By Dr Alan Stephens

It was the 19^th century British prime minister Lord Palmerston who famously remarked that in international relations there are “no eternal allies … only interests”.

Palmerston’s hard-headed world view has particular relevance for small- and medium-nations that find themselves drawn into high-intensity warfare. The October 1973 war in the Middle East and the 1982 war in the Falklands illustrate the point.

The 1973 war began on 6 October when Egypt and Syria launched a sudden attack against Israel. Over-confident Israeli commanders were shocked when their previously dominant air force found itself unprepared for the quality and tactical disposition of the Arabs’ ground-based air defence system.

The IAF started the war with about 290 frontline F-4 and A-4 strike/fighters and within days some fifty had been shot-down. It was an unsustainable loss rate.

A week later, as the war in the air began to turn and the Israelis started to assert their expected dominance, it was the Arabs’ turn to experience unsustainable losses.

Now, both protagonists faced the same urgent problem: neither had the reserves nor the local capacity to rapidly reinforce their fighting units.

There is a limit to how much a nation can spend on otherwise non-productive war industries and stockpiles. Governments have to make fine judgments regarding how many weapons – which represent stranded assets until they are used – they can afford to have parked on ramps or stored in warehouses against the possibility of a contingency that might never arise.

That economic imperative is especially pronounced in the war in the air, in which platforms and weapons are exceedingly expensive. And in high-intensity fighting, extreme unit costs are accompanied by extreme loss and usage rates.

Thus, during the nineteen days of the October War, the Israelis lost 102 strike/fighters and the Arabs 433, and the Arabs fired 9000 surface-to-air missiles. Those numbers alone amounted to thirty aircraft and $560 million per day.

What that meant was that neither the Israelis nor the Arabs was capable of fighting a high-intensity air war for more than about a week without direct assistance from their American and Soviet sponsors.

And that’s precisely what happened.

On 9 October, the Soviets started a massive airlift to resupply the Egyptians and Syrians with missiles, ammunition, SAM components, radars, and much more; shortly afterwards, the US did the same for Israel. The US also made good the IAF’s aircraft losses by flying-in about 100 F-4s, A-4s and C-130s, some of which arrived still carrying USAF markings.

Without that resupply, Israel and the Arab states could not have sustained such a high-intensity conflict.

This point bears emphasis. Israel was far superior militarily to the Arab states, and its excellent indigenous industry enabled it to develop important capabilities (such as electronic warfare counter-measures) during the conflict.

Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to suggest that, had Egypt and Syria been resupplied and Israel had not, the war would have ended differently.

Sustainment in the form of aid from an external source was again crucial during the 1982 Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina.

The UK’s armed forces are among the world’s very best, and the nation is one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful. Argentina in 1982 was a dysfunctional, second-world nation led by an incompetent cabal of military dictators.

Yet according to both the key foreign affairs advisor to prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Lord Charles Powell, and the assistant US defense secretary,

Richard Perle, “Britain probably would have lost the war without American assistance”. That assistance extended to providing vital intelligence, and to “stripping part of the frontline US air forces” of the latest version of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile.

Argentina, by contrast, and to its dismay, found itself the subject of Lord Palmerston’s unsentimental characterisation of alliances, when it was abandoned by two nations which, until the day the shooting started, it had believed were its friends. The first, the US, cut-off intelligence and diplomatic assistance; and the second, France, which had sold the Argentine Navy Super-Etendard strike fighters and Exocet missiles, withdrew the technical support needed to make that capability fully effective.

In the event, the Argentines managed to fire five Exocets, sinking two ships from the British war convoy and severely damaging a third. It is feasible that, with better targeting information and only a half-dozen more operational missiles, the Argentines might have inflicted sufficient damage on the convoy to have compelled it to turn back before it got within 100 kilometres of the Falklands.

Should Australia become involved in a high-intensity conflict in the next ten years, we can confidently expect that our air power would be well-trained and well-equipped.

Those attributes would be insufficient in themselves, however, if they were not under-written by a strong and reliable alliance.

With changes in the region, and with new dynamics of change in the North Atlantic, how might Australia rethink its defense policy?

It is clear that the current government has put in place a fundamental transformation of Australian defense policy with the RAAF being significantly modernized, the navy recapitalized but a decade away from seeing the force transformation to be deployed and Army reworking how best to contribute to the transformation effort.

This provides a solid foundation for the way ahead but how best to proceed in the future as the foundation is transformed?

Clearly, a key aspect will be thinking through longer range strike and defense in depth capabilities.  In fact, the two might be combined as Australia looks to build a 21st century version of operating from flexible basing throughout Australia as fixed bases become high value targets.

Might the Army become a key force operating land based longer range strike and building up its capabilities to defend mobile air bases?

These are issues which we will explore in the coming months.

But during this visit to Australia, we had a chance to meet with Paul Dibb, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre which is part of the Australian National University.

And during that meeting, he brought to our attention a piece c0-authored last year with Richard Brabin-Smith which provided an interesting look at rethinking Australia’s defense policy in the new strategic era.

What follows is the executive summary to that paper published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Australia’s strategic outlook is deteriorating and, for the first time since World War II, we face an increased prospect of threat from a major power.

This means that a major change in Australia’s approach to the management of strategic risk is needed.

Strategic risk is a grey area in which governments need to make critical assessments of capability, motive and intent. Over recent decades, judgements in this area have relied heavily on the conclusion that the capabilities required for a serious assault on Australia simply did not exist in our region.

In contrast, in the years ahead, the level of capability able to be brought to bear against Australia will increase, so judgements relating to contingencies and the associated warning time will need to rely less on evidence of capability and more on assessments of motive and intent. Such areas for judgement are inherently ambiguous and uncertain.

In particular, China’s economic and political influence continues to grow, and its program of military modernisation and expansion is ambitious.

The latter means that the comfortable judgements of previous years about the limited levels of capability within our region are no longer appropriate. The potential warning time is now shorter, because capability levels are higher and will increase yet further.

This observation applies both to shorter term contingencies and, increasingly, to more serious contingencies credible in the foreseeable future.

It’s important not to designate China as inevitably hostile to Australia, and to recognise in any case that there would be constraints on the expansion of its military influence.

Beyond the short to medium term, there would be intrinsic difficulties in operating in waters potentially dominated by Indian anti-access capabilities, and there’s potential, too, for Indonesia to develop significant sea-denial capabilities.

Nevertheless, China’s aggressive policies towards the South China Sea and elsewhere are grounds for concern that it seeks political domination over countries in its region, including countries in Southeast Asia and including Australia.

It’s China, therefore, that could come to pose serious challenges for Australian defence policy.

We need also to keep a watchful eye on Indonesia against the possibility that Islamist extremism will come to dominate that country.

This isn’t the country’s current trajectory, but the security consequences for Australia of such a development would be severe, especially if Indonesia over the years ahead were to become a major regional power.

How should Australia respond?

Contingencies that are credible in the shorter term could now be characterised by higher levels of intensity and technological sophistication than those of earlier decades.

This means that readiness and sustainability need to be increased: we need higher training levels, a demonstrable and sustainable surge capacity, increased stocks of munitions, more maintenance spares, a robust fuel supply system, and modernised operational bases, especially in the north of Australia.

For the longer term, the key issue is whether there’s a sound basis for the timely expansion of the ADF.

In many ways, the expansion base is impressive, in that relevant capabilities already exist or are in the forward program, although not necessarily in the right numbers.

Matters that would benefit from specific examination include the development of an Australian equivalent of an anti-access and area denial capability (especially for our vulnerable northern and western approaches) and an improved capacity for antisubmarine warfare.

In summary, the prospect of shortened warning times now needs to be a major factor in today’s defence planning.

Much more thought needs to be given to planning for the expansion of the ADF and its capacity to engage in high-intensity conflict in our own defence—in a way that we haven’t previously had to consider.

Planning for the defence of Australia needs to take the new realities into account, including by re-examining the ADF’s preparedness levels and the lead-times for key elements of the expansion base.

The conduct of operations further afield, and Defence’s involvement in counterterrorism, must not be allowed to distract either from the effort that needs to go into this planning or from the funding that enhanced capabilities will require.

https://sldinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ASPI-MANAGING-RISK-FINAL-NOVEMBER-2017.pdf

By Robbin Laird

When I attended the 2016 RAAF Airpower Conference, the main focus was upon the newly released White Paper and related documents announcing the government’s ways ahead on defense modernization.

The Conference highlighted key elements for the modernization of the Australian Defence Force and the importance of shaping as integrated a force going forward as possible.

Indeed, the Williams Foundation seminars since that time have highlighted various aspects of integration, air-sea integration, air-land integration and the challenge of designing an integrated force.

This year’s RAAF airpower conference and indeed the Williams Foundation seminars are moving from that foundation to focusing on dealing effectively with the challenges of the evolving strategic environment.

How best to shape effective approaches, technologies and modernization strategies for the decade or more ahead?

The RAAF Airpower Conference is entitled “Air Power in a Disruptive World”and is providing an overview on how the RAAF and ADF leadership are looking at the challenges as well as various specialist presentations of technologies which may well drive significant change in the period ahead.

I will focus primarily on the policy side of the way ahead and how key speakers looked on Day 1 of the Conference at the broader parameters of change and shaping a way ahead.

But for non-Australians it is important to highlight the quite rapid path the RAAF has taken to modernization.

A decade ago the force was defined by its Hornets and C-130s and the range and effects which such a force could achieve.

Then the Super Hornets, Wedgetail, the KC-30A, and the C-17 were procured and the force went from being a territorial or regional force to one able t project globally.

The coming of age of this capability really was the Middle East Operation, called by the Australians Operation Okra.

Here a significant airpower package has been deployed from Australia to the Middle East and the skill sets developed to support an advanced air battle management system, an advanced tanker and a data rich combat aircraft, the Super Hornet.

With the coming of the F-35 and the Growler, the RAAF is about to take its next steps into the tron warfare domain and shaping a broader fifth generation warfare approach informing and empowered by transformation of the ground and maritime forces as well.

It is the coming of this force which is emerging into the changing world of the period ahead which is the backdrop to the discussions at both the RAAF and Williams Foundation Conferences.

Our interviews last week and this week with the RAAF and the Navy will highlight several aspects of the dynamics of change within the force itself.

But the RAAF conference provided a good look at the perceived dynamics of change in the broader global environment and within the ongoing technological revolution reshaping the demand side of both the use and development of modern airpower and the ADF more generally.

The conference was opened by Air Marshal Leo Davies, Chief of the RAAF.

He highlighted the growth in the breadth and depth of the challenges facing airpower as well as the growth in demands to operate in the gray zone.

Among the key dynamics he highlighted were the following: the dispersal of global influence and the diversity of power centers; the shift in the center of global power from the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific region, the elevated strategic impact of China and North Korea; the shifts in US national strategy from focusing primarily on counter-terrorism to great power challenges.

These dynamics were leading to the need to invest in higher end military capabilities and to seek innovative solutions to ensure that the liberal democracies had credible deterrent capabilities.

He underscored the core significance for the RAAF of evolving the skill sets to deal with these challenges which he characterized as shaping skill sets which could move beyond a narrow definition of mission performance to deal with the distributed battlespace and its more strategic demand set.

The Australian Defense Minister then followed with an overview of how she saw the evolving global situation and its impact on the ADF.

She noted at the outset that although it was only two years since she addressed the 2016 airpower conference, it seemed almost an age ago compared to the world of 2018.

The changes in Europe, the United States, and Asia have created significant pull in the strategic environment and shifting demand sets as well.

She underscored the core shift in how Air Forces receive and use information and with the coming of both Growler and F-35 this would be accelerated as well.

She underscored the important role which Australia played in the region and growing expectations of partners in the region for that role to remain central as well.

She reinforced the core message from Air Marshal Davies concerning the need to shape a 21^st century workforce in Australia to support the ADF as well going forward, given the pace and scope of technological change in the commercial and defense domains.

Other key ADF speakers throughout the day added key points to the challenge agenda facing the ADF in the period ahead.

Chief of Navy, Admiral Tim Barrett, highlighted the significance of the digital transition for navy both in terms of what it means to shape an integrated digital force as well as building out a new shipbuilding capability built around a digital design and manufacturing process.

The key role of software upgradeable systems and digital manufacturing has been a theme for some time for Second Line of Defense, but there is still a broader lack of understanding in the defense community of how significant this shift is for force development and generation.

This clearly is not the case for Chief of Navy who underscored that the standing up the workforce and infrastructure to build the new navy platforms was designed not simply to build a new ship, but to be crafted in such a way that the “frigate or destroyer after next was already being shaped in the design and manufacturing process.”

Major General Toohey, Head of Land Capability, provided an Army perspective which focused on what she called the “post digital army,” although she was really focusing on how the digital transition was shaping a new approach to the man-machine relationship in which technology could extend the reach and impact of the combat elements in the ground maneuver force.

Vice Air Marshal Warren McDonald underscored the importance of building more effective security into a digitally enabled force.

His focus was less on new technologies to provide for enhanced protection, than upon the organization becoming more aware of how to avoid leaving seams within the organization through which adversaries could penetrate and influence the ADF decision making.

He highlighted a key element of the transition from the land wars to higher tempo operations in terms of the ADF and other allied forces getting too complacent about the environment in which digital tools have been used in the Middle East as the forces shift to dealing with cyber armed adversaries conducing information war on a regular basis.

He highlighted the strategic significance of resilience and building out resilient organizations to deal with new threat environment associated with IW.

The Chief of Joint Operations, Vice Admiral David Johnston, highlighted how he saw the impact of the evolving environment on the ADF and what he thought was the key to being successful in this environment moving forward.

As he put it, he had a five-year perspective as the Joint Force Commander, but frankly that makes a great deal of sense in terms of what the ADF is introducing in the next five years and how one then builds from that shift to the next round of innovations.

His perspective is very reminiscent of the ACC Commander whose own focus is quite similar.

He underscored that the geographical spread and diversity of threats has grown and the speed of response has been elevated as an operational requirement.

And the ADF is doing this in a very visible world characterized by the spread of social media and the proliferation of information war.

He also seconded McDonald’s remarks as well: “We have gotten used to operate in a non-contested EW environment, and those habits are a threat to our force going forward.”

The ADF faced the challenge of task diversity when deploying a force, but the new platforms, and the focus on acquiring multi-mission platforms provides an advantage.

Indeed, integrated force design and performance is a increasingly key discriminator going forward.

A broader geo political perspective was provided during the conference, led off by the keynote address by Bilahari Kausikan Ambassador at Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Singapore.

This was a remarkable address given its breadth and pungent insights on the region, on the United States, on China and on the ASEAN countries.

He drove home the point that there is too much binary thinking in addressing the region, notably with regard to the US-Chinese competition. Developments and competition in the region is rarely zero sum; it is really a multiple-sum competition.

He started by addressing the significant analytical failures in the media and in the broader analytical community to grasp the reality of the Trump Administration.

Although his style leaves something to be desired, when one looks at the realities, the Administration has moved beyond failures of the Bush and Obama Administration to address some fundamental aspects of change globally.

He was concerned that the strategic achievements of the Administration militarily could be undercut by the Administration’s trade policy perspective, but at the end of the day there was significant continuity and the US was not going away.

He then focused on China and the consolidation of power by the Chinese leaders.

He saw the Chinese as trying to work an economic transition which will be difficult and the leadership will be focused on domestic challenges in the period ahead.

The leadership clearly would like to keep the current global system in place as they have more to gain than to lose from the current state of affairs but this is not at all clear will be the outcome.

Clearly, China would like to see its new status globally to be recognized and to shape a new china centric order with all roads leading to Beijing.

He saw the ASEAN states as seeking ways to leverage Chinese economic growth but at the same time protecting their autonomy.  A challenge but a necessity as well for the smaller states in the region.

He predicated that the period ahead would see significant great power competition and uncertainty but felt that although the Chinese are pursuing the path of persuading others that their rise was inevitable and the decline of the US equally inevitable, US allies in the region would work with the US to deflect such an outcome.

Another geopolitical presentation which focused on Australia was that of John Blackburn. 

His focus was on energy security and the absence of a policy in Australia looking at global realities that make security of energy in Australia a question mark, not a reality.

Obviously, military conflict in the region would lead to disruption of energy supplies, and disruption of energy would significantly impact Australian society and military operations.

Blackburn argued that not only should a comprehensive energy security policy be put in place but he argued for a “fifth generation” approach.

What he means by that is shaping an integrated approach which looks not simply at sources of fuel supply but how to integrated ways to supply demand with ways to reshaped demand in a crisis as well.

The first day was concluded by Peter Jennings, the Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who provided an overview on ways to reform the Australian policy system to better prepare Australian for meeting the challenges ahead.

He focused on ways the Australian system could build in better strategic decision making, ranging from changes in the terms of government, to Senate electoral reform to holding periodic cabinet meetings to address longer term strategy.

In short, the RAAF has undergone and is undergoing significant modernization.

But rather than sitting on their successes or focusing on the next platform, the RAAF is generating a broader look at the evolving strategic environment for the ADF and seeking to understand how that environment might drive the next round of modernization.