AUSTRALIA: New approach on how to deal with regional crises
Updated
The Australian Defence Force says warning times about threats and possible crises in the region are getting shorter. It has released a guide to military operations in the 21st century, pointing to the way emergencies can arise with little or no warning.
Presenter: Graeme Dobell
Speakers: Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Air Chief Marshall, Angus Houston
DOBELL: As a nation that has its own continent, Australia has taken comfort from the idea that it'd take a long time for any nation to develop the capability to threaten Australia. In the era after the end of the Vietnam war, Australian planners assumed they've have a decade to respond to any emerging threat. The last formal Defence White paper, in 2000, repeated the idea that Australia is a secure country thanks to its geography and good relations with its neighbours. The idea of an attack on Australia was described as only a remote possibility. But the Asia Pacific was the region seeing the fastest growth of military capabilities. The new guidelines for joint operations by the Australian military go over the same ground, but warn that warning times for a threat are reducing.
HOUSTON: We cannot guarantee that Australia will remain free from threat to our national security in the longer term. While the international system can act to constrain the use of force, we cannot dismiss the possibility of major conflict between states.
DOBELL: The chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who released the guide on how Australia's military will fight in the 21st century.
It says a future enemy would able to acquire the weapons to threaten Australia or its national interests before Australia could develop a counter-capability. Recent history, it says, shows that a crisis can arise with little or no warning, and this trend is likely to worsen.
HOUSTON: Global factors such as terrorism, endemic disease, resource depletion and the security impacts of climate change and regional factors such as state fragility, poor governance and economic under-development may affect Australia's security interests, both directly and indirectly.
DOBELL: The tempo of Australian military deployments is a dramatic indicator of changing times. In the decade of the 1980s, Australia sent a total of only 1000 military personnel overseas on a range of small missions. So far this decade, Australia has sent 35-thousand of its military off shore.
Air Chief Marshall Houston says Australia's military is doing more than it was designed for.
HOUSTON: We've got a very sharp focus on a very demanding series of operations, operations that spread from Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor to the Solomon Islands, and of course a normal sort of contribution to UN operations. We as an organisation did not envisage that sort of operational commitment when we put the defence organisation together. So I guess what we've got is an organisation that was designed for a slightly different paradigm.
DOBELL: The Defence Force says Australia will support a regional security environment that promotes economic and political stability. The description of future operations assumes that countries in Southeast Asia will continue to look to Australia to help them build their own security capacity, and help them respond to major events beyond their individual abilities. Australia's emphasis will be on counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation, maritime and border security, and international governance.
The new doctrine puts a special emphasis on the need for Australia to be able to help stabilise fragile nations.
HOUSTON: These challenges include readily available low-tech capabilities, increasingly secure and sophisticated command control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, increasingly lethal survival and deployable conventional platforms, and increasingly available advanced conventional weapons. The increasing lethality and precision within certain battle spaces, particularly those principally suited for maritime and airforce elements, means that we will seek to reduce both a footprint and the vulnerability of deployed courses. At the same time the ADF should expect to be involved in more operations that are low-intensity, particularly stabilisation operations that require a demonstrably visible presence on the ground.
