Policy Discussion Paper - Australia Defence Association

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The concept of defending interests is as old as warfare itself. Arguably the history of the 18th and 19th centuries with their wars of territorial and commercial expansion led to the disillusion inherent in the 1903 Australian Defence Act's idealistic definition of war. If defence was conceived as the protection of Australian territory only, this country could never be accused of aggression or expansionism. As indicated above, that idealism was not – and could not be – proof against the pressure of actual events although the desire for some kind of moral purity was still implicit in the refusal to conscript young men for overseas service.

Even so, Australia's national interests were engaged during World War I even though Australian territory was not seriously threatened. While the moral interest of defending Belgium or resisting aggression wherever it occurred might have been invoked to justify an independent Australian commitment, it was hardly sufficient to justify the sacrifice that was incurred. On the other hand, Australia was faced with a German colony bordering upon our own territory of Papua, while our economically vital overseas trade was heavily dependent upon the British naval supremacy that was being challenged by Germany. In the Pacific, a powerful German naval squadron exercised substantial power by its mere presence. Thus both moral and economic interests were engaged while territorial integrity, at least in the immediate sense, was not.

Later conflicts were based much more on ideology with the moral interest of resisting aggression and totalitarianism being much more significant than in 1914. Economic interests continued to be important with the security of sea and air routes being major factors in the Middle East and South-East Asian deployments. There was a well-founded fear of invasion in early 1942 but this generally lasted only from the fall of Singapore in February to the Battle of Midway in June. As we now know, the Japanese High Command considered that the invasion of Australia was beyond its capacity at that stage.

In Korea, Australia's commitment was clearly not driven by any fear of invasion. A number of considerations drove the decision to deploy forces to the peninsula. One was manifestly the desire to sustain United States support for Australia’s security on the basis of our paying our dues. Another was the desire to give some credibility to the collective security principles set out in the United Nations Charter. On the other hand, these fundamentally political interests were not seen to be so compelling as to require the substantial commitment that would be demanded by a territorial threat. In Vietnam, our rhetorical interest was the defence of free South Vietnam against Communist aggression. As is now increasingly evident, our real interest was the engagement of United States support for Australia's security. In fact both interests were valid and worthy of military support in the circumstances.

Australia's primary interest is – and always has been – in the maintenance of peace, local, regional and even global. Arguably, Australia's real security policy since Federation has been driven by a desire to contribute to coalition attempts to maintain or restore peace. Although its declared policy, at least until recent years, has been to defend Australian territory and nothing else, the policies successive governments have pursued have been different. The challenge to a mature society is to close this gap between declared and real policy. Because the actual policy has been driven in the past by pressure from allies rather than from popular conviction, Australia has rarely been adequately prepared for the task it faced.

The political interests that were important in Korea and Vietnam were valid but not necessarily persuasive to an Australian community whose concept of defence is primarily defined by the territorial interest alone. Political interests will continue to be significant (and, in an era of rapid mass communications, often unpredictable and capricious) while the territorial interest can be taken for granted. What is surprising is that economic and other interests have yet to be defined in any public or even professional debate, yet they will become increasingly important in the future. Australians generally consider that theirs is a small and insignificant country. This is not so. Australia has the 16th largest economy in the world, it is the 13th largest trading nation in the world by tonnage (seventh if the calculation is on a tonne/mile basis) and has the 15th highest per capita Gross Domestic Product. Australia is one of a small number of industrialised nations and an even smaller number moving into the post-industrial age. Even in population terms, Australia ranks 50th in the world, that is, in the top quarter of some 200 independent nations.

In a more subjective sense, Australia is one of the world's oldest parliamentary democracies, one of the most politically stable of nations and, as a medium power, is - and always has been - strongly committed to collective security, be it economic or military. Thus Australia has a substantial and continuing interest in maintaining peace on a global scale. In a regional and global strategic sense, Australia's interests will always be engaged by its geography. Australia is not merely an island continent (with the world’s sixth largest land area and 11th longest coastline); it lies at the junction of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, one of the most heavily traversed waterways in the world. While Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines are the significant countries in this context, Australia's potential or actual ability to deploy strategic naval and air power from our north makes us a factor in regional security calculations whether we like it or not. Similarly, our strategic position and identity as a politically stable nation ensures that Australia is important in a global strategic sense.

A large proportion of Australia’s seaborne trade passes through the so-called marginal seas off East Asia. As China is now indicating by its territorial claims, these may well become a key area of future conflict. Australia's control of the Cocos Islands is significant in a global and regional sense even if they are not particularly important to Australia. Control of the Cocos airfield potentially confers control of the approaches to the Sunda and Lombok Straits, two key passages through the Indonesian archipelago. Thus Australian territory is involved in the security calculations of others as far afield as Japan whether we want to be involved or not.

Most of Australia's seaborne trade is carried by foreign shipping and this could arguably neutralise the importance of the shipping defence interest because of the involvement of other naval powers. However, many of the ships are 'flagged' by small and relatively powerless nations. More significantly, Australia has a vital interest in the security of the cargoes rather than the ships. Part of that interest is to ensure that ship owners can be confident that their vessels are protected. Shipping protection is pre-eminently dependent upon coalition operations and this constant in Australia's security posture demands close and continuing attention. Australia is also heavily dependent upon secure air communications for the movement of people and high value, low volume cargoes. While the direct defence of air communications is virtually impossible, Australia does need to contribute to the security of key international air routes and especially the nodal points that are crucial.

The traditional notion of the purpose of a defence policy is the protection of the national territory from attack. This has been restated so often in Australia that it is sometimes thought to be the only task of a national defence capability. That view is so naive and contrary to Australia's historical experience that it has attracted the qualification that the priority for the defence force is the protection of Australia, defined as the national territory and the sea-air gap covering the approaches to Australian territory.

Protagonists of this view argue that a defence force capable of defending the sea-air gap and the national territory will have capabilities available for other tasks - provided the priority task is not imperilled. That is, the basic force required for territorial defence must not be deployed in case it is needed. This is also naive. To illustrate, it is only necessary to consider the challenge to a notional adversary. As the Japanese realised in 1942, the sheer logistics of lodging on Australian soil and then supplying an invasion force capable of conquering all of Australia is so great as to be beyond any force except that of a superpower. Moreover, the reaction not only of Australia's friends and allies but of the global community would be immediate and powerful. Australia's political and economic standing in the world community is too substantial for a global community intent on maintaining some degree of order to ignore. The world's only military superpower, the United States, would be the least likely to tolerate any attack on Australia.

Furthermore, developing the intention and the ability to carry out such an attack on Australia would be manifest well before the attack occurred. And, for fundamental reasons of geography, it would necessarily involve Australia's immediate neighbours such as Indonesia or Papua New Guinea as targets or participants. The regional engagement policy pursued by Australia in recent years has been attacked as another form of the much-maligned 'forward defence'. But, properly pursued, regional engagement achieves two important objectives in the territorial defence task. First, it reduces the likelihood that Australia's regional neighbours will align themselves with an adversary and therefore engages those countries in Australia's defence. Second, it maintains capabilities and skills in the Australian Defence Force that can translate into a capability for the direct defence of Australian territory.

Regional engagement, properly pursued, ensures that the possibility that Australia can or will be directly attacked is deferred for years, if not for generations. The corollary, that Australia disengage from the region, actually encourages the possibility that Australia could be politically, militarily and economically isolated. Two further points are worth making. Australian history teaches that the so-called 'sea-air gap' includes the territorial land masses of our neighbours. Much of Indonesia, all of Papua New Guinea and now East Timor lie within what is more accurately termed the sea-land-air gap. All these island territories have the ability to provide bases from which attacks can be launched against Australia. Clearly, the gap must be defended on land as well as at sea or in the air.

Second, Australia's interests are so widespread that it is not necessary to attack Australian territory directly to apply powerful political and economic pressure on this country. Indeed, in the event of a confrontation with Indonesia, for example, a low cost and effective strategy for that country would be to deny the use of the archipelagic sea lanes to shipping bound to and form Australia. Similarly, the denial of overflight rights for civil aircraft would be seriously embarrassing. Thus the notion that Australia is vulnerable only to direct attack is naive and fallacious. A sophisticated community is entitled to a more sophisticated analysis.

One significant and growing imponderable is the blurring of national consciousness and identity as international communications become surer and faster. With access to global radio, telephone, television, the Internet and other systems virtually uncontrollable, the capacity now exists for peoples of different nations to communicate and develop relationships which are independent of nationality. These coupled with the so-called CNN factor add to the complexity of the political interest by generating intense public pressure on government to respond actively if not necessarily effectively. Most people are well aware of the phenomenon of the transnational corporation in which strategic decisions are made without any reference to national interest by boards of directors or corporate managements made up of people of several nationalities.

Similar situations are beginning to emerge with labour unions and other interest groups. Greenpeace and Amnesty International are just two examples of politically influential transnational organisations which owe what may be primary allegiance to a cause and not to a nation. With the rapid growth of fast and accurate international communications, transfers of resources and organising capacity, what have traditionally been the rights, duties and privileges of the nation state can be expected to erode significantly. The process can be interrupted by serious clashes between two nations but the cost of such a conflict will be measured in different ways from the past. Such a clash may, for example, have serious deleterious effects upon investment flows. Trade boycotts may become an important weapon in international relations.

All these changes increase political pressures for intervention in conflicts, especially the increasingly common intrastate conflicts, to limit their impact on normal political and economic commerce. Australia's interest is greater than that of some countries because of our ethic mix and also because of our substantial economic interaction with the world.

There is a current tendency, noted in frequent conversations, to talk of commitments to peacekeeping operations or alliance tasks (as in Korea, Vietnam and the 1991 and current Gulf Wars) as 'political' - and presumably therefore not quite pure in a military sense. Traditional strategists such as Karl von Clausewitz would be astonished at the notion that war could be divorced from politics. The fact is that, as long as we in Australia accept the basic democratic principle that the military are subordinate to the elected government, military deployments will be driven by political interests, broadly defined. These factors will affect the task of national defence. Military forces are pre-eminently the manifestation of national sovereignty and their role will be determined by the way and the intensity with which nations assert a diminishing sovereignty. That may occur in increasingly unconventional ways and may be supported or constrained by the interests of transnational organisations.

At the same time, the potential for political pressure on governments to employ the ADF for unpredicted tasks regardless of strategic orthodoxy will grow. Defence forces possess such a large range of capabilities for their war-fighting role that the political leadership of any nation will invariably perceive its military forces as a useful tool in domestic as well as international relations.

Clearly then, Australia's interests could be engaged by events at great distance from this country. An outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, for example, would be far more significant to Australia now than it was in 1950 if only because South Korea is now one of our most important export markets. Any current debate before the event is largely pointless because it cannot predict the actual military circumstances or the national and international political pressures that would be brought to bear on a decision to intervene or not at the time. Thus it is not the task of the government to tell the defence force to prepare or not to prepare for such a contingency. A responsible government will ensure that the defence force is so structured as to give the government some military options if circumstances demand that they be used. Much of the defence debate in Australia at the political, official and unofficial levels tends to focus on threats - especially to Australian territory, situations and capabilities rather than on interests. Yet in real terms, it is the interests that always drive decisions to commit military forces. There is considerable scope for a public debate upon what Australia's true security interests are as the bedrock of a continuing Australian security policy.