategic environment rather than one which tries to shape that environment. To some extent, too, it is seen as being independent of our other international relationships and modes of dealing with them - as though our defence capability were relevant only in war when diplomacy had failed.

In practice, however, Defence has attempted to shape that strategic environment with a range of programs designed to build relationships and confidence in our region. The intention to do so was set out in the Defence Report 1991-92 where it was stated that our policy was that: ...we will defend ourselves with and in Asia - not against Asia. This too was an attempt to integrate our various international policies into a coherent and mutually supporting whole. But it is also a policy approach that has been unpopular in a number of quarters, even within the official defence community. Those with a traditional isolationist bent reject the idea that Australia needs to co-operate with any other country in its own defence. The isolationist group includes strange allies - the anti-American community, the anti-Asian groups, the defence-against-invasion advocates and so on. The ill-defined concept of self-reliance once strongly urged by Defence and the then Hawke government also helped to promote isolationism to such an extent that developing a more sophisticated policy encountered significant obstacles with, apparently, official and political endorsement.

Not less damaging has been the tendency to define policy in terms of slogans that mislead and which are used to criticise policy without having to explain the basis of the criticism. The endless reiteration of accusations that a policy of 'regional engagement' was not more than a reversion to one of 'forward defence' was not only wrong but a view peddled by those who had been persuaded that 'forward defence' was bad. Furthermore, 'forward defence' is considered bad primarily because it is alleged to have failed in Vietnam. Future historians might suggest otherwise but the actual reaction to the perceived failure – the withdrawal into a form of neo-isolationism – was quickly perceived to be inadequate for a nation compelled by reality to associate intimately with its region and the world.

The task of the Department of Defence and the ADF is to provide the government of the day with the widest possible range of military options for the support of national policy. Writing in the January-February 1999 issue of the Defence Force Journal, the then CDF, Admiral Chris Barrie noted that: With today's uncertainties, there is a growing focus on the needs of the force in being, which provides the range of options available to a government to support its foreign policy needs. But this is a demand which is inevitably in conflict with the demands of investing in the future force, especially against a limited overall budget.

Admiral Barrie highlighted an essential difficulty - that the options must be created within a budget and, perhaps of lesser importance, while providing capabilities to meet more serious but generally longer-term and much rarer threats. At the same time, it is necessary to point out two important but related elements to meet the predictable criticisms. First, no government needs to exercise the military options it has even if some elements in the community, even within the defence community, would like to deny them the options in case they are tempted to use them. Second, if the government does not have the options, there will arise situations in which its diplomacy lacks necessary military muscle and its influence over events is thus minimal.

Attempts to deny governments the ability to use military force are fundamentally undemocratic in the Australian context. Governments are elected to do those things that the community is unable to do for itself. Governments will be judged on how they use their resources - options if you like - to achieve community objectives. It is no defence to say that the country's interests could not be supported because it lacked the ability to do so. And, as the 1976 defence White Paper pointed out: The first responsibility of government is to provide the nation with security from armed attack and from the constraints on independent national decisions imposed by the threat of such attack. Not a bad definition when you think about it because it places the responsibility for adequate defence on the government rather than the department or the military which have dominated decision-making for too long.

Clearly, defence can be defined. Defence White Papers should adopt and incorporate a clear definition such as:

The first responsibility of government is to provide the nation with security from armed attack and from the constraints on independent national decisions imposed by the threat of such attack. To that end, the task of the wider defence organisation is to provide the government with the widest possible range of military options for the support of national policy.