By Robbin Laird

After the Williams Foundation Seminar held on September 28, 2022, I had a chance to discuss some of the takeaways with regard to the way ahead for Australian defence with my colleague Air Vice-Marshal (Retired) John Blackburn.

We started by focusing on how in reshaping the ADF and the defence ecosystem in Australia to deal with the direct threats to Australia posed in the Indo-Pacific, a much broader focus is required than simply on the ADF and its role as a professional force.

Blackburn underscored that “our defence force is professional and capable but it is small. And it relies on a civilian infrastructure which is fairly limited as well.

“When we focus on ways to ramp up the capabilities of the force, this will not come with simply buying shiny new platforms. As we re-design and reshape the force with increased numbers of personnel, training is a key part of the effort.

“And to manage disruptions as we look in the near to mid-term to add new force enablers, such as robotic systems, is a challenge to be dealt with as well. We need to be able to fight in the near term which means that we cannot simply just reorganise the force to the point of reducing operational capabilities.”

Another key aspect of the focus of attention is upon how to enhance the resilience of Australian society in support of the direct defence of Australia. This requires as well building an enhanced industrial base in Australia and shape mobilization potential to deal with crises.

But how does one build or participate in a wider allied “arsenal of democracy,” when the Western economies are service-oriented and with the challenges to re-industrialization posed by the geopolitical crisis associated with energy production and oft stated goal of dealing with a “climate emergency”?

As Blackburn noted: “When we mobilized in World War 2, we were part of a wider American-led effort to shape an arsenal of democracy. Now we are a services and mineral extraction economy so how do we now build relevant industrial capabilities to support mobilization?”

We then discussed the impact of globalization in obscuring the dependencies the liberal democracies have built with their authoritarian competitors. Clearly, what is needed is an effort to understand and shape reliable and secure supply chains.

This means that governments and the society actually have to understand the security implications of globalized economic actions and how to manage them and with whom. This also means sorting through who specific partners are in specific and discrete supply chain areas of interest and that can be trusted. This could be done in part by government actually building data bases that can support such an effort, and with all the hype about artificial intelligence, perhaps these data bases could provide dynamic input into reliable supply chain decision making approaches and policies.

Blackburn has focused for some time in his work on ways to shape understanding and policies to deal with the resilience challenge associated with fragile supply chains. “We need to target specific areas in terms of key supplies. As a country of 26 million people, we are not going to be sovereign in terms of ownership of a complete capability to defend ourselves. This means that we need to lead an effort with allies to understand what critical supplies we will need and how we are going to build ways to ensure trade flows in times of crisis.”

What is required in the shift to the priority in the direct defence of Australia is a degree of honesty about alliances, partnerships, and vulnerabilities in terms of mobilization potential for Australia on its own. Australia cannot only depend on an ally to show up and protect its interests. It cannot assume that it can engage in extended defence with the existing level of defence supplies or mobilizable in the near term.

How then to shape a more realistic discussion and policy in terms of how Australia can defend itself albeit within an alliance context?

As Blackburn forcefully emphasized: “the very starting point for what we need to do is being really honest about what the situation for Australian defence is and what we can and can’t do when crises come. As a nation, we are not facing that reality. We are not being brutally honest about our risks and vulnerabilities when facing a complex threat posed by the various dimensions of power which China possess and exercises. Business as usual is no longer acceptable. Spending more money on defence systems alone is not going to solve the problems in and of themselves.

“The scale of the potential threats requires a change in the national approach and generating change as well within our broader relationships with allies and partners. The way ahead for defence is not simply to discuss platforms or equipment. It is about how to change the national ecosystem for national resilience and mobilization potential across our alliances and partnerships.”

Looking at the current situation in Ukraine, Blackburn posed this question: “One of the questions we had to look at is how do we think the Australian population would respond to a large-scale mobilisation? One of Australia’s challenges is that we have a complacent culture and the world we have entered does not prioritize complacency.

“What we need to be able to do is not only to project power in our region, but to do so with as much resilient strategic depth as we can muster with an alliance effort where we have allies who are on the same page.”

Featured graphic: Photo 178979193 / Australian Map © Sonyasgar | Dreamstime.com

 

By Robbin Laird

Dr. Dupont provided the launch presentation for the recent Williams Foundation Seminar held on September 28, 2022. That seminar focused on key questions and challenges facing the ADF as it addressed the shift to focus primarily on the direct defense of Australia.

In his presentation, Dupont provided a comprehensive examination of how fluid and dynamic that environment was for Australia and the liberal democracies. He underscored that several crises were happening at the same time, and that the demand side on nations of having to deal with multiple crises at the same time presented an overload situation.

For Australia, this meant that its economy was challenged by several developments at the same time. The pandemic exposed the supply chain vulnerabilities of an island continent. The globalization disruption and re-direction meant that the core relationship between China and Australia which has been part of Australia’s prosperity was significantly undercut. The war in Ukraine posed both supply chain disruptions, economic downturns and brought back dramatically the threat of global conflict.

For the nation, Dupont underscored that defence and security were clearly not simply an ADF challenge or to be funded simply by defence budgetary requirements.

How to build more secure supply chains?

How would doing so disrupt the trade order and the global WTO rules?

How to deal with the energy crisis?

How to ensure energy supply?

How will Australia deal with coal and nuclear energy issues?

The broader point was simply that defence was no longer the province of the professional ADF; the global crises posed challenges beyond the remit of a professional force like the ADF could deal with.

And what is required was shifting from a peacetime mindset to one which understood the cascading challenges to Australian sovereignty and to the nation.

John Blackburn and I had the chance to follow up with Dr. Dupont and to discuss his thoughts on the nature of the challenge and some key elements in shaping an effective way ahead for Australia. Dupont noted that in the 1990s there was a debate on the need for a broader national security strategy, and that debate has now returned in the new context in which threats have increased and become more complex.

But because of the difficulties of shaping a comprehensive national security policy, the reality is that, in Dupont’s words, “defence will have to push on and shape a more comprehensive approach within the limits of what a Department of Defence and ADF can do.”

The focus will be on a broader interpretation of what defence needs to encompass such as with regard to mobilization and enhanced Australian domestic defence industry. And it is through these prisms that the broader aspects of national security policy will be addressed.

Dupont underscored the impact of cascading global crises ramping up the threat envelope and shaping a greater sense of urgency with regard to the direct defence of Australia. He argued: “that for the first time in 40 years, we have the real possibility of changing public mindsets about the challenges and the need to respond.”

According to Dupont: “we’re no longer in a peacetime situation. And that realization is now beginning to percolate through the political system and within the general public.”

The alliance piece is crucial and Australia will pursue greater interdependence with U.S. forces but there is a significant change as well. According to Dupont: “the old U.S. dominated hub and spokes alliance is becoming much more like a European style Alliance, where there’s a lot more interaction among the Allies themselves. And the U.S. needs to have Australians on board in ways they wouldn’t have conceived of a couple of years ago, such as building the defence industrial base jointly.”

We agreed that the initial focus needs to be upon getting measurable improvements in the existing force along the lines discussed in the seminar with regard to lethality and survivability. But to get the kind of force multipliers both Australia and its allies need will require expanded trust and cooperation in building new defence capabilities as well.

The defence industrial base throughout the alliance is not up to the tasks now required from it. As Dupont warned: “We just don’t build enough of what is needed for defence these days. We have suddenly realized that China controls 80 percent of the ecosystem that’s critical to defence.  It is not just about building platforms but building out an effective defence ecosystem as well among the allies.”

And we need to have a compressed time perspective.

What can we build out in five years not twenty?

He argued that a key focus needs to be on finding ways to ramp up the defence industrial base rapidly and in realistic ways. He put the challenge and the opportunity this way: “We need to build a new defence industrial base quickly and efficiently by harnessing the financial and manufacturing power of the private sector. And  we must be able to better support, sustain and protect our deployed units on the future battlefield.”

New technologies are emerging that can do so such as in the robotic domain and in 3D printing and other innovative approaches. But new partnership approaches with Australian industry are required in order to deliver the speed and scale of build required to prepare the ADF for challenges ahead.

He has argued in his recent Australian piece and in his presentation to the seminar that another key focus needs to be upon “the need to project power into the region for alliances purposes. We need to keep the big predator away as far as possible, rather than let the predator get close. Becoming a porcupine is not enough: you might make yourself spikier but get rolled over and eaten anyway.

“We need a combination of being able to defend Australian territory but also having a capacity for long range strike, and an integrated system supporting allies, at least up to Australia’s first island chain which runs through Indonesia, PNG and the adjacent small Pacific Island states to our north. Such an approach needs to be part of the guidance for the force that we need for the future.”

We then closed our discussion by focusing on the intersection of territorial defence with power projection by discussing the way ahead with regard to building out defence infrastructure including allied training facilities in the Northern Territory. He argued that by working with allies, the United States, Japan, South Korea could lead to joint investment which could accelerate the build out of defence infrastructure in the top end.

But to do so in his perspective required a different investment model as well. “With government leadership, we could develop a whole series of public private partnerships around enabling dual purpose infrastructure in the Northern Territory. The real secret is to liberate money from our private financial sector and to give reasonable returns on investment for dual use infrastructure in the Northern Territory.”

Featured Photo: Dr. Alan Dupont speaking to the Williams Foundation Seminar September 28, 2022.

By Robbin Laird

In his presentation at the recent Indian Ocean Defence & Security Conference, the recently appointed Chief of Army, Lt. General Simon Stuart highlighted how he saw the way ahead for the Australian Army.

“War is a national endeavour, and as a so-called middle power, we fight alongside allies and partners. As to the character of the next war, and to quote General H. R. McMaster, “we have a perfect record of predicting future wars… and that record is zero percent”.

“So we must be prepared for the fight beyond the opening battles, as wars are inevitably longer, more demanding and more visceral than imagined by those who speak, in my view, with undue certitude about the character of the next war.

“War requires national resilience, national means and national will.

“Our strategic environment has and will continue to change unevenly and at pace. And our ability to adapt must be similarly agile.

“As part of the ADF, your Army must be able to field and sustain relevant and credible land power options for our government. Including the things that only an Army can do – land combat – the demands of which are more lethal, more complex, and certainly more consequential than they have been in a long time.

“Your Army is transforming to keep pace with the changing character of warfare. To prevail in 21st century your Army must be better connected, protected, lethal and enabled.

“Your Army will make a greater contribution at the operational and strategic levels, through new and transformed capabilities such as long-range fires, littoral manoeuvre, cyber, space, information warfare, and special operations forces.

“Your Army is modernising its scalable, world-class combined arms fighting system that gives our soldiers the best probability of mission success in the most lethal environments and the best chance of coming home….

“Your Army is enhancing and expanding its health, logistics, engineering and aviation capabilities, as well as our command and management in order to be in a better position to modernise and scale, and contribute to mobilisation.

“Underpinning all this is the application of new and emerging technologies.”

The Chief of Army spoke at the recent Williams Foundation seminar on the evolution of the ADF in the new strategic environment. The day after his presentation, I had a chance to meet with him in his office to discuss some aspects of his thinking about the way ahead for the Australian environment post-Middle East land wars.

At the heart of any change is determining how best to work with the joint force in the direct defense of Australia, which includes significant demands to operate in the littoral regions adjacent to Australia and out into relevant areas of the Pacific.

We started by discussing the strategic environment. Lt. General Stuart underscored that Australia was a middle power, not a great power. This means that working with allies and partners in the region effectively was a core competence which the Army needs to develop, enhance and maximize. He argued that their exercise regimes in the region as well as working with Pacific partners was a key part of this effort.

He argued that “we are a convening power.  What is our strategy?

“Fundamentally it comes down to working with the alliance we have with the United States and other like-minded states, to promote shared interests. And in those contexts, we are focused on being a net contributor to alliance security as well as our own.

“And we are addressing how we work together to build the interior lines of defense in the region – to use land – parlance in the Indo-Pacific.”

How do you further enhance and develop such an approach?

According to Lt. General Stuart: “You take the architecture that already exists through the multilateral activities we do with Indonesia on activities like Garuda Shield, Balikatan with the Philippines, Cobra Gold in Thailand, Talisman Saber in Australia. You build those out as multilateral activities, and connect them in a way that strengthens international partnerships while enabling a persistent multilateral presence.

“And that persistent presence and multilateral interaction has a range of key strategic aspects. First, we get to know the environment and how to operate within it. We get placement and access where our multilateral forces need it. We can leverage the relationships, and importantly we provide an alternative to what the authoritarian states are offering as a future for our partners in the region.

“If we need to respond militarily in the region, we already have a grid and network established. We will have communications networks in place and have exercised mission command. And we have already worked through multilateral formations, so that you have a working C2 model, with all the authorities, in place and an understanding of how you plan, how national authorities affect your planning, how you force project, how you do logistics, and who’s going to contribute what to which part of any potential fight.”

But he argued that “we are not fit to purpose today to be able to do what we need to do in this strategic space.”

We then discussed some aspects of the transition for Army which he envisaged to make the Army “fit for purpose.”

He highlighted the need to be able to deploy long range fires in a joint context. We did not discuss how to do this at length, but in my view, it is not simply the ability to fire from the Australian continent or to move first to littoral locations in an Army context. With the emergence of kill web technologies, and third party targeting, the Army working with Navy and Air Force can shape innovative new ways to cross-target adversarial positions in a variety of new ways going forward, including the use of various robotic or autonomous systems.

Lt. General Stuart highlighted the need significantly to enhance the ability of the Army to become mobile in terms of littoral operations. He noted: “We need to be able to thicken our capacity for independent littoral maneuver and also be able to reinforce and disperse our amphibious capability in a meaningful way.”

He underscored: “Our 1st Brigade up in Townsville was previously our medium weight brigade. It will now be our core littoral maneuver formation. And this is a capability that our army hasn’t had since 1946. And we are building the capability for the brigade to enable us to maneuver in the littorals of our continent and in the region.

“But it has the capacity for inter-theater, independent intra-theater movement as well. It can also aggregate and disaggregate as part of our amphibious system. We are focused on force dispersal and mobility and providing us with utility to launch a range of different force packages either independently or as part of a combined or multilateral activity.”

Lt. General Stuart underscored that working with the USMC in terms of the MRF-D rotational force was assisting in this re-design process as well.

This means as well a shift in how to organize the Army.

He highlighted this aspect as follows:

“We’ve been organized for the wars of the last two decades at the brigade level. We need to move that to the division level to provide the standing headquarters, which are JTFs as well as divisional headquarters and provide our two-star special operations command with the kinds of C2 or C4 capabilities where they can actually command operations in their AORs that incorporate joint and combined agencies.

“We are organized today on a very much just-in-time efficiency model. We need to be now organized in our warfighting structures that are always on. New and emerging tech, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, quantum and human performance optimization will all have an important impact on our logistics enterprise and in the Combat Service Support space.”

As well the modernization of the Army, we also discussed Army’s aviation enterprise as a broader set of challenges.

He summarized this thrust towards the future in the following terms:

“We are in the cooperative development program for precision strike missiles. We are looking at common effector sets with our navy in the longer term. Our contribution to space and cyber adds significant robustness to the joint effort given we are too small to have separate organizations.

“And we have completely reoriented our special operations capability along functional lines, and are highlighting special warfare and technical enablement to move us away from the focus of the past two decades to what we need to be doing in terms of unconventional warfare and other capabilities to contribute to deterrence in our region.”

Lt. General Stuart argued for the continued need for armor as well. “We need to modernize that bit of the army that needs to be hardened and protected to be able to guarantee overmatch in time and space and in a distributed way. If you look at it from a full-time brigade formation level in the Australian Army, it’s one out of nine formations.

“It’s not the bulk of the army, but at the end of the day, we’ll have about a brigade’s worth of armor capability to provide, what we used to call a commander’s reserve for those less lethal, less mobile, and less protected formations.”

I will finish this article by highlighting how the Chief of Army concluded his speech in Western Australia for it contained important insight into the key role which the Australian Army can play in terms of the direct defense of Australia understood in terms of its own continent.

“If I can now conclude by explaining how Army’s modernisation is unfolding here in Western Australia. Our 13th Brigade is growing and evolving – increasing the number of our full-time workforce and providing more opportunities for more West Australians to serve in either a full or on a part-time basis.

“Enhanced command and control arrangements in the headquarters of the 13th Brigade have increased its scale and its capacity for operations on the West Coast and it’s approaches.

“And we have created or enhanced capabilities in the 10th Light Horse Regiment, the 13th Engineer Regiment, and assigning new roles to parts of the 16th Royal West Australian Regiment.

“I just spent the last few days with our teams in the Kimberley and the Pilbara, where they are ‘always on’ every single day – providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in the most remote areas of our state’s north with cutting edge capabilities and making a huge contribution to bringing together and participating in a whole of government intelligence gathering framework.

“And of course based here in Perth is Special Operations Command – West, centered on the Special Air Service Regiment which conducts some of the nation’s most sensitive missions.

“All of this provides your Army with the ability to scale and mobilise in, to and from Western Australia and abroad.

“But of course, we cannot do it alone. Leveraging one of Army’s key strengths – teaming – we have focused collaboration with government, industry and academia. With the Western Australia Police Force, Australian Border Force, Maritime Border Command, and various intelligence agencies, we maintain a united network for the defence of Australia, including here in the West.

“With BHP, we collaborate on automation and secure communications, electrification and quantum technologies, as well as pathways that allow us to share our workforces. With the University of Western Australia’s Defence and Security Institute, we realise the challenges of the future and contribute to research, engagement and education on defence and security issues.

“These are just a few examples. Service in your Army offers a sense of purpose and an opportunity to be part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, AO, DSC

Lieutenant General Stuart assumed command of the Australian Army on 02 July 2022.

Enlisting as a soldier in 1987, Lieutenant General Stuart was commissioned into the Royal Australian Infantry Corps in 1990.  He has over thirty-five years’ experience across a range of leadership, operations, training and program management appointments in Australia and overseas.

Lieutenant General Stuart’s regimental experience was in the 2nd/4th and 2nd Battalions, Royal Australian Regiment, culminating in command of the 8th/9th Battalion from 2008-10.

He has commanded on operations on five occasions at the company, Joint Task Force, brigade and force levels in East Timor, Afghanistan and Egypt/Israel respectively. His early career included significant training experience, while his staff appointments have largely been in capability development. He has worked in joint, whole of government, international and multi-national environments for most of the past 20 years. Most recently, Lieutenant General Stuart has fulfilled the role of Head of Land Capability in Army Headquarters after a three year deployment in command of the Multinational Force & Observers from 2017-19.

Lieutenant General Stuart is a graduate of the Royal Military College – Duntroon (1990), the United Kingdom’s Joint Services Command and Staff College (2003), the United States Army War College (2015) and the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program (2022). He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of New England and Masters’ degrees in Project Management (UNSW), Arts – Defence Studies (Kings College, London) and Strategy (US Army War College).

Lieutenant General Stuart’s honours and awards include his appointment as Member of the Order of Australia (2011), the Distinguished Service Cross (2014) and advancement to Officer of the Order of Australia (2020). He has also received a number of foreign awards, including those from the United States, Timor Leste, Columbia, Uruguay, Czech Republic and Japan.